There is the way they are stored in the mind, for starters. Games and memory belong together, I think. I remember that I was allowed to eat that brazil nut chocolate once that particular game was completed. I think of the toast rack and I can almost smell the gas hob and the marmalade that scented the kitchen of that house. I remember looking at that plectrum and wondering what it was for. I can remember so many of the items that served time on the Kim's Game trays - a silver toast rack, a plectrum, a music box with a clown printed on it, a bright purple brazil nut chocolate - and then these items bring their own memories along with them too. I think of Kim's Game and I am instantly back in my grandfather's living room. It's where so much of what we are lays tangled together. At times - these times may be called "the speedy approach to being 40" - it feels like memory is the most human of topics. When he uncovered the tray again we all had to spot what was missing. (At 39, I now look back and suspect my grandfather wished he hadn't spent his life as clerk of the local magistrate's court.) Then there was another game - I've since learned that it's called Kim's Game, but as a kid I assumed my grandfather had invented it - in which he arranged a tray with bits and pieces from around the house, gave us a minute to study them all and then covered the tray with a cloth and quietly removed one item. At five or six, I found it overwhelming, but also intoxicating. He would stand in the middle of the room and direct the trains between the stations, and you had to remember which train you were and where the station you were headed to could be found. There was one in which each chair in his living room became a station and his family became trains. The first games I played were games of memory.