So – Grandpa Byron’s book. Tough-going, that’s for sure, but pretty cool all the same

I’m going to tell you a bit about this Memory Palaces thing, but not too much because I don’t want to distract you, but I do want you to understand it because it’s kind of relevant later on. (This is much, much cooler than the Kings and Queens rhyme, by the way.)

Basically, you have to imagine places – rooms are best – that you’re very familiar with and then make all sorts of crazy images in your head that link together the things in the room with the things you want to remember.

For example if you want to remember three random items – say a chimpanzee, a tractor and some chewing gum, then first imagine you’re standing on your doorstep and walking into your house.

The first mental image you make is of your front door. You’re about to go in, when a chimpanzee’s arm shoots out of the letterbox and grabs you by the throat. It’s a huge, hairy, smelly arm and you’re wrestling with it. (That’s the point, by the way: you’ve got to make it a vivid mental image. Something boring doesn’t stick in your head.)

Now, assuming you’ve overcome the imaginary chimp attack, you’re through your front door, and what do you come across next? In my house, it’s the doormat. Except in my imagination, now the doormat is transformed into a mini-field. The coconut matting has been ploughed into lines by a tiny tractor that’s driving up and down the mat, and I have to be careful not to step on it. So that’s mental image number two.

Next it’s the coat rack. We have a load of hooks for coats by the door – but now the hooks have been replaced by huge lumps of used chewing gum. Instead of hanging your coat up, you stick it to the wall with a claggy piece of gum.

I know – it’s stupid, but it’s also funny and it makes you remember stuff. Now obviously, doing it with three items is pointless. Anyone can remember a list of three things. But what about ten, or twenty, or a hundred?

In The Memory Palaces of the Sri Kalpana, Grandpa Byron talks about Indian mystics who – in their heads – had room after room after room, and these rooms would have doors off them, leading to other rooms, and gardens and ante-chambers, and forests, so that they could store and memorise anything they wanted, all with these crazy imaginary pictures.

I’ve started trying to do it. I can easily do ten things, maybe twenty.

And here’s the thing about Grandpa Byron. All that stuff, all that knowledge that he uses to answer quiz questions? That’s him just playing. The real stuff in his main Memory Palace is his life memories – the recollection of daily events back to when he was a kid. Memorising things like The Guinness Book of World Records he just does for fun.