Don't worry, I'm not about to go all Barbra Streisand on you - I don't have either the nose or the talent for that - but I do want to talk (by which I mean waffle) about memory. Memory is rather like the European Union, by which I mean that it's a part of all of us, and yet nobody really knows what it's for. And by memory I don't mean the ability to remember (or in many cases, to forget) telephone numbers and birthdays, or the home wins of Scunthorpe FC since 1927, but memories.

My earliest memory, as far as I can tell, is of sitting on my mother's lap. She was talking either to her sister or her mother (certainly another woman) and while doing so I was watching the rise and fall of her chest. (There's probably an acre of unploughed Freudian analysis in there, but moving rapidly along...) My memory of that moment, and it is just a moment, with no context, is of watching her breathing and thinking how much easier it would be to talk without having to keep breathing in and out all the time. The colour blue also seems to figure, now that I really concentrate hard - but whether it was the colour of the clothes my Mum was wearing, or the colour of the walls in the room, or even the colour of the cupboards (more detail - I think we were in a kitchen) I just don't know.

Memory is a strange thing once you start to think about it, for all sorts of reasons. For one thing it seems to lack any real, or at least any obvious, sense of discernment. Why should the above inconsequential, trivial, even absurd, passing thought lodge itself so irrevocably in my brain, when a million other moments have passed through it in an instant, never to be remembered. There was nothing significant or monumental or earth-shattering about that second, and yet it's still there. There are other memories from early days - some of them were perhaps 'important' or at least 'memorable' so I can maybe understand why I recall, for example, coming home one day and finding Mum & Dad had bought me and my brother a bike each, or finding that I had got a letter published in a comic when I was 8. But there are many, many other events which logically speaking I know took place, but which register nothing with me in terms of recollection or experience. My first day at school is a blank (although probably not to my brother since by all accounts I moaned so much that eventually they had to summon him in to sort me out - oh the shame, the shame!). Another complete absence is the day, at age 5, that we set off on our move from St Keverne (a tiny little village in between Goonhilly Downs and the sea) to Carlisle (a great big city inbetween Scotland and England). Those are both events that had a great impact on my life, both practically and emotionally, but there is nothing at all associated with them.

Conversely, there are a great many trivialities that are still engraved on my mind. If they were items in a cupboard they would have been Spring-cleaned out and given to the dustcart long ago. I can remember being given a sweet by Simon Forsythe while on the way back to School at lunchtime sometime in 1981. I can remember sitting in the sunshine in 1982 in the playground of Mr Green's hut, making pom-poms. I can even remember watching the closing seconds of part 4 of "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" (I don't really need to tell you, gentle reader, that that is an episode of Doctor Who, do I? No, didn't think so) through the crack of the sitting-room door. This wasn't my equivalent of hiding behind the sofa, let me quickly add, but we had visitors to tea that night and had been told that when they arrived the TV would go off. So I was in the hallway partly watching the front door opening, and partly watching the credits crash in through the crack in the door. But other than being, to coin a phrase, a convention-calibre anecdote (or at least one that I trundle out on Doctor Who Message Boards on a regular basis) I can't see any significance, or relevance, or impact on my personality, that can be derived from that moment.

Since I've mentioned Doctor Who (and I do from time to time, you know) and by extension TV, there are a couple of intriguing twists there too, on the memory front. The first is simply, why for goodness sakes would anybody remember watching a TV programme?! Something like the Moon Landing, yes, or one of the Royal Weddings, I can understand - but why remember watching anything else? Again, surely nothing of that sort could ever be a monumental moment in one's life? Yet I genuinely can recall watching the closing moments of "The Hand of Fear" and parts of "The Deadly Assassin" (1976). I can also remember watching the very first episode of "Grange Hill" (1978), and the Motel Fire in "Crossroads" (1981), and even the man who kept answering "chicken" in the final of "Family Fortunes" (date unknown, but a timeless classic). But why?

The other issue around remembering TV shows is that with the advent of the humble VCR, things have become even more confusing. To pick a TV programme entirely at random (well, ish), say BBC TV's "Doctor Who" for example, I can remember sitting down to watch part one of Peter Davison's first story in 1982. Twenty-two plus years ago, now, I can actually remember sitting down to watch it, and I can remember Mum saying how much he sounded like his "Sink or Swim" character with his delivery of the line, "Sooner we get to this zero room place the better eh?" Well that's fine, another irrelevant memory neatly filed away for no good reason. However, I can also quote lines of dialogue from that story, and appraise the story's strengths and weaknesses, and comment on its musical score, and its direction, and its visual style, and so on. Not from its 1982 showing, though - but rather from many subsequent re-viewings on video.

Taking another example, again a debut story but this time of seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy. His first story was fan favourite (that's what it says on my crib cards anyway) "Time and the Rani" in September 1987. That's nearly 17 years ago, at which time I was only a couple of months past my 16th birthday. Or to put that another way, slightly over half my lifetime ago. But I in fact watched my off-air video recording of that very story just a few months ago. That moment, the sitting-down to watch a story at the age of 16, seems subjectively speaking to have been a fairly recent event. But is that just because time seems to race faster the older you get, with the result that it doesn't seem like 17 years since I was 16? Or is it because what I watched at 16, I have just rewatched, with the result that the content of it is still very fresh and 'current' in my mind?

What interests me so much about memory is the extent to which it forms us, how much it influences our personalities - a man is the sum of his memories, they say. If that's really true then it surely follows that there must be some connection between what we remember and who we are. So on what level does that work? Is every memory actually still in there somewhere, albeit with the vast majority wallowing in the murky depths of the subconscious? Or are the only memories we have those we know we have, the ones we can summon up at will? And if that's the case, how do we account for those occasions when we suddenly recall something for the first time in many years, with a smile, or a frown, and an, "I'd forgotten that!"

If, as is generally accepted, some events are so traumatic that the mind represses the memory of it, then doesn't that by extension suggest that the mind is operating to some agenda in how it treats memories - keep 'em, bury 'em, or throw 'em away. I can't help but think that there must be some rhyme or reason to what our minds choose to remember. Although it could be argued that the periodic table would have been more use to me in Secondary School than the running order of all 26 years of Doctor Who stories, it is nevertheless the latter rather than any hint of the former which resides with me. That is probably more to do with inclination and preference, it's true, but I still feel that on some deeper level all our memories are treated following the same basic premise - something that appeals to us, or which means something to us, even if we don't know what or why, is kept; and all the other stuff, things towards which our minds are disinclined or disinterested, is junked.

I suppose the other question might be, do we need our memories? To the extent to which they form us, do we need them hanging around after they've done their job? To use a simplistic example, if one falls into a deep pond at the age of eight, it might well produce a fear of water. But once it's created the phobia, does one actually need the memory anymore? It's done its job, surely it could now be deleted to clear up more space. Or does it need to remain there, like a power supply for the phobia? Or put another way, if we forget things as we get older, does the forgetting change who we are?

My daughter is seven years old now. I don't know what age my early bosom-watching memory heralds from, but I do know that "The Hand of Fear" part 4 aired on 23rd October 1976, when I was five-and-a-third years old. So it's certain that by now, somewhere in my daughter's tousled cranium (which reminds me, her hair needs washing) is the instant, the moment, that forms her earliest memory. She might be aware of what it is now (although since it's just gone half past eleven at night I'm not going to wake her up to find out) but even if she isn't, one day when she's older and able to fully articulate it, there will be some thought, or occurrence, or simple moment, that is her earliest memory.

Not only do I wonder what that monumental first might be, but I also wonder what the odds are of my remembering it too. I once saw a programme (on the BBC of course!) about a blind man. At one point he said that he had smiled at where he knew his daughter was sitting, and she had asked him how he knew? He of course asked her what she meant, how did he know what - and her answer was that she had just that minute smiled at him, so how did he know to smile back if he couldn't see? (It was years ago I saw that, but I still remember it...) And the point is of course that he didn't know, but sooner or later the laws of simple chance meant that it would happen. Same with this memory then - will I happen to remember my daughter's first memory, or will I not?

It's all very confusing, and in writing this I've found myself becoming even more confused than I was when I started. It's probably best to leave it now before it becomes any more baffling. I suppose I'll have to accept that, there are more questions than answers, if I may quote the song by... by... by... erm...

I forget.