A forgotten family holiday in the French Alps reminded me how we all recall events so differently

In the latest in his series of reflections on (not so) memorable places and pathways, Will Gore remembers a walking trip to Savoie slightly differently from his mother

Get back to nature in the French Alps (iStock)

When my mother said recently that this series of columns had made her think about her own most memorable pathways and places, I was quite touched. It’s always nice to know that parents are vaguely aware of what their children are doing.

But when she went on to describe the walk that had particularly come to mind, I was taken aback. I had, apparently, been with her and yet had no memory of it at all.

It wasn’t as if I had been a child at the time but a 20-year-old student, on what turned out to be our last family holiday before I left home for good.

As it happens, I probably shouldn’t have gone. My girlfriend at the time had wanted me to go to Australia with her that summer but for reasons that caused strife at the time and seem fairly daft now, I decided against it.

Consequently, I ended up going with my folks and my brother to the French Alps, where I got a filthy cold and generally moped about, feeling regretful. All of that I remember well.

Weather-wise, we were unlucky, which didn’t help my brooding. A few days were completely lost to rain. In the pre-internet era, books and Scrabble did their best to keep us entertained.

When the clouds dispersed, we put on our boots and got into the mountains. But really, I only know this because it must have happened – it’s what we did.

In fact though, as well as not being able to remember the route my mother described to me the other day, I actually couldn’t tell you a particularly defining feature of any walk we did that fortnight.

Yet for mum, it is all as clear as day.

The walk up the valley, the steep path between glaciers, passing gentians, edelweiss, erigeron and multitudes of geranium. On the descent we crossed a dried lake covered with pink moss campion and I apparently hung back to help Mum where scree made the going difficult, while my father marched ahead (my brother having not joined us that day).

And then, the grand finale – something of a classic you’d think: getting back to the hire car to find that Dad had locked the keys inside. A local mechanic was called and swiftly jimmied the thing open with a strip of metal. It was only when my mother recounted this detail that a vague bell jangled somewhere at the very back of my mind.

The discussion of this lost walk made me wonder how much else of my life has been discarded by the memory bank.

What have I seen but not stored; what have I been told but now forgotten? If moments have gone unnoticed, were they really felt at all?

But then, we all have our own narratives; our individual takes on even the most shared of experiences. In our own versions of the same tale, we are each to the fore, our successes and our concerns taking precedence.

Where my mother breathed the sweet Alpine air and took in every wildflower in the Savoie, I evidently day-dreamed of Australia and looked at my laces.

There are no absolutes in our human stories. Only the mountains are immutable.