I listen to things in chunks these days. Eight minutes of a podcast in the small hours after feeding the baby, another 12 while I clean up the kitchen. Fifteen, if I’m lucky, walking to the post office. Skeins of conversation and argument and story woven among the sirens and the rumble of traffic, or the squeaking of the baby.

And so I was standing at the worktop for the latter part of Zadie Smith’s interview with The New York Times, either preparing a meal or clearing it away. The author was talking about the kaleidoscope of ageing, how it is possible to walk down the street and feel decades younger than you are one day, or heavy with the substance of every minute you’ve lived on another.

“I guess I distrust narratives that flatten it out and tell you that people experience their lives in this very rational, chronological way, because I just really don’t think they do,” Smith said. “I think people are overwhelmed by their memories, all the time. A certain smell can set you off, or someone in the street who looks like someone you knew twenty years ago. There’s all this mess with time in your mind as you move through your life, and that’s been my experience: knowing exactly the age I am but constantly being struck with memories of other times.”

Whatever I was doing, I stopped. I paused the podcast and whipped out my notes app. I wrote down that handful of words: I think people are overwhelmed by their memories, all the time. I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone spell it out before, the endless teleportation that being is.

I am a sentimentalist for memory, always have been. As a child I would collect the flotsam and jetsam of good times: plane tickets and napkins from a holiday, autographs from unemployed actors in Mickey Mouse suits. I’d cut and stick, putting them into books that became precious for the reminders they contained. I still have boxes of ticket stubs and old letters and birthday cards. They have earned their keep cupboards tightly guarded by an attempt at minimalism. I hold onto them in case I want to be reminded of the stuff of my life. Not the words I’ve written or the jobs I’ve had but the addresses I’ve lived at and the people who have left their washing up on the side; the clothes I loved for a season; the way my face used to be fatter, more daubed with blush on the cheeks. These are the things I want to bottle in case I forget them.

But there is a difference between attempting to preserve certain memories and the means of existing alongside them. Smith is right: we are overwhelmed all the time. When we are in a part of London that M is not familiar with (East, usually) he will scrabble for a memory of a building that someone he knows used to live in; perhaps it was a warehouse, perhaps a council block. I know these streets better and joke that he always thinks this, that his geography is off, that he is only showing his broader unfamiliarity with council estates of South East London. But don’t we do that all the time? Retrace steps we made years, or decades, before, tugged back to the people we were by a pause in our cerebral filing systems and try to make sense of it before the moment passes with the next bus.

I’m interested in these things. Both Rootbound and Why Women Grow touch on the heft of memory, how much space it takes up in my experience of living. How I occupy younger versions of myself in particular places in London, how I play and indulge and ignore these memories, and how they regenerate themselves. It’s something that gardening encourages, I think. When we repeat the same actions with the seasons - planting bulbs, sowing hardy annuals, cutting down and pulling up - it is impossible not to think about who we were when we last made them.

Increasingly, I feel overwhelmed by my memories. This time last year I was nearing six months of pregnancy and it’s only now that I can begin to remember what my body felt like when the baby was inside it. I inhabit a new kind of existence now, one of Wriggle and Rhyme classes and pram suits, and I wonder what my memories of it will be all the while remembering how previous Novembers would become a kind of ramping up. A time of parties and late nights and chewy dawns and afternoons in the pub. Sparkly eyeshadow, one too many on a school night. These days I go to bed at 9pm. I’m in denial about Christmas shopping.

Memory feels potent right now because things are standing so very still and moving so relentlessly fast at the same time. I have worn the same clothes for three days running. The baby will have grown ounces and millimetres imperceptibly in that time. Nothing changes, everything changes. Memories do the same thing.