YOUR earliest memory is usually a tactile one. The first fraction of life you keep and carry into adulthood seems to stick from when you are about three.

Friends explained their first recollections to me. One remembered getting told off in reception, aged four, and another told me about cutting her nose open, aged two.

Yet another remembers a nursery rhyme she sang in play school, aged three. If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.

Early memories also included walking down a Croydon pavement and being carried under bilberry bushes.

I was jealous. My mind couldn’t delve into the memory banks below age five. And there were no records I could use to remind me except a scatter of photos. It’s not like that now.

Now, if you want to remember the antics and adventures of your three-year-old self you can just look it up on your mum’s Facebook page.

And, if you feel the need to see a photo of yourself, drunk, waving your scarf around while dancing on someone else’s sofa at 2am on a Friday, you can look it up on your blog, or your Twitter, or your phone.

Memory and the way we handle information has changed. I don’t want to get too Matrix on you, but I wonder if we will start to remember less in our heads now we can Google everything. We could become blank empty vessels.

“What did you do yesterday?”

“Oh I don’t know, look it up.”

Parents and friends help guard against cultural blankness and help you hold on to your memories.

I found out last week, when my mum and dad took me back to my earliest memory. They had to go through a few holiday antics lost in the mists of youth, including the time I nearly broke dad’s foot on my tiny plastic toy dog.

Eventually, I recalled a light blue blanket I was given. It was the bluest thing I thought I would ever see. I was three.

Reminiscing was good, and early memories are important, to me at least. Although, I suppose if we lose them we won’t mind. We won’t remember it being any other way.