Forgetting the face of someone you know or have met even briefly isn't necessarily an indication that you have found them instantly and enduringly forgettable, but that's the way the forgotten face sees it. If they can remember your face, they reason, why can't you remember theirs?

You must tell them why. You suffer from 'face-blindness', a little-known condition, similar to dyslexia, which affects the sufferer's visual recognition of faces (and, in some cases, landscapes too, you should add for good measure).

When normal ('face-sighted') people look at a face, they see all the various distinguishing features in the correct place, and their brain automatically stores the 'picture' for future reference. A 'face-blind' person, however, sees a nose, a mouth, two ears, and two eyes unrelated and out of context to each other, and the eye sends no signals to the brain about the composite picture, for reasons no doctor or psychologist has yet been able to discover.

By this time, you will have won your audience's interest, sympathy, and forgiveness. But you must press on lest they should suspect or discover that there is no such affliction. Describe how you once cut your own wife dead at a dinner party in your own home because you failed to recognise her and how you went to the park with your two children and returned home with someone else's.

You must now give a dramatic demonstration of your handicap. Make an excuse to absent yourself briefly from the company of the person whose face you have just forgotten, and fail to recognise them ten minutes later when you return.

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