Just as 'face blindness' causes the unfortunate victim to forget faces, so 'name deafness' renders others incapable of remembering names.

Name-deaf people, like dyslexia sufferers, are otherwise normal and often enjoy above-average intelligence; but for reasons still largely unknown, their brains are unable to assimilate names. This condition is known as Dyslexanoma.

When someone says to you 'Hello, I'm Fred Brown', your ears receive the message but fail to transmit all of it to the brain, which records only the words, 'Hello, I'm . . .'

The handicap is a major social embarrassment, of course, not only because you can rarely recall the names of even close friends and associates: for many years you have had to have name tapes sewn on to the cuffs of all your shirts so that you could introduce yourself to people. In fact, before the banks started printing customers' names on individual cheques, you had a chequebook with your name specially imprinted, so that you knew what name to sign on the bottom line.

If the person whose name you have forgotten is a doctor or a psychologist, of course, you obviously can't shoot them this line. Your excuse should be that on the day you met, you underwent hypnosis to try to stop you smoking. An unfortunate side effect was that the treatment erased from your mind everything else that transpired that day.

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