I’VE FORGOTTEN what I was going to say. Never mind. It’ll come back to me. Or not. In the meantime, let’s talk about wotsname – senior moments – you know, where you forget what you were going to say. That was it! Knew it would come back to me.

Senior moments: everybody panic! We’re all getting dementia! Well, this news just in: no, we’re not. According to a new study led by Dr Robert Wilson, of Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago, just being aware and worrying about senior moments means that you’re all right.

It’s only when you lose awareness of your lapses that there’s a good chance the rot is setting in. So, you’ve just walked into a room and forgotten what you came in for? Forget about it. It’s nothing to worry about, as long as you’re worried about it.

Another recent study made me worry after suggesting that waking up in the night could be a sign of dementia. Well, that’s me done for. A friend counselled: “That’s not Alzheimer’s. That’s just worry.” “You sure?” “Absolutely.” “Well, thank goodness for that. Had me worried for a minute there.”

The key lies in being aware rather than being worried. According to the American psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne, stressing yourself out about senior moments could make them more likely. Professor Whitbourne points out that everyone, at any age, forgets. Tiredness and simply being distracted are among other likely causes.

And we’re all different anyway. Some friends of mine can remember every detail of football matches from decades ago. Others, including me, can hardly remember the score shortly after full-time.

All my life I’ve never been able to remember details from books or films, just whether I liked them or not. Like Woody Allen after his speed-reading course, ask me what War and Peace was about and I’ll say: “Something to do with Russia.”

A friend of mine, when younger, temporarily placed a sheaf of important documents on top of her car as she looked for her keys, then drove off, scattering the papers all over the street. Could happen to anyone, at any age.

However, in my own experience, it does get worse as you get older. All the time now, I start anecdotes and forget the names of the protagonists. It could be because I’m ageing in tandem with the information revolution, which is cluttering up our brain-space exponentially.

Thankfully, in evening classes, “sorry, I’m having a senior moment” is a widely acceptable excuse from the age of 50 upwards. It’s about this time that you start putting your reading specs in the fridge or, worse, try cramming them on top of a pair you’re already wearing. Everybody’s done that. Haven’t they?

I wish I could stop worrying about it, even with the news that worrying about it is a good sign. Some people, when worried, reach for the Bible or Das Kapital, but I pick up the 1897 edition of Chambers’s Etymological English Dictionary. I find that tracing the origin of a word helps me understand the concept it conveys.

On this occasion, it terrified the life out of me. “Dementia” didn’t make the cut in 1897, but “worry” did. “Worry”, says my venerable word-book, originally meant to tear with the teeth and is connected to the Dutch worgen, to strangle, and German würgen, to choke. Hell’s dentures, no wonder I can’t sleep at night. I’m being strangled by a strange creature: me.

Later, according to my further researches on the internut, worry came to mean to harass or cause anxiety. Crucially, it appears to have been something we did to somebody else, like dogs and their sheep-worrying. Now it’s something we do to ourselves.

So we worry about dementia every time we have a senior moment. We harass ourselves, which only makes things worse. Alzheimer’s, and other forms of dementia, being what they are, it’s difficult not to worry about them.

But what’s the point? Worrying never stopped anything bad from happening. But being aware just might. After a senior moment, merely note that you’ve temporarily blanked out or even had a “brain fart”, to cite an expression newly added to Oxforddictionaries.com and meaning a “temporary mental lapse”.

Put like that, it doesn’t sound so bad at all. It sounds almost like fun. The moral of the story may sound a bit New Agey but nothing is ever worse for that: be aware or – all together now – mindful. Yay. And don’t worry about a thing.