I was listening to Test Match Special on the BBC's Radio 4, a normally soporific experience that delivers sheer rapture without demanding much intellectual effort in return, when I realised that there was something wrong.

How could a commentary on a cricket match between England and India not include that golden voice from India? Maybe he would come on later, to break the Anglocentric chatter of the British commentators then on the air, Jonathan Agnew and Geoffrey Boycott.

And then I realised I couldn't remember the Indian's name! What? How could that be?

I remembered the fantastic innings he had played in the MCC versus The Rest of the World match in the 1980s; I remembered his funny helmet and the unforgettable manner the Australian commentator, Richie Benaud, had described it. It was "the most extraordinary" helmet Benaud had ever seen, said Benaud.

Now, that may sound quite unremarkable, but Benaud is a master of understatement and it wasn't so much the word "extraordinary" that he'd used, as the inflexion of his voice when he said it, that stuck in my mind.

Ah! How irritating. How could I forget that guy's name? He was the greatest Indian batsman before Sachin Tendulkar came along; he was famous for having publicly refused to accept membership of the MCC after the stewards at one of the entrances to Lord's had refused him entry because he'd left his pass in the press box or something. He didn't want membership of such a "snobbish" organisation, it had been widely reported. How could I forget the name of someone who had taken the amazing step of rejecting membership of the MCC, when the waiting list for MCC membership apparently stretches into the next century, if not the one after?

I still couldn't remember his name, though. I recalled other facts about the guy: over 10,000 thousand runs; average over 50; short; pleasant, affable face. Still nothing doing.

So I moved to the computer. I was going to go to www.google.com and type into the search box, "Indian+top+batsman". I knew I would get about one million entries in about half a microsecond.

But then, out of nowhere, I got the feeling that I should rebel against Google this once. I mean, Google made things so easy. When I started on my career in journalism, you would have had to travel to a reference library to borrow the International Who's Who, thumb through the index (probably under a subheading entitled "Sportsmen" and then, a sub-subheading: "Cricketers", and then find out whether the name you wanted was listed. Failing that, you might have had to borrow a general book or two on India and hope that sport - and cricket - had been thought worthy of coverage by the editors. All very fraught. It made the information, when it did finally come to hand, quite unforgettable.

No: I wouldn't Google. I tried some mental tricks. What was the difference in height between Mount Everest and Mount Kilimanjaro? "About 9,000 feet, wasn't it?" my mind asked. I checked from Wikipedia. It said 10,000 feet. (Everest is just over 29,000 feet and Kilimanjaro just over 19,000.) "Not bad" my mind said complacently. But another part of my mind retorted cruelly, "John Humphrys wouldn't accept that for Mastermind!"

My mental exercises went on: "Spell Mount Kosciusko!" (A teacher of ours had once titillated us by saying that a talkative classmate had a head that "looked like Mount Kosciusko"! We had had to look through many books to find out whether Mount Kosciusko existed. It did - in Australia. That fact convinced us that our teacher "knew his books" very well and we treated him with unusual respect after that.)

Cripes! Mount Kosciusko? Who'd ever heard such a name? More important, who cared? But Ghanaian students were often made to "chew" words like that "by heart", completely useless though this knowledge was, in real life.

I was engaged in these sorts of memory-testing tactics when Henry Blofeld took over one of the microphones of TMS. Now, if you know "Blowers", you'll appreciate that his mind is linked to one of the widest nets of "associations" one has ever come across. So I was hoping that in his voluble, machine-gun flow, he would come up with the name I wanted.

Blowers didn't disappoint. In less than three minutes, he'd found reason to mention the name, "Sunil Gavaskar".

I was ecstatic and said "Boo!" to Google. But then - but then - I realised that I had a problem with spelling "Blofeld"! Was it spelt in French - "Bleaufeld"? Fortunately, this was quickly discarded when I saw in my mind's eye (as used to happen in the days when I had something close to total recall) an exact replica of a cricket report in The Independent signed "By Henry Blofeld".

But then came another poser, "In which James Bond novels does the villain named Blofeld appear?"

I am not going to Google that either. I am waiting for it to come to me naturally. I am taking this attitude because I believe that if we don't take care, the generations following us will have no use at all for memory and that our genes will, thereafter, mutate to write memory out of the human genome.

Already (I am told) many schoolchildren in developed countries, armed with cheap calculators, can neither add nor subtract - let alone multiply or divide. They simply look up the sums. If you ask them to do "mental arithmetic" involving sums like 7, 13, or 19, they'd be stumped. Now, in my "backward" school in Ghana, we were taken through special lessons on such sums. Failure to grasp them meant suffering a good whipping.

Those good old teachers of ours would faint at the sight of what today's calculators can do - not to mention Google!