Most people will have experienced one flavour of this scenario in their youth, as a Granny or Great Aunt on seeing them for the first time in a while says, "Haven't you grown!" Cue embarrassment for the child and amusement for everyone else. This is mainly predicated on the aged relative having a mental picture of the child from the last time she saw them and a surprise that things have moved on in the interim. Meanwhile from the child's perspective they have hardly changed at all from day to day and they can't understand what the fuss is all about.

I experience something of the same response from time to time, but for different reasons. Quite frequently someone will ask me, particularly on meeting me for the first time in a while "Have you grown?". No, I haven't. Not since about 1986. But that person is still suffering some sense of dislocation between their mental image of me and the person they see in front of them.

Why is this? I clearly haven't grown and they know that really. But despite me being no taller now then when they last saw me, it's as if I've somehow shrunk in their memory.

Did I fail to make an impression of utter hugeness at the time? That seems unlikely, because if I seem big now, I probably looked the same the first time.

Is this a strange trick of the memory? The longer in between sightings, the brain says "He can't really be that tall! Make the memory a bit smaller." Does the memory of something tend to decay towards the average over time?

Perhaps when you get to know me I stop being just a very large person and become your friend. So you stop noticing so much the enormousness and get on with the normal things. And the fact that I'm tall gets suppressed and only comes out again when you see me after a while and it's a surprise again.

Whatever the reason, it doesn't last long. No-one has ever been surprised by my height halfway through a conversation. However extreme the reaction at first, it seem to pass pretty quickly.

This is good. I don't think I could cope with being much more conspicuous.