A very dear friend of mine, lamenting the memory lapses of advancing age, asked if I do any mental exercises, take supplements and so forth to help ward off senility.

It so happens that I do. I shared them with this friend (whose name escapes me at the moment), and it is entirely likely that he, or she, was very appreciative.

Do you feel your mental sharpness diminishing with age? Read on.

You might try my “Chrissie Hynde-Annie Lennox Mental Health Squats.” That’s the name I gave to the brain exercise I employed recently to overcome a troublesome mental block.

Chrissie Hynde is, or was, lead singer for the rock band “The Pretenders.” Ditto Annie Lennox for “The Eurhythmics.” I am a big fan of both these singers and could rattle off a dozen song titles, or at least one or two, probably, from each of them.

But I could not recall both their names at any one time. If I remembered Annie Lennox, then I could not come up with Chrissie Hynde. The reverse also was true. If Chrissie Hynde popped effortlessly from my memory, Annie Lennox was a blank slate. It was weird.

I felt that I must work to reverse this dark portent of creeping memory loss.

I made flashcards. I stared at their pictures on CD covers. I wrote the singers’ names on the palm of my hand. At odd times I ambushed my memory, during dinner, brushing my teeth, petting the cats, demanding it give up both names. Still, if Annie Lennox came instantly to my tongue, Chrissie Hynde ran off and hid.

Then one day I got it.

“Chrissie Hynde,” I said to myself while lacing up my boots. “Chrissie Hynde and Annie Lennox!” my brain replied, and I said both names out loud.

Hurrah! I jumped for joy! Yowl! said Flop the cat (or was it Snit?) when I landed on its tail.

Crazed with success, I added Deborah Harry, lead singer for “Blondie,” to the list.

“Chrissie Hynde, Annie Lennox, Deborah Harry,” I repeated without hesitation.

That was weeks ago, and I’ve been able to recall all three names, any time of night or day, right up to the moment that I began to write this column, when I knew Chrissie Hynde and could not recall the other two to save my life. I had to look them up on the internet.

My system is flawed, I know, but it gives hope. Work remains to be done.

(In my life, work always remains to be done.)

My only other mental exercise is staring at the “spot six differences” puzzle in the newspaper Sunday funnies. If I get four I count that as success because the person who draws the pictures can be very sneaky and unfair, I feel, considering all the time I put in comparing cartoon eyes, clouds, fins and buttons.

As for a memory supplement, I take a daily 1,200 milligram capsule of phosphatidyl choline on the advice of my sister Col. Peggy, who was told to take it by her dear friend, Dr. Butch Somebody, who is 90 years old and a cardiac physician, and should know his business. The capsules are a dark brown color and what I imagine the egg case of a prehistoric monster cockroach would look like. Or, normal size now in Florida.

To cite another’s regimen of daily mental health exercises, my wife Honey loves to work sudoku and jigsaw puzzles, and reason out the murderer in detective stories. She also manages all our finances, does income taxes for friends and family, and knows who married whom, the names of their children and their family history and other trivia. Her mind is much sharper than mine so you might try her approach.

I can lift more than she can, though. That balances our relationship.

My apologies for comparing that healthful mineral capsule to the egg case of a huge cockroach. If you take that supplement too please try not to think about that.