That day is a clutter, long in the recollection, with a twisting in its growth over time. You could not possibly have lived it for as long as you recall, could not have taken so many and so contrary a set of actions.
If it were possible to cut open the duct or bladder of memory then that day would be a stone, an encysting of poisons and a blockage against anything which might run contrary to the emotion or impact of it. None of your other encounters with the group are as surely and specifically recalled or as often pondered upon and prodded at. Any lesser or complementary memories are inextricable in their detail from the carbuncle of the larger, are full of both accidental and purposeful embellishment.
You have gone back and forth in compulsion and picked out moments from it which were never clearly experienced at the time, looked for ever greater detail in each slicing, something which you did not and could not have done in such depth as you lived it. You have sat otherwise, talked otherwise, or were talked-otherwise-at, or were silent, amongst different subsets of those people in each retelling. You have picked things up and inspected them, moved them from table to sideboard, taken them from cunning recesses that did not exist and placed them out onto the carpet or matting which was sometimes present sometimes not.
The little dolls, for instance, have been much inspected in that first encounter with them. That seems untrue. Say rather that it is the first time that you are conscious in the present of having seen them in the past. Maybe they came before and have been swept up, or came later and been placed there purposely, or without purpose, whether by yourself or by some internal accounting mechanism. Despite the number of times you may have seen them you cannot think of a single memory of any experience of coming into contact with them, of observing them either for the first time or a second and making note of that fact. You tell yourself, as you have done before, that you must fully recognise such a contact if it occurs again, while you are conscious of where you are and what you are seeing. So say that you have encountered them, even in recollection only, scattered through your memories of places, or even of people, but only as an aftermath, as part of the later pondering and walking-through that takes place inside your skull. Regardless of whatever reality they may posses they exist there now, in those places, whether actually encountered there or not, concrete but vague. There is nothing to be done.
You think of them as little Uig chessmen, though they are dissimilar, at least insofar as they have any real shape or character in your mind. They are not like the Uig chessmen at all, but the association seems valid. Perhaps it is just that they were somehow ancient or smoothed, or similarly faced or formed, or Scottish-seeming, or in some other manner. The particulars shift as a dream might, so fundamentally understood by the sleeper to be this thing that the actual image associated with them is not important or required in any actual detail. Sometimes they will wear the faces of your friends as a decoration, they do not represent them in any manner, the gap in detail just plugged-up by some placeholder image, something stored physically closely in your memory organ perhaps, even if conceptually unrelated. Whatever the character associated with that filled-in image, no behaviour could ever arise from it which would contradict their essence, which you cannot describe, that essence of the Uig chessmen.
Sometimes you hallucinate those same little men, those dolls, distinct from the times you see them in memory, into the other half-seen places in your life, a tic of recursion. On those occasions when some thing or place cannot be fully seen, you see them there, knowing that they are phantoms. Through long monotonous exposure you have learned to treat those times as a flag of missing content.
You wonder if you picked up the notion or memory of them from someone or somewhere else and some minor point of their story so resonated or so contrasted with that first encounter that you have stored them there, an unconscious method of loci. Perhaps they were never relevant in any large way and some small appreciation of the colours used, or the smell of the world, or a stray comment by a bystander was enough to trigger it in automated response; over time that association was cemented in along with everything else as the strata of your personal histories were layered down.