Left Behind
Victorian children sound like they had a bit of a shit time of it. If they didn’t die (which most of them did), then it was a rubbish life of picking bits of coal out of the ground, not playing X-box and dying. In a shocking statistic that I’ve just made up but sounds about right, only one in twenty of them got to go to school.
Kids sat there quietly having the shit beaten out of them by vindictive teachers, with boys learning manly things like woodwork, while girls did the things their little brains could cope with, like cooking and sewing. Just how it should be today, eh Mr. Daily Mail?
The only thing that they got right was the idea that everyone was right handed really. Those lefys were just being bloody awkward. So, everyone had to write with their right hand and get on with it without complaining. Or they were beaten with a bit of wood.
See, I’m left handed, and it’s a massive pain to do even the simplest of household things.
Screwdrivers? No chance. My right wrist just can’t work out the angles and gives up in a pathetic flop. Scissors too are hit and miss, with the blades just not playing nicely with the way I hold things. I’m basically a domestic spastic, and pathetically have to leave the DIY to my other half.
My enjoyment of golf has been forever ruined by the sheer bloody difficulty of getting hold of clubs. It’s alright for the normals, as every self-respecting dad has a set of clubs gathering dust somewhere in their shed. But no, the options are limited – shell out for a lefty set on the off chance that you like playing, or learn to play right handed. Which I did. And guess what? I’m crap with both hands. So there.
I can’t use a fountain pen, and even biros conspire against me to leave a smeary, smudgey stain along the page where my clumsy hand drags itself through the wet ink. I once went out with a girl who rotated her arm 3/4 of the way round the word she was writing so she didn’t smudge, like a demented crab. Wasn’t the only connection between her and crabs. The only solutions are pencil or blue crayon, which leaves you looking mental.
In fact there’s only two advantages to being a lefty. First of all, you have an excuse to get out of arm wrestling, which is brilliant if you were the sort of weakling that I definitely wasn’t. Unfortunately the really hard kids would want to take you on left handed anyway and still win, proving just how shit you are and how great they are.
The other, which I know nothing about, is that apparently you can use your natural hand on both the computer mouse and anything else you may want to be doing at the same time.
There’s a society for left handed people, where they can giggle together about all those important things that are bothering the left handed community, like, er, having to open the fridge with your right hand and who should be left hander of the year.
They’ve fundamentally misunderstood what it’s like being left handed though, with their weird collection of shop items – a real life version of the Leftorium from the Simpsons.
We’re not backwards mirror people, we just write, eat and touch ourselves with the other hand. Badly.