Being left-handed is a precious trait that few of us possess, and while the few who are blessed with the dominant use of the left hand tend not to scream that fact from the rooftops, there is no reason they shouldn’t.
There is still always that polite surprise in a person’s voice when they observe you picking up a pen and inevitably ask you, ‘Oh, are you left-handed?’ It is almost as if the concept of someone who does more things with another hand is alien to them.
Around one in ten people are left-handed, and while many of them would like to believe being in that minority equates to having powers beyond the ordinary, sadly this is not the case – but in my opinion, in this world of crushing mortality there is plenty to cheer.
The so-called drawbacks of left-handedness have quite the opposite effect, and if anything increase dexterity in the other hand, so much so that the devil himself could not fashion playthings from the hands of a leftie.
For example, we all remember those green and yellow scissors in primary school – the very epitome of ‘alternative’.
Most of the time the left-handed kid in class – myself included – would be left disappointed when told by the teacher there were none to use.
What to do? Were we to sit there miserably while everyone else had unparalleled joy cutting out shapes and sticking them onto collages?
The answer and the salvation did appear immediately in the form of the red scissors, the scissors of the common child.
Tentatively handling a pair, not quite sure how to use them was the norm in art class, but it taught me to use my right hand for something other than holding a knife.
A decade or so later, something similar happened again: I realised I appreciated music enough to give Guitar Hero a night off and start playing the real thing, but to be thwarted by the rarity of left-handed guitars would have been the ultimate disappointment.
Fittingly, David Bowie once sang that the tragic Ziggy Stardust ‘played it left hand, but made it too far’ and it seemed that taking the effort to buy a left-handed guitar was a step too far, especially when there was a perfectly good right-handed acoustic gathering dust somewhere in the loft.
After a few months of hard graft (and even harder fingertips) the relief of mastering a function that Hendrix performed upside down yet still being unique enough to prompt those raised eyebrows from classmates who see you doodling.
I suppose I could have taken inspiration from The Simpsons character Ned Flanders, whose shop specialising in left-handed items, the Leftorium, made the subject part of pop culture back in 1991.
But where would the challenge have been in that?
Image courtesy of EMI Music via YouTube, with thanks
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