A system I can relate to

It seems unlikely that I’ll ever come to know my left and right. When I was a mere slip of a thing and still of impressionable age, my mother tried hard to drum some sort of awareness of these alien coordinates into me. She’d shout instructions – touch your right foot; your left leg; your right ear – and I would attempt to respond correctly: a sort of ‘Simon says’ scenario, then, without the complication of Simon.

But these exercises, while making me (and, most importantly, my mother) feel that I was working on the problem, did little to improve matters. And so I’ve gone through life with what feels to me like an innate inability to differentiate between the spaces to either side of me. It hasn’t been too much of a burden, and I’ve found ways of working round the problem. Most usefully, a quick look down at my hands (as long as it’s not too dark and I’m ungloved) reveals a scar which I’ve been told denotes my right. The scar was caused by an exploding Kenwood food mixer, and it’s since become an unexpectedly functional distinguishing feature.

So what’s my problem with left and right, apart from the fact that I can’t tell them apart? It’s their fickleness I don’t like. Turn your back on them for an instant, and they’ve swapped places. Bring an interlocutor into the equation, and heaven knows whose left and right you’re talking about. To me, the whole concept of left and right has always seemed just slightly flawed.

North, south, east and west, on the other hand, are delightful and far less indecisive guides. The mere mention of them is so much more romantic, and their territory so much more far-reaching. Bring out the compass, and all of a sudden you’re in the presence of an invisible but constant force that overrides any kind of twisting, turning, self-centred confusion. Now there’s a system I can relate to.