You know what's wrong with this country? It has completely ruined my understanding of left and right, a subject on which I was already rather shaky. The reason for this is that when I was a child everyone tried to tell me to look at my hands and see which one made a proper L, but that takes a really long time. I have to look at my hands, and then I have to try to remember what an L looks like and work out which one of my hands more closely resembles an L when neither of them do, in fact, look much like an L at all because they are not alphabet letters, they are HANDS. I was always much clearer on which of my eyes was my left eye and which was my right, because I knew which contact lens was which. It's just that this look-at-your-hands thing was so drilled into me that I was never given the chance to learn left and right by my eyes, because everyone insisted upon my learning it by my hands.
Anyway, before coming to England, I had pretty much sorted it out, this left and right business. Occasionally it took me a second, but mostly if you said left I knew which way to look without bothering about my hands or my eyes. But you know England? In England everything goes the opposite way. They drive on the left side of the road and the driver sits on the right-hand side of the car. Very confusing. As a pedestrian, I am always looking the wrong way up the street and nearly getting hit by cars, which will not stop for such a trifling matter as an errant pedestrian but will go ahead and strike me and kill me dead if they get half a chance.
It is a crossing-the-road issue. What you do in America is look left, look right, and look left again to make sure that no more cars have come while you were occupied in the looking-right phase; and then you cross safely. Here it is backwards, which I thought was fine because I thought I had come up with a system that sorted it all out. The system was this:
I get to a road that has to be crossed. My brain automatically thinks: Look left. Then I deliver myself a sharp mental slap and say sternly, NO. THE OTHER WAY, at which point I look the other way instead, allowing me to cross the road without being killed.
Only now, now my brain automatically does the sharp mental slap no the other way thing, even when I do not want it to. If someone says, Turn left, I begin to think about turning left, and my mind says NO. THE OTHER WAY, and instead I turn right until someone shrieks at me to stop, stop, that is the wrong way because we told you to go the opposite way to the way you have elected to go!
Stupid England.
(This is so unfair to England. In fact it isn't stupid England at all, it's Stupid Jenny! Stupid! Stupid! but I feel so stupid being incapable of telling left from right properly even though I am extremely old and should have worked it out by now (it takes me a while to read clocks too; I was the best in my class at it in first grade when we learned them, but everyone else kept progressing and I stayed at about the same clock-reading level so they have surpassed me). In order to distract everyone from my total failure at life I am therefore blaming it all on England.)
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2 comments:
Why do you suppose you suffer from this disability? I do too, and I think Someone has played a bizarre genetic trick on us.
I never got the hand thing. What if you look at your hands with your palms up? You'll get all messed up. So instead of remembering which way is left, you have to remember to keep your palms down and not up, which is just as bad.
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