Richard Hearn explores left-handed greatness
April 2012. Hove. Back garden. Mark the moment. I have just realised that Youngest™ is left-handed. Well, left-footed. (Isn’t that the same?) He is kicking the ball in the back garden, and that is definitely the foot he prefers. It brings to mind Gareth Bale or Johan Cruyff. (Brings to mind how good they are; I’ve never seen them slam the ball so determinedly into a rosemary bush as Youngest™ has just done.)
Is this important? Does it matter if he’s left-handed? All I’m thinking at the moment is it seems to fit, because it’s less common, and Youngest™ is always a little off the beaten track.
He’s following in the footsteps of other left-handers. I can think of four immediately: Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Napoleon, my dad. (That’s one hell of an episode of Come Dine With Me).
These traits will no doubt rub off. Da Vinci, known for his scribbled inventive drawings and a famous portrait with an enigmatic smile, might look at Youngest™’s drawings and see they too are scribbly and enigmatic, the main enigma being what they are in the first place…
Perhaps, like Napolean, he’ll become a French leader (unlikely), or produce an equation like Einstein that leads to a large-scale atomic device. Now that, I can imagine from Youngest™. As for Dad – or Grandad, as some know him – well, Youngest™ has got approximately 25 per cent of those genetic hand-me-downs already. Poor chap.
I’ve since looked up other left-handers. For your info, they include: Paul Daniels, Celine Dion, Winston Churchill, Annie Lennox, Barack Obama and Paul McCartney. Plus, on the football-side, I’ve neglected to mention Maradona and Pele.
Youngest™ gets bored of kicking and picked up the ball instead, again preferring his left. Except then I realise it’s because he’s already carrying some tiny pieces of Lego in his closed right fist. Aha. This has confused me before. He is right-handed, but so often starts the day picking something up and never letting go, that it means his right hand is occupied throughout the day. That’s why he then uses his left; it’s the supersub that comes on in the first ten minutes.
Left-footed and right-handed, then. Youngest™ wants the best of both worlds. I think the phrase is ‘having your cake and eating it’, which incidentally, I always thought was a stupid phrase, less an insight more a teatime observation. Right now, Youngest™ is eating his cake, right-handed.
Well pick the bones out of this one:
I am left footed – I once tried to kick a ball right footed and broke my foot, no really, I did.
I am left-handed, in the sense that I write left handed, but if pushed (or in my case having a pencil removed from my left hand and not given back to me until I held it in my right – got to love 70s Primary School education) I can write small, neat capitals with my right hand.
However, it now gets more complicated – I used to be quite a good tenpin bowler (highest score is 243) – but I bowl right handed. I also bowl, in the cricketing sense, right handed.
It gets worse – when I used to play squash (badly) I used to have two forehands – yes, I used to swap hands and was equally comfortable/bad using either hand.
Now it gets weird – I throw (rocks, balls) right handed, but I can’t throw a frisbee right handed, I have to throw that left handed…
Yours (confused) John.