On Left and Right

Not politics. I have nothing more to add. (That’s not true.
Like most of my friends, I find it hard to talk about anything else these days
but I have nothing new to say and most of the talking is despair. Left, always,
if there’s a choice, but more importantly Remain and so there isn’t a choice.
Vote Green, except that splitting the liberal vote risks letting a Tory in. Hold
your nose and vote Lib Dem. Emigrate, if you can find somewhere not also in or
near the grasp of right-wing demagogues, not that there’s much point because
climate change and air pollution don’t stop at borders and anyway you can’t
emigrate any more because you’re about to lose freedom of movement and
reciprocal healthcare arrangements. Despair.)

No, I mean literal left and right. One side of your body or
the other. One side of the road or the other. I have no idea which is which.
Mostly I get by because I know that I wear my watch and my wedding ring on the
left, but I still have to look at my hands as I approach the part of the
sentence where I have to choose the word, and if someone else says ‘turn left’ I
often guess and I’m often wrong. I don’t usually take exercise classes but in
Pilates for Runners I have to wait to see which side everyone else uses when
the teacher gives an instruction. I was hopeless in childhood ballet classes. I
usually get it right when driving or cycling because I know that left is the
easy one and right is across traffic, but I’m spending as much of this last
European summer as possible in countries where the opposite is true and that
makes me particularly scatty because I need first to remember that left is the
easy one and then that I’m now in a place where left is the difficult one.
(It’s all right, I never drive outside the UK and Ireland and I wheel my bike
over junctions even in Denmark.)

I’m better at right and left on the road than walking or indoors
because the easy/difficult distinction when driving or cycling makes right and
left different experiences in a way that they’re not in a room or on a path. I
can remember a qualitative difference where I have no purchase on an arbitrary
binary. For the same reason, I know how many days February has but cannot
retain information about the other months; if they were all different I’d have
no trouble but though it’s my job to imagine and inhabit other people’s
realities, I don’t understand how anyone remembers the 30/31 groups. (Yes, I
know the rhyme, but it rhymes and scans just as well when the months are wrong
so it’s not much use as a mnemonic.) I have to think of, or better, look at, an
analogue clock to know clockwise from anti-clockwise, which means that without
contextual data such as the name of the last meal or the position of the sun I
can’t read an analogue clock that doesn’t have numbers because I don’t know 8
from 4 or 2 from 10 unless they’re written out.

I used to be painfully ashamed of this confusion, convinced
that it was a symptom of wider inadequacies to be concealed at all costs. It’s
one of the pleasures of middle age to be able to write this. I’m also, by the
way, terrible at verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests. There are small mammals
out there, certainly birds, capable of higher scores in standardised aptitude
testing; I have no idea which of the patterns I can see is the one recognised
by the test. By objective measures, I am very stupid. All this leaves me deeply
sceptical about the value of box-ticking as a way of assessing human beings,
even for educational purposes where you might hope that particular competencies
can be tested. I hope my own incompetence makes me a better teacher, because I
know very well what it’s like to be the one at the back who doesn’t know the
answer, doesn’t understand the question, and is hoping only to escape the seminar
with dignity apparently intact. Students can’t learn and therefore I can’t
teach as long as the fear of humiliation is in the room, and though I don’t know
if the door is on left or the right I work very hard to expel the fear of
failure. At least for other people.