Sinister musings

Ah, Wimbledon...strawberries and cream (thank you, "The Life Of Luxury", ooh and a Pimms too, while you're at it, with a sprig of Borage), summer afternoons, "quiet, please", and more left-handers per square foot than anywhere else on earth.

The other day Lunchista found out, quite by accident, that the wonderful Anything Left-Handed, which disappeared off the face of London ages ago, is in fact alive and well and living in Cyperspace as part of the Left-Handers' Club. It was too rainy for the garden and there wasn't anything much happening locally at the time, so I browsed around. There were all the familiar tales, for example of the research that found there were fewer and fewer left-handers as you go up in age in the population, and concluded that we probably die young in horrible accidents involving badly-designed chainsaws, before the results were overturned by someone who pointed out that until about 1960 it was practically illegal to write left-handedly at school, meaning that all the elderly lefties were in fact cunningly disguised.

There is also the Theory of Continuity Of Lefties, which says that left to itself a population will settle with about 10% of us, with slightly fewer women than men in that 10%. I've always assumed this is because women have historically been under more "pressure to conform", but the more fashionable explanation apparently involves the effect of Testosterone. Which is probably a load of


(Thank you, NASA).

Anyway, the Left-Handers' Club are carrying out a survey in an effort to identify which jobs are more commonly chosen by us Lefties. President of the USA seems like a popular choice, but apparently left-handedness is something of a career-limiting move if you want to be Pope.

In fact there seem to be a disproportionate number of lefties who have risen to the top of their profession: I'm amazed to find, for example, that Bill Gates is one. I also remember noticing Colin Powell sign something important using his left hand.

Meanwhile down in the ranks there are certain results which you might kind of expect. Given that most of our ability to imagine 3-d shapes, and think laterally, resides in the right hemisphere of the brain (which works the left hand side of the body) you'd expect to find a lot of lefties doing things like architecture, scultpture, and so on. And sure enough, there they are. Widening the "creative" net a little, media posts are also quite well-populated with lefties. So are a lot of sports (except, I presume, things like hockey).

From the survey results, they put together a table correlating jobs which give an advantage (or the opposite) to left-handers, with jobs in which we are over (or under) represented. You'd expect, for example, not many of us to be involved in "Admin", because of the combination of right-handed kit and lack of opportunities for lateral thinking. But Students? And the cited reasons just look silly: yes computers usually have the mouse on the right, but that's only so that people like Lunchista can search for information on the web and take notes at the same time. All the rest of the kit would have been the same when I was a student, and I remember that quite a few of us were left-handed. And the further I studied, the more of us there seemed to be, until in the rarefied atmosphere of academic research (but curiously, not lecturing) we were really rather common.

But I was a student a quarter of a century ago and, well, things change. Student grants have turned into loans, and extra money has to be found for tuition fees, so that today's students are consuming a service rather than being invested-in by our country. Lunchista studied for the love of it (I mean, whoever heard of a career in Astronomy?) but today's pressures mean that that sort of attitude seems to have gone out of fashion. More students today than in my class want (or rather need, just to stay afloat) a quick, no-nonsense, assembly-line route into a good job. Universities, being also more commercially-driven than in the past, for the most part provide precisely this.

Could it be that this set-up and the attitudes within it are somehow putting off a creative, innovative and otherwise just plain interesting slice of the population from studying at Universities? And, if so, where are the missing left-handed students? What are they doing that's more interesting and enlightening than University?