As a child, Jasper Gerard quickly learnt to disguise being a leftie. Now, on the back of a story revealing that 'cow-pawed' women are at greater risk of ill-health, he feels moved to come out and show his solidarity with this persecuted minority
Like former BP chief executive Lord Browne, I was born into a minority. Fearful of prejudice, I pretended to be 'normal'.So successfully have I suppressed my true nature that even my wife doesn't suspect. But now, dear reader, it is time I came out: as a closet left-hander. Yep, I have had a side-change - or, as we like to call it in the bi-handed community, I am a Many creative geniuses have been left-handed.
Being left-handed is dangerous, so it takes courage to face up to what you are. Thankfully, many men cope, but for women it is grim. You see, a new study suggests that left-handed women have a 40% greater chance of dying of any cause, and a horrific 70% greater chance of dying of cancer.
Many creative geniuses have been left-handed, from Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo and Pablo Picasso.
Even if you are not overly impressed with the long list of today's left-handed celebs - from Robert De Niro and Gordon Ramsay, Germaine Greer and Eminem, via Natalie Imbruglia and Sarah Jessica Parker to left seem blessed with a quirky intelligence, such as Bill Gates. Yet as autism.
Now, finally, we have conclusive evidence that to be born left-handed can be an affliction. But hey, I could have told the Dutch researchers of this latest study of 12,000 people that - after my very first day at school.
Finding a 2HB on my desk, I instinctively picked it up with my left hand.
'Friends' found this hilarious, so I took to scrawling - illegibly - with my right. After all, Victorian schoolmasters tied left hands behind backs to stop nippers writing the 'wrong' way, and not without reason, for writing like that leads to smudging.
My kindly teacher, Mrs Binder, was more enlightened and kept placing the pencil in my left.
But, as soon as she passed, I put it back to avoid scornful sniggers.
Ha! Ha!
Now the left-hander has wet himself ...
And so, to this day, I have lived in confusion: while I write - still badly - with my right, I lift heavy objects with my left.
Being fairly ambidextrous can be, well, handy: if stranded at the net in tennis, I can fling myself to the left using my left hand. I swing both ways.
Oh, and I can nurse two G Ts simultaneously. But my trans-sidedness has left me faintly unco-ordinated, as demonstrated when I tried to teach my daughter to juggle eggs.
Still, true left-handers in sport have advantages.
Not only are footballing left-footers invariably 'tricky' - George Best, Maradona - but a left-handed tennis serve swings the ball away from the receiver.
In cricket, left-handed batsmen - those who, quite literally, 'bat the wrong way' - are notoriously difficult to stop making runs as they upset a bowler's line. Statistically, they score faster.
The word 'left' has long been Not that Roman Catholics were any more benign to left-handers, fearing they were in the grip of the Devil. Jesus reckoned that on Judgment Day the blessed would sit to the right of God; the damned to the left.
Historically, 'left-handed' was interchangeable with 'cack-handed', 'cow-pawed' and even 'gibble-fisted', which sounds nasty.
A 'left-handed sugar bowl' was an oh-so-genteel term for a chamber pot, while in dusty locals discovered Andrex.
In Japan, finding a woman to be supper.
'Leftness' derives from the Latin word 'sinister', meaning on the left-hand side, which was considered by the Romans to be unlucky.
And might of the law, it is taken for granted that the 10% of the population who soldiers, for instance, contend with hot, spent cartridges flying towards their faces.
Indeed, any left-hander who has struggled with a left-hander is dangerous work.
If you are right-handed, you take iron are designed the 'right' way.
Only left-handers are left to look Frank Spencer-ish. Still, it has compensations: as I am considered so slow in wielding kitchen and garden equipment, I'm normally excused - with a withering huff - from domestic duties. Or maybe that's more a man thing.
Still, it had to happen, and left-handers look as if they are finally on the road to the ultimate destination of all minorities: victimhood status. A friend reports that, with great solemnity, her sister presented her with a unconvincingly uplifting, such as Being Positive About HIV!!
! or Gangrene Can Be Fun. I had not, my friend reports dryly, realised that for all those years I had actually been disabled.
Web sites are driving for left-handers, to the 'disadvantages' suffered as one grows up - though romance, at least, is taken care of by left-handed dating sites. Relationships have been forged on even more tenuous connections.
The Dutch study is certainly alarming, suggesting that left-handed women are twice as likely to die from breast cancer, five times more from colo-rectal cancer, and three times more from a cerebrovascular condition.
But why? If we dismiss the theological and pagan explanations - the gold of the wedding band, for instance, was placed on the left hand as it was thought that seem hardly more convincing.
One suggestion is that left-handers are damaged in the womb.
In our compensation culture, that sounds promising for lawyers, if alarming for midwives. In recent years, apparently, there has been an increase in left-handers, and this coincides with the introduction of the ultrasound scan. Hmm.
But if not that, what possibly explains such alarming figures?
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