• keepleftI disturbed a hornet’s nest yesterday. I gave a talk over the weekend about creative organisation and was explaining how the left and right sides of the brain work differently. The left side deals in order and language. The right side is a bit airy-fairy and deals with the world in a wider, looser way. The right side takes everything in, decides what is important and then passes it over for the left side to organise and make sense. That is a very crude description.

    One of my audience had had a couple of small strokes and wondered how that might affect their creativity. They told me there were some words that they just could not remember. This led into a discussion about left and right-handedness. Counter-intuitively, the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. We then wondered if right-brained thinkers might be more left-handed than the norm.

    Yesterday I asked my FaceBook friends how many were left-handed, as most of my FaceBook friends are writers or illustrators. There was no statistical anomally in the results – If I’d thought about it more I would have known that.

    However, I was not ready for the tirade of abuse that came back about left-handed people! My friends are intelligent writers and thinkers, so I assume that they were being mostly ironical, but a base hatred of all things left-handed was very evident.

    My sister is left-handed, so I grew up with it as an everyday occurrence and learned all about her difficulties with scissors and clothes’ irons and other tools that are made for right-handers. I read on one forum yesterday, how someone said they hated sitting next to left-handers because their writing arms bumped into each other. The obvious answer is to change places! I remember fondly sitting next to a left-hander, who was the object of my affections when I was about six. We both had long pencils with walking stick ends – they looked like candy canes – the hooks entwined as we wrote. I was most upset when the teacher made us swap places. I suppose I was always a romantic.

    Yesterday I was reminded that the word sinister comes directly from the latin word for left and that left-handers were often considered to be witches. One of my friends, assuming I was left-handed for asking the question, wondered why it hadn’t been beaten out of me at an early age! I guess this must happen. I found a few forums with concerned mothers asking how to make their left-handed children right-handed. In the past, left-handers had their arms tied up behind their backs to force them to use their right arms. My Grandmother had a little board tied around her neck to let everyone know that she was a Welsh speaker in the times when they tried to beat the language out of children and make them speak English. It’s the same thing.

    You would think by now that we understand everything about human nature and have become more accepting, but it seems we are hard-wired to go along with the norm. Anything that deviates is deviant – obvious. I won’t mention that I grew up with bright red hair – lucky for me it turned very dark as I got older.

    Alright, I will mention it as I’m frequently shocked at the way “Gingers” are abused on the TV and in the press. It doesn’t seem to happen in other countries. Americans are amazed at the way we treat ginger hair. I think it’s a race memory hatred of the Vikings. Red-heads are the only people you can legally be nasty to nowadays. When the UK had it’s enormous influx of immigrants in the 60s and 70s red-heads were forgotten and had a quiet time as we told jokes about, and were generally hostile to, the Pakistanis, West Indians and the Irish. But now it’s against the law to tell those jokes or show any animosity to other races, so tough luck on Gingers – they are fair game again – and, so it would seem, are the sinister ones amongst us.

  • I’m still re-building my website at the moment. There is a lot to get back to bring it all up to date. It had grown like topsy over the years. Having been hacked meant that I had to get rid of a load of old scripts that had become easy prey for hackers.

    I’m now creating a sensible structure to my site, nesting folders and giving folders names that mean something within the whole site. I’m also naming folders with an eye to the future, incase I want to differentiate files easily for reasons of gaining useful statistical information.

    I’ve outsourced my blog hosting to WordPress.com bringing it into my site as an iframe. I’ve organised the Blog CSS so that is looks seemless with my site (www.shoorayner.com). I wasn’t earning anything off Google AdWords, so I’d rather have WordPress handle the business of keeping me safe and up to date. (I’m pretty sure that the hackers got in through my self-hosted WordPress folders). After couple of weeks I realise there are other benefits. Being on the wordpress.com site brings me viewers that I’d not get otherwise. My tags reach further that my posts. They trigger other pages to include your posting. I get different readers and different statistics about them. Before I had to wade through my site stats to make sense of the blog stats.

    My site stats have changed radically. I could see the moment the robots and spiders found I’d changed everything. They went zipping through the new folders to bring their databases up to date. Of course it’s a risk changing one’s site. The search engines have you all mapped out. Now they are providing links that don’t exist anymore, so I’m getting a lot of 404 documents not found at the moment. These are coming from dead links on search engines and, sadly. dead links on user’s favourites. Those will have to build up again.

    In the meantime, I have a much more manageable site that I’m now happy to grow. The site statistics make much more sense too. What is surprising is that most people want the boring pages. The fun ones, that take so much more time and effort, don’t seem to be appreciated as much. I wonder if that will change as time goes on and users begin to bookmark pages and the search engines take them directly to the pages they want. This time I’ll try to keep on top of the backup!

  • I’ve had my lovely niece and her husband and brand new baby staying over the weekend. We got talking about books and reading last night and my niece seemed a little surprised that now was the perfect time to start reading. Bookstart has obviously made a huge impression on her so far!

    Of course a baby isn’t going to understand the story, but it is going to learn about that special time of closeness and the tone of voice and, as the baby grows into a toddler it will associate words and pictures with books and nice times with Mum or Dad or who ever is close to read to them.

    If you do one thing towards your child’s education, read them stories every night. A TV in their bedroom or story tape sand CDs cannot do the same job. TVs stimulate children and keep them awake. There is no discussion after a TV programme – there is no one to explain difficult words or ideas, TV zips them on to the next bit of entertainment, keeping them awake. Children need their sleep. If your child wants a TV in their room the answer is simple. NO! (You are allowed to say no to children – in fact it is your job to say no and set boundaries. Children love to know what the rules are.)

    A child who has never been read to turns up at school when they are five or so, not knowing which way up to hold a book or how a book works. Yes, this still goes on, year after year. Compared to the child who has been read to for five years, that child has five years of learning to catch up on. No wonder some children slip through the net and get through school without learning to read. The consequences for them and society are disastrous. The prisons are full of children that grew up unable to read. It is the most common denominator in prison.

    Children love routine. A story at bedtime is the best way to calm them down ready to go to sleep. Ten minutes spent reading a story is worth it. Otherwise you will spend half an hour chasing them around shouting at them to be quiet and go to sleep.

    Children copy their parents. If they see you reading, they will read too. If there are no books or magazines or written texts in the house, children don’t know what to make of the written word when they finally meet books – words are not part of their culture. School then only exists to impose this discipline upon them rather than to teach them and open up the world of the written word that the rest of us live by every day.

    Remember: If you only ever do one thing for your child – read them a story every night. Your actions will pay untold dividends.