My fifth grandchild (Miss Six) differs from the other six grandchildren, and I confess to feeling very awkward around her. I have never been able to help her with most things in the same way I have helped the others.

I always found it difficult trying to help her feed herself as a toddler or help her to brush her hair or her teeth. I couldn’t help her with learning to tie her shoelaces, but she has her own way of doing it and it works.

I cannot help her with cutting out when we are working on a craft project.

When we are cooking together, I find it very awkward showing her how to mix the batter. She holds the spoon differently and stirs in an anti-clockwise direction. It just doesn’t work for me. The benefit for her is that she learns to follow verbal instructions quickly and adapts them to suit what she can do.

She is left-handed.

It’s hard to be left-handed in a right-handed world, and it is certainly hard for me as a right-hander to do things in a left-handed way!

There is a genetic link to left handedness, and in this regard, she follows her mother who is also left-handed. My daughter-in-law is extremely creative, excellent at photography, imaginative set design, graphic arts, and she is also musical. Perhaps Miss Six will follow her in these creative areas.

I know that her leftie mother had considerable trouble trying to teach her right-handed girls the practical skills leading to independence – her father helped teach Miss Eight many of those little tasks when she was small, and he is helping Miss Three with her right-handed coordination skills.

When she was three, Miss Six drew a picture for me as I sat across the table from her. A stick figure, just like any other child of that age. However, she drew it upside down, so that as I watched, it was right side up for me. She left space at the bottom of the page, then drew a circle. Working her way up, she added the body, the arms, and finally the legs, sticking up towards the top of the page. From her viewpoint it was upside down; from my perspective it was the right way up. I was astonished.

She could already write her name – so she did, at the bottom of the page, and she went from right to left, like Arabic script. Furthermore, the letters were also formed from right to left. When I held up her picture her name was at the top, and the letters of her name well-spaced and evenly formed. I marvelled at her brain and spatial dexterity. I don’t know whether this reversal was related to her left-handedness. Obviously, she was using, or had developed, areas of the brain which we don’t normally use.

Apparently, left-handed people score very well on tests of creativity, imagination, daydreaming, and intuition. They are good at complex reasoning. Interestingly, they are also better than right-handers at rhythm and visualisation. They are sometimes better at sport, perhaps because they have more opportunity to practice and develop skills against right-handers than the reverse.

There is a high proportion of left-handed people amongst Nobel Prize winners, as well as amongst musicians, architects, artists, writers, and mathematicians. Mathematicians? Yes – spatial awareness for geometry and related disciplines. Famous Lefties include Michaelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Renoir.

Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford were left-handed, along with six of the US presidents since World War 2, well in excess of the normal ten percent of the population. Prince William is left-handed, as is Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, in the UK.

Left-handed people, apart from being known as Lefties, are also called Southpaws. Apparently, when playing baseball in the late nineteenth century, the ballparks were laid out so that the pitcher looked in a westerly direction when facing the batter. The throwing arm of a left-handed person would therefore be to the south, thus giving the name Southpaw.

Mollydooker is an Australian slang term for someone left-handed. Molly is simply a pet form of Mary, and “dooker” comes from the word “duke”, a slang term for fists, especially in fighting. It was as if one scorned the left-handed boy for having “fists like a girl”.

I can remember in the late 1950s that boys fighting, or even pretending to fight, in the school playground would yell to an opponent, “Come on on, mate, stick up your dukes!” In Scottish to “dook it out” means to have a fight, usually a fistfight. The English had more than eighty expressions for left-handed people, most of which were uncomplimentary. In Latin, the word for left is “sinister” and in French the word for left is “gauche” which in English has the idea of being awkward or clumsy.

In those times it was unfortunate to be a mollydooker as teachers used to rap children’s knuckles with the edge of a ruler to beat left-handedness out of them – they were forced to become right-handed. That is no longer the case, thankfully.

Yet even today, the left hand is in some countries and cultures considered to be “unclean” and is allocated the dirty jobs, whereas the right hand is used for shaking hands and eating food.

For most western cultures, however, there is welcome tolerance for, and acceptance of, lefties. These days there are boutique and on-line shops catering for left-handed people, and supplying all manner of equipment, including tools, scissors (both for adults and for children), as well as such things as left-handed corkscrews, can openers, measuring cups, and even an ergonomic computer mouse. For lefties, the normal computer mouse does not feel "right".

My fifth grandchild is unlikely to suffer any serious disadvantage these days from her left-handedness. But I do now have more understanding of how awkward it must feel to be left-handed in a predominantly right-handed world, and how awkward her mother must have felt trying to teach her other girls all those little skills, when everything was, for her, back to front.

My granddaughter will probably keep pace with her peers in all her skills – but you never know, she just might do something of brilliance – after all, not everyone can draw upside down and write back-to-front!