The Dyslexic Vindication

Today, on instructions from d, I did not get back on the bike.
To be fair, with business being as manic as it is right now, I would have to have dragged myself away from my desk in any case, but the point is, I didn't. I simply sat, and worked, and occasionally ate something lovely - scrambled egg on toast for breakfast, chicken pie and potatoes for dinner. All of which will have settled in nicely around various vital organs, in the complete absence of anything approximating exercise on my behalf today.
Bottom line - it's been a very weird week. Tuesday's weigh-in is what it is, frankly.
Tomorrow though, am getting up early and doing some rotations around a lovely local park to at least re-introduce my body to the idea that yes, it really has to move occasionally - this after all is what it's for.

Oh, one thing of note today. As many longer-term readers will know, I have no sense of direction, or navigational skills of any kind. I once went for a job interview, map in hand, turned the wrong way out of a tube station and ended up walking half an hour in the wrong direction. Which would have been just ordinary incompetence had the interview not been with the Royal Institute of Navigation. d eventually cracked the mystery of my incompetence by standing me up and asking me what direction I was facing.
"North" I told her with utter conviction.
She physically turned me through 90 degrees and asked me which direction I was facing now.
"Well, North," I said, something niggling at the back of my brain.
She turned me once more, till I was 180 degrees opposite from my starting position.
"And now?" she asked.
"Look, I can see what you're getting at, but something in my brain unequivocally says I'm facing North," I told her. It was something of a eureka moment in our house.

Well, my mother, bless her, has always said this was basically just a refusal on my part to pay adequate attention to location, directions etc, somehow ignoring the fact that every time she drives me down a stretch of road she swears I've been down plenty of times, and she tells me, again, the spatial relationships between things she thinks I should remember, all she gets is a blank, "who are you again?" stare. Same with location names. Same, come to that, with other dementedly simple things - my pal Rebecca will gladly tell you that after knowing her for 25 years, I still don't know what number house she lives in, and that I frequently walk past her door, thinking she lives somewhere entirely else.

Well tonight, I was talking to a professor from the University of Nottingham, and I happened to mention this ongoing dispute.
"Oh, that's dyslexia," he said, matter-of-factly. "Dyslexia is not only about literacy, although weaknesses in literacy are often the most visible sign. Dyslexia affects the way information is processed, stored and retrieved, with problems of memory, speed of processing, time perception, organisation and sequencing. Some may also have difficulty navigating a route, left and right and compass directions,” he added, quoting, apparently, directly from the British Dyslexia Association.

Given that my career and livelihood depend on my skills with literacy, I'm going to swiftly breeze on by the "most visible" sign of dyslexia here, and say this would explain a hell of a lot. He did also mention a newly discovered thing called "Developmental Topographical Disorder", which means you can't orient yourself in any environment. On the face of it, that sounds more specifically like my situation, but as I can, more or less, find my way from my desk to my bed and vice versa, I'm not laying claim to that one. But a teensy bit of navigational dyslexia - yeah, might well have to hold up a hand and join that club, cos I swear I'm not putting this on. 

All of which is fine...but when I first wrote the title of this blog, I typed it as "The Sylexic Vindication."
Oh cripes...