A meme that I picked up from Matthew has got me thinking. Do I have five weird habits I can talk about? For that matter, do I have any weird habits?

I don’t think I do. In fact, I can’t think of much that I do that is habitual (apart from consume alcohol). I have some odd quirks - for example, I have difficulty with left and right. This is more a routing problem in my brain as I know which way left and right are and I have a pretty good sense of direction and rarely get lost. But if I’m directing someone in a car, I’ll point left and say “Go right” and conversely, I’ll point right and say “Go left.” My wife now understands that she should always go the way I’m pointing because it’s only the verbal direction I give that is wrong.

I have a similar problem when laying a table. I can’t seem to ever get the knife and fork the right way around. This isn’t because I was never taught it - I grew up in a restaurant and have been laying tables for over twenty years. But as much as I know the right way to eat, I tend to place the knife and fork the wrong way around when laying a table and I won’t ever notice.

When I started my degree I was doing a joint honours degree with Psychology. I remember one of the experiments we did was a cognitive test on “mental rotation”. The idea was that you were shown a series of pictures of a capital letter R that would be at different offset angles from upright. You had to press one of two buttons to say whether that R was a mirror image or not. The experiment is meant to show (and does) that the further away from upright the R is, the longer it will take to tell which way it is facing. A side result of this experiment shows that it takes longer for someone to tell a mirror image R from a normal facing R.

Not in my case.

I remember my lecturer being intrigued that I was the first person in fifteen years of him doing this experiment who could tell a mirror image R faster than a normal facing R. And I’m not russian. I have no idea whether or not this is related to my inability to correctly articulate left and right. But this isn’t a weird habit, it’s just something about me.

A habit I do have is only buying black socks. It’s a convenience thing. It’s rare that anyone will ever see your socks and I hate trying to pair them so it made it easier to buy only black socks so I don’t have to try to match them at all.

Other than that, I don’t like sitting in a room with an open door. This isn’t a hundred per cent but invariably if I’m sitting in my lounge, I have to make sure that the door nearest to me is shut. Perhaps it’s an acoustic thing or a privacy thing but it’s something I have to do.

I honestly can’t think of any other habits I have, weird or otherwise. How about you?