Synesthesia

I got headbutted at the weekend. It was quite astonishingly painful and was made worse by the fact that I essentially headbutted myself. I was balancing my niece on my feet and was holding her hands, she slipped and my holding her hands only served to turn her in to a battering ram and her head went straight in to my nose. Sadly it was one of those injuries that, although amazingly painful, leaves no evidence although it felt like I was going to have to invest in a fake nose. I used to know someone who had a fake nose, it was attached to his glasses. You used to hear his sister shout “Put your nose on Will” as you rang the doorbell. Anyway the gymnastics were a way of trying to sell the idea of brothers to my niece, as the arrival of 2 in 15 months has put her out a bit. I’m not sure how successful my pep talk/carnage was.

I was slightly overly reliant on my brother Ben as a child. We are only 18 months apart and both lacked vital skills (that thankfully the other had) and so together we could function. I sadly lacked the ability to speak. Well I could speak but no one could understand me apart from Ben and so he was forced to act as my translator. Ben, meanwhile, had absolutely no concept of the days of the week or time. It must have confused my mum no end to overhear us having a chat. BEN: “What day is it?” ME: “fginfionda” BEN: “But how do you know??”. What did become clear later on in life, when I could explain myself (as long as it didn’t involve the words professor or blancmange) is that both Ben and I have (and I only know it’s name as I googled it) synesthesia. Basically we see things in colours and pictures. Ben more than I. I see days of the week, numbers up to ten, years and months in it and Ben sees pretty much everything like it. Well not everything, he doesn’t look at a house and see it as a cow symbolising a house, he generally just sees a house.

I see the days of the week as a strip, a bit like a negative strip from a camera, with the days of the week laid out as different colours and patterns. Tuesday is an old flannel we used to have, Wednesday is a foul egg yellow (and is also a sad day) and so on. Years are on a ladder with those yet to come higher up the rungs. Months are on a loop and again are differently patterned and so on.
I had no idea that everybody didn’t think like this until Ben and I had an argument at dinner one evening about the colour of Thursday and everyone else just looked at us. Having read this through it sounds like I should be riding the special bus. But it does make life easier. It’s always easy to get to a date as it’s all laid out on a colour coded graph in your head. Also it doesn’t seem to hold me back although sometimes there is a bit of a sensory overload.

Any way my nose doesn’t appear to be broken so I shall simply add it to the list of injuries that were almost fantastic but instead just hurt a lot and looked crap. The only truly decent injury I have had is when I cut my finger off in a door and had to pick the severed flesh out of the hinge. Well I didn’t, I was too busy pumping blood up the wall, someone else had the joy of finding the top of my finger. All in all I’m quite glad I don’t have to invest in a fake nose. I’m rubbish at wearing my glasses anyway and I don’t think I could get away with losing them if my nose was attached. I’m also not sure you could attach a fake nose to a pair of contact lenses without causing yourself difficulties.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia (explains it better than I ever could).