Look Out, Mr Magoo!

Thanks to my wife’s thoughtful birthday present, I now have the ability to bake my own bread. She’s an absolute whiz at choosing gifts. It would never have occurred to me to go out and buy myself a pair of hands, but now I can’t imagine how I ever managed without them. Hands are not just great for bread-making: they have literally dozens of other applications. You can motion to boy scouts through the kitchen window, and extract crumbs from the back of the sofa during the half-time break. Here are just some of the things I’ve been doing with my marvellous new hands:

• Indicating my frustration to a supermarket employee
• Preventing light from entering my eyes (though, to be fair, I could already do that by positioning a horse between my eyes and the source of said light)
• Preventing objects from falling to the floor, and – in extreme cases – actually causing them to go higher than they were previously
• Examining the texture of custard for imperfections
• Symbolising any number between 1 and 10
• Estimating the relative proportions of a bowl of fruit for the purposes of artistic representation
• Artistically representing a bowl of fruit (through the medium of crayon)
• Causing household electrical items to perform certain labour-saving operations through the manipulation of “controls”
• Waving goodbye to a member of The Bee Gees who has outstayed his welcome (and polished off the Ribena, I might add)
  

There’s no doubt about it: hands are a positive boon! So taken was I with my new hands, that I used them to search on Google to learn more about the history of hands. Unsurprisingly, there are thousands of web sites devoted to hands, so I had quite a busy afternoon sifting through all the available information (not using my hands this time, but using my mind).

Did you know, for example, that hands were invented in 1833 by Sir Robert Godfrey? Legend has it that he was struggling to put on his riding boots one cold winter’s morning, and said to himself “there must be an easier way”. Then, one day, he was visiting the recently-opened London Zoo and, while watching snakes trying to open a can of baked beans, he had a brainwave. The reason why snakes can’t open cans of baked beans is because they haven’t got any hands. So, if he invented hands, not only would snakes be able to open cans of baked beans, but he’d have no trouble getting his riding boots on. It was a landmark moment for British industry, and Sir Robert became one of the richest men in Croydon. There was one flaw in his reasoning, of course. Snakes will never be able to use hands to open a can of beans because they don’t have any money to buy a pair of hands in the first place.

How monkeys can afford them is one of life’s great mysteries.