Summer makes me go a bit odd. A case in point – I spotted a headline recently that read: “Your hands are probably about twice as heavy as you think they are”, and I became instantly obsessed. How heavy are mine, and how could I weigh them? If I estimated their weight, would I mentally factor in this bombshell headline, skewing the result? I mean, have you ever thought about the weight of your hands? Go on: how heavy do you think they are?
Then I found myself wondering whether heavy hands were bad, like heavy legs are in France. Every pharmacy there will offer you a selection of products at varying prices to deal with what is, I believe, a fictional condition, and if you tell a medical professional that your legs are heavy, they will take this entirely seriously and may even prescribe a trip to walk around in some knee-high seawater, like a racehorse, in a coastal spa somewhere. I’ve seen (and envied) it. Has the scourge spread? What is happening to our hands?
I spent a long time on overwrought thoughts along these lines, while I should have been tending to almost anything else: work, the house, the ailing dog, my ebbing grasp on reality, before finally clicking through and reading the article. The Birkbeck College study behind the headline was exploring the fact that it is apparently fairly common for people fitted with prosthetic limbs to complain that they feel too heavy, even when they are lighter than a real limb; the researchers hope the study could lead to better prosthetic design in future.
“How much do you think your hand weighs?” I asked my husband. He didn’t even look puzzled; he has lived through many summers with me. “Quite a lot – maybe 500g?” He’s not far off (this is what comes of marrying an engineer, I suppose). The average is 400g, which left me even more bemused. People think their hands weigh 200g? That’s nothing! I weighed mine on the kitchen scales to check: 409g (right) and 426g left). Oh yes, it’s been a fun summer in our house.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist