I nurture, it's in my nature

I've been wondering a lot lately about how influenced we are by where we are and the things that happen to us throughout our lives.

It's the old Nature or Nurture debate. I know people who are crazy smart, really intelligent people and it's a curveball for the family. Their cleverness is out of the ordinary, unusual; but they've had a good education. One point for team Nurture. There are also people whose parents are highly intelligent and they, well, aren't. They struggled, and have never reached the bar their family set high. Point two for team Nurture.

Whenever the Nature/Nurture debate is discussed, the idea of adoption is always brought up. What if a genetically intelligent child was raised in an environment with less opportunities? What if a child with a poor genetic disposition were to be given a fantastic upbringing and allowed to thrive? What if, indeed?

Well, I have a personal example. I have always been fairly bright and when time came to go to Secondary School (at age 11 to non-Brits) I managed to do well enough in my exams to be put into the top class for everything except maths, my one weak point (excluding P.E... Let's not talk about P.E.) There wasn't a huge difference between my marks, until it came to the first year of our GCSES (age 14) when we got a maths teacher who had no control over a class that included a couple of particularly unruly troublemakers.

By the end of the year my marks were hovering around a D (shocking for me, I wasn't a straight-A student, but I got a few, smattered around the Bs and Cs) as I had barely learnt anything in a year; except how to make paper aeroplanes while the teacher shouted at the popular kids who laughed in his face. He took a long leave of absence and we finished the year with supply teachers.

Then, luckily, we got a new teacher for our last year. I pulled my socks up and took advantage of the after school catch up sessions she ran and by putting in two hours each week, I slowly dragged my marks up. My parents saw how hard I was trying and managed to find a private tutor who didn't charge too much to give me one hour a week. My problem was that whilst I could get my head around the method, as soon as I left the class it would all trickle away like water through a sieve. I just could not retain it. But thanks to all the hard work I put in, I improved so much that my school teacher thought I had cheated on my coursework.

My dad is an incredibly intelligent man but not academic. His brain constantly amazes me with his grasp of science and mechanics and maths. But despite all his help, despite the private tutor and the after-school catch-up lessons, I am still not good at maths. It is simply not in my nature and no matter how much I tried, no matter how much help I had, no matter how much maths was nurtured, my brain is simply not built that way. Point one for Team Nature.

Another point for Team Nature is my sister. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was very gifted with art and with animals. My mother inherited his artistic ability and my sister and I are both very creative, although whether this is nature or nurture is arguable as we were definitely raised with art and creativity.

We weren't raised with animals, my parents had had pets and now they had children and didn't need anything else making mess that they would have to clean up. So no matter how much we begged, the most pets we were allowed was a pair of gerbils. My mum turned the garden into a haven for wild animals and she is still fascinated with watching the birds that visit our feeders but she watches from afar, she doesn't need to get up close and personal.

So now, I'm not much of an animal-person. I think they are adorable and wonderful but also a lot of work. At uni a friend was writing a dissertation on something genetic and kept fish that were occasionally sacrificed to science as humanely as possible. When we graduated, she offered me the remaining fish (knowing how much I adored them) and I gave them a loving new home. I went off the fish after they started eating each other. Nature is kind of a bitch.

My sister is animal-mad. She discovered horse-riding in her teens and you could barely pry her away from the stables where she volunteered, mucking out the horses for hours on end, grooming them and exercising them. Now she has her own house, it is a veritable managerie. She has a dog, two cats, a rabbit, a mouse, two gerbils, three hamsters and an enormous fish tank. She would have chickens if she were allowed and the only reason she hasn't got anymore animals is that she literally has nowhere else to put any.

According to family members who actually knew him, she is very like our grandfather. She is an animal-whisperer, she has a way with them and they just respond to her in a way they never have to me. So that's point two to Team Nature. Even skipping a generation, being raised without any familial influence or encouragment, without many animals and even fewer pets, she still inherited his gift with animals.

I think nature and nurture are so inextricably linked that there are only a few circumstances that we can view them like this, weighing up their influences and imagining what difference they have made or haven't made. But it is only imagining. We can never know what would have happened otherwise.