Ah yes – Peter Pan, the boy that never grew up. I was left feeling like Peter yesterday.
It all started when we rushed out the door on Sunday morning. I took the kids to the rugby ground – my son for his weekly training session, and my daughter to stand and watch with me, whilst my wife went to the supermarket just down the road from the rugby club to get the weekly food shop done. I say supermarket, but it’s actually two right next to each other – Aldi, the lovely and decidedly quirky German import, and Asda, the local giant which is now owned by America’s Walmart. Asda’s name, incidentally, comes from a contraction of Associated Dairies. I mention this because it is one of those odd little bits of information that frequently pops into my head when Asda is mentioned – there is clearly an association there in my brain, and my AS helps to push me into mentioning it. Only after I’ve told this to people will I start to feel embarrassed for having done so.
Anyway – Asda isn’t the star here, it’s Aldi. Aldi is great – it doesn’t stock the huge range of Asda, and it isn’t big on well known brands, but the things it stocks are usually of excellent quality, and many – such as cold continental meats – are better and also much cheaper than at their giant next door neighbour. Aldi also have a clever trick of having some non-food specials in twice a week at unbeatable prices. Everything from power tools to computers, light bulbs to bathroom furniture. At the start of the summer we bought a giant four berth tent and lots of camping equipment from them when they opened one Tuesday morning (just in case they would sell out before we got there), at prices far better than any of our local outdoors shops could manage. We like Aldi. Anyway…
Whilst I supervised the kids at the rugby, my wife went to Aldi first, and then across to Asda for the few items she couldn’t get at Aldi. We met up at the end of the training, and she told me that she’d seen some winter coats at Aldi – both for my son and me. We wandered down the road to take a look. My son liked his jacket, and I thought the one my wife had found for me was great. They were silly money too, so we bought them. For £18.99 I got a waterproof coat with an unzippable fleece lining. It’s nicely finished, is deliciously warm, and has plenty of pockets. My son’s is like a slightly brighter scaled down version of mine. The fleece lining doesn’t unzip on his, but hey – for £7.99 you really can’t complain – and it is still waterproof.
At home, after lunch, I found myself doing something that I remember doing when I was a child.
I took my new coat, and spent a good ten minutes pouring over it in great detail. I unzipped each of the pockets in turn, and explored them with my hands, seeing what size they were, and wondering where to put each of the things that I carry around with me. I marvelled at the stitching, and carefully cut off the couple of stray thread ends. I examined how the fleece was zipped in, amazed at the trickery used to hide the metal zip ends behind folds in the softer material where it might make contact with my neck. I tried it on and then took it off again, and then put it back on and did up the zip right to the top. I unfolded the hood from it’s hidden compartment, and then carefully folded it back up. I felt the fabric of the fleece lining and of the outside too. I listened to the sound that my hand made on the outer fabric.
This is something I can always remember doing with clothes, but especially with coats. Coats tend to be quite complicated garments with lots of pockets, so there is much to explore. I can still remember a summer coat (this is the UK after all) that I got when I was about ten. It was green and blue and yellow – very garish in today’s terms, but quite fashionable back in the mid eighties. It had a pouch on the front for your hands, much like a hoody sweat top, but you had to peel the pouch off (it fastened on at the top and one side with velcro) to zip and unzip the jacket – really very unusual. I loved it for it’s unusualness, and for the lovely way it had been stitched together. To me, it was a coat to be proud of. I guess I feel much the same way about my new coat. It is a no-name brand, and in all likelihood the material probably isn’t wonderful quality, and maybe it’ll lose it’s waterproofness quickly. But it is well engineered in a very German way, and well finished, and it was an astonishing bargain to boot.
I keep wanting to put it on – in fact each time I’ve popped out of the office this morning, I’ve put it on. This is unusual – I usually brave the trip to the coffee shop or the post office in just my shirt sleeves, even at this time of the year.
So, I feel like Peter Pan, the boy that never grew up. I feel ten years old again, pouring pride and affection into my new coat. I can’t help it – it’s just me.
Yet whilst my actions may be very much like they were when I was child, I’m concious of the fact that they are not the actions of many, probably most kids. My son is only five, so I can’t compare directly with myself at ten, but his reaction to his new coat was, I think, fairly typical of boys in particular. He liked the colours, pronounced it as cool and said he’d wear it. When we got home, it got discarded on the kitchen floor and forgotten about until this morning when it was time to leave for school.
Will he react that way at ten? I can’t say, but I suspect he’s more likely to continue to react that way than to have my fascination with the mechanics and design of it.
In lots of ways I’m like Peter Pan – many of the things I do now are the same as when I was a child. However, the child in me is still really rather different from your typical child, so the comparison feels strained to me. I’ve read many times over the last year about immaturity and naiveness in adults with Asperger’s, and associated behaviour being described as child-like. But it occurs to me that I’ve not seen it pointed out that the behaviour is child-like in a peculiarly ASD way – but it most certainly is. And remember how kids with ASDs get described? That’s right – as little professors.
So maybe I’m not like Peter Pan at all. Maybe I’m actually like a little professor, in an adults body, with a strange fascination for winter coats.
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