A new Special Interest

Here in the UK, a General Election has been called for 6th May.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m not very big on politics. However, whenever a general election happens, I end up getting very drawn into it all, with very set views all of a sudden.

I’m a liberal. Not out of choice or even out of spending great deals of time pouring over policies. I just am. I guess I was born that way – my ideals align with them rather better than any of their rivals.

The voting system in the UK does not favour the Liberal Democrat party which is where my voting intentions lie. We use a ‘first past the post’ system that skews and twists the will of the electorate wildly. In recent elections, the Lib Dems have typically polled approximately 20% of the votes, but taken only 10% of the parliamentary seats. The two larger parties – Labour (currently in power) and the Conservatives take the lion’s share of the remainder of the votes and the seats. It is, however entirely possible for one of the two big parties to win a majority of seats with fewer than a third of the popular vote.

It’s no surprise then, that voting reform has always been one of the big pledges of the Lib Dems, and one of the political causes that I support with a passion when there is an election in full swing. It’s the lack of logic in the current system that I despise.

Something unusual has happend in the last week of the current campaign. For the first time, there has been a televised debate between the the Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem leaders. The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg did something unexpected and refreshing. He talked about his parties policies and how they differed from the ‘old’ policies of his rivals. His rivals squabbled amongst themselves. Nick Clegg ‘won’ the debate – snap polls immediately after the event had around 50% of people thinking he won the arguments.

Wow! The Lib Dems have now risen from around 20% to around 30% in the opinion polls, very similar ratings to the two big parties. But here is where it all goes wrong again.  Let’s look at one single, but reasonably representitive poll carried out this week:

Liberal Democrat: 33%, Conservative: 32%, Labour 26%

Based on an average distribution of ‘swing’ from one party to another across the country, this would give the following predicted break down of seats in parliament, if the above figures held on election day:

Liberal Democrat: 134, Conservative: 244, Labour: 243

Ugh! Not only do the Lib Dems end up with approximately 45% fewer seats than either of the other two parties, but Labour, who have less of the popular vote than either of the other two actually end up with the most seats, although not enough to rule on their own – it would be a hung parliament.

That TV debate has been something of a catalyst for me, and I’m now heavily absorbed in what is going on. My search for information – typically via the Internet – is now quite time consuming each day, and my quest for further knowledge seems to have no bounds – my brain is like a big sponge trying to take in everything I can find. I smell a new Special Interest in the making.

The Lib Dems cannot win this election. They do however seem to have captured the public mood right now, where people are fed up of the old style politics and politicians. They can’t win, but the Lib Dems can force a change. If there is a hung parliament – and it looks very likely right now – then they would hold a lot of power, by forming an alliance with either Labour or the Conservatives to allow a government to be formed. It’s likely that part of that power would allow them to ask the populace if they’d like to see a change in the way voting works.

Who knows – maybe by the time the next general election comes round, a fairer and rather more proportional voting system might be in place. I for one have my fingers crossed.

Awareness

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

My new job is going well – very well. That is the biggest reason that I’ve not been writing here.

It’s not that I couldn’t find the time to write, it’s a little more subtle than that. My new job has become my current special interest, and has taken on all the properties that that title bestows on it. Focus – that’s the main thing. By focus, I don’t mean that I’m getting lots done. I don’t mean that I’m obsessing about work when I get home either. Both of those attributes are what I would associate with a regular person who was committed to their job.

When my job becomes my special interest, something a little different than the above happens. Whilst at work, I am supremely focussed. Focussed on whatever it is that I’m doing at the time. I may have a to do list the length of my arm – indeed this is often the case, but I’ll struggle to get half of it done, despite working really hard. This isn’t due to a lack of productivity, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I complete the task I’m working on very thoroughly, and with great attention to detail, at the cost of the other tasks that need doing.

I won’t realise that I’m doing this whilst it is happening. To echo one of the great AS cliches, I lose track of time, and suddenly find myself near the end of the working day, aghast that I’ve not tackled several of the high priority items that I put on my list that morning. I will have had a blast of a day however, getting lost in the intricacies of some problem, and quite often bathing in the satisfaction associated with having nailed whatever the problem was.

It’s not just my other work tasks that get neglected, I’ll often have a few bits of personal logistics on my daily list – paying bills, finding a little something for my wife, that sort of thing – and much of the time I’ll not have tackled these either. I find this very frustrating, and over the years, no matter how I’ve tried to structure my day to allow me to complete more tasks, I’ve invariably slid back to a position where items get missed for the above reasons. I find that with great effort I can carry off some sort of structure that forces the execution of my list for a short time only. Invariably the effort required to make it work is just too great. I am not blessed with much of an ability to structure my life in a way that gets important tasks done in a reliable way. Call it executive dysfunction if you like.

At the end of the working day I drive home, and for the most part leave my work thoughts behind in the office. That’s great, but unfortunately I don’t get to enjoy my evenings in the sort of productive way that I note many of my peers do. There’s the initial feeling of exhaustion that I’ve written about before. That hour or so of feeling dazed and looking glazed that I put to down to too much sensory input at work and the forty five minute drive home. Once that’s worn off and the daily chores are done, I’m fit for nothing. I feel tired despite getting eight hours of sleep most nights, and find it difficult to bring myself to do anything productive.

But do you know what?

The above frustrations now also feel normal and comfortable. Whilst I have lived with the above challenges my whole life, it’s only really in the last year that I’ve become properly aware of them, and have had any kind of idea as to why they exist. My awareness has brought an acceptance of who I am. That’s incredibly powerful and empowering too. I’m never going to be all that good at getting a bunch of tasks done in a given day. By accepting that, I’ve removed the need to compare myself to those who don’t have AS. I no longer have to beat myself up for not managing to work in the way that I see many of my peers do.

One, two, three, four…

You know how it goes:

Ring-Ring. One…

You don’t like calling people on the phone, and have just spent ages trying to pre-play the conversation in your head.

Ring-Ring. Two…

Anxiety is sloshing around.

Ring-Ring. Three…

It’s ok, people rarely pick up on three rings, unless they are sitting by the phone.

Ring-Ring. Four…

Ok, I admit it. I count the rings before people pick up the phone.

Ring-Ring. Five…

It’s partly to do with knowing when to put the phone down when the phone isn’t being answered.

Ring-Ring. Six…

It’s also to do with my love of patterns. I find myself counting involuntarily these days.

Ring-Ring. Seven…

Come on – where are they?

Ring-Ring. Eight…

Hmmm… Maybe they aren’t there. But eight rings isn’t all that long. (It’s actually around 24 seconds…)

Ring-Ring. Nine…

I can visualise them running towards the phone now.

Ring-Ring. Ten…

Pick it up! Oh no. They didn’t. Maybe they weren’t running after all…

Ring-Ring. Eleven…

Maybe this time! Oh – no.

Ring-Ring. Twelve.

Handset  down.

I don’t know why I picked twelve rings to be the cut off point if I’m honest. If I really think about it, most people have picked up by half a dozen rings if they are there. But twelve it is, most of the time. If I’m phoning a utility or some other sort of service I’ll hold on for longer. But with people, I count to twelve and then put the handset down.

Do any of you have a hidden and slightly odd use of patterns like this one? I’d love to hear about it!

The mechanics of visibility

It’s a funny old game, this blogging lark.

When I first had the idea for this blog back in January, I was very unsure of myself, and, indeed about what I would be able to write about. My first postings, back in the early spring were tentative, and I was relieved that no-one was watching whilst I was finding my feet.

As time passed, my confidence grew in my ability to express myself and occasionally produce some nice and/or interesting bits of writing. Satisfaction started to set in, and I grew somewhat addicted to assembling the jumble of thoughts in my head into coherent articles.

People were starting to take notice. Some have come and gone, others have hung around for the longer haul. New faces are always welcome, and it’s great to see.

In time I’ve turned from a shy and unsure blogger into a confident one, who wants his words to be read by others.

But frustration has started to hit on the visibility of the blog. I made a concious decision to host on my own server because I wanted control, and to have the ability to muck about with my own settings, and feel pride in having created my own hosting solution. At the time, this seemed like a great idea, but I can now see the drawbacks.

My blog is not part of a community.
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The anatomy of a special interest

Whilst browsing the web a few evenings ago, I found myself – as I often do – following my thought process to see where it would lead me.

My starting point was a news item I’d seen earlier in the day that had piqued my curiosity. The story was this – a ghost village near to where my parents live in Scotland is to finally be demolished after thirty five years of sitting empty.

I love stories like this – local history and it’s odd quirks in particular have long been a fascination of mine, making this a special interest that makes regular and usually unanticipated repeat visits.

Over the course of an hour and a half, I let my thought processes dictate where this starting point would lead me. It lead to somewhere quite unexpected, but still in the same special interest thread (just) – Drax power station.

What follows is a little dissection of my thought processes that show how I got from A to B, via C on the way.

As I’ve said, we started here – a BBC news story about how the ghost village of Polphail in Argyll is to be demolished thirty five unhappy years after being built and never having been occupied.

The village, it turns out, was a legacy of the Scottish oil boom of the 1970s. A series of dry docks were built at that time around the Scottish coast for building giant concrete oil rigs, and Polphail was built next to one of these to house the expected workers. But the workers never came – the technology changed, and when it comes down to it, this dock and village were built on the west coast of Scotland, and all the oil is off the Eastern seaboard. The government has long since sold off the dock, which has recently been redeveloped into a marina, having served time as a fish farm. The unused village has changed hands several times, and has had a long and unhappy history of promised demolitions which have never been carried out.

A link from the BBC page (the link is no longer there) took me to a collection of photographs by a local photographer, that document the decay in the village, along with surprising details such as a rack of keys for the houses, and washing machines in a launderette – all still in place after thirty five years. The photos are eerily beautiful, and the website is well worth a visit.

Google maps showed me where Polphail was. After seeing it, I wondered if Google could tell me any more about it’s history. I found this – a wiki about secret and obscure sites in Scotland. This had some useful additional information, but I’ll come back to this in a few moments.

At this juncture, I wondered if there were any other ghost villages in the UK, so I searched. I found a couple.

The British military, it would seem has been the main cause of ghost villages in the recent past. During the Second World War, it commandeered three villages for exercises – Tyneham in Doset on the south coast, Imber on Salisbury Plain – not far from Stonehenge, and Mynydd Epynt in Wales. In each case, the government told the occupants that the land was temporarily required for military use, and gave them a month to leave. None has ever had their home returned to them, even to this day.

Figuring all this out took a while, and involved a lot of quick searches and looks via Google Maps to see what was there on the ground today. Some of the websites I found along the way were wonderful examples of amateur passion and campaigning turned towards the direction of a new technology like the web, including this great example here. You’ll find a great tour of Tyneham here.

Some further searching for other possible ghost villages turned up this gem of a website. I’ve barely scraped the surface of it yet, but have it tucked away to devour in full when I get the time. This site just about left me agog, as it talks about a now vanished village that I have driven past the site of many times – Glenbuck in Ayrshire, Scotland. Glenbuck is on the road I drive down when I visit my parents, which is the same road that we used to drive down to visit my grandmother when I was a child. Due to this I know the road well, and can create a wonderful 3D video of it in my head. The old mining town, with houses and a main street, has gone – vanished under a scar of open-cast mining. The industry that made it also in the end tore it up too.

With other ghost villages examined, it’s time to go back to Polphail, where we started.

I noticed on the Secret Scotland website that there were links to various planning documents (isn’t it amazing what you can get easy access to these days online?), so I had a bit of a read of these. Not only did these tell me a lot more of the history of village including the various efforts to try and get the owners to demolish it, but the site also had some interesting reading about how much public money had been wasted on building it in the first place. It wasn’t the cost that grabbed me however, it was mention that the costs for it were listed with the costs to build the Hunterston Deep Water Terminal, which is literally just down the road from where my parents live. I’ve always known that Hunterston was a port for bulk materials, but I’d never really know what. A quick trip to Wikipedia told me that these days coal is offloaded here, and then taken over the road via a large conveyor (easily visible in Google Maps) to the railway, where it is sent elsewhere.

And this is where Drax comes in. Wikipedia told me that one of the places that coal from Hunterston is shipped to is Drax – a huge coal-fired power station located in my neck of the woods, and just a couple of miles down the road from where I worked for a little over two years. Drax is huge and imposing – on a clear day you can see it from near my house, which is some twenty miles away as the crow flies. It’s huge in terms of output too – on it’s own it can provide 7% of the UK’s electricity, and if you classed Drax as a country in it’s own right, it would rank as the 76th biggest produces of CO2 in the world. Wow!

So – Polphail to Drax, via Tyneham and Glenbuck. All in all a very interesting ninety minutes.

Was it really ninety minutes? It seemed like much less time than that. I’ve been writing this piece for about that amount of time too, and once more the time has flown. This is what special interests are about – I get so thoroughly absorbed in them that time just disappears.

I think the above dissection of my thought processes gives a good example of how special interests drag me in, and of how my brain becomes a huge sponge for new information, devouring anything and everything vaguely related that I can find.

It also shows the other side of special interests too – the desire to share the knowledge I’ve learnt, often in detail to people that aren’t interested. This article is exactly that, but in written form.

I’d be willing to bet that some of those who start reading don’t make it here, and I can’t blame them.

As for you – well thank you for listening!

A dinner party, Aspie style

Last weekend, my wife and I hosted a dinner party for six. This is an unusual event in our household, but we had been to evenings at the other couples houses recently, so it was our turn to entertain.

With my new-found hyper-awareness of how my Asperger’s affects me, I wondered how the evening would go, and how my AS would colour things. As it happens, it went well.

Before the day itself, my wife and I split up the jobs. She was to sort out the nibbles and the dessert, and I was to cook the main course. We decided that as we don’t have much practice of juggling cooking and entertaining at the same time, that we’d stick to a pre-prepared dessert, and a main course that we cook regularly – a good old fashioned British roast dinner.

On the morning of the event, I did my first Aspie trick – I made a list. It was a timeline from mid-afternoon of when everything needed to be prepared, go in/out of the oven, and when we’d fit in feeding the kids and bathing them etc as well. With my list done, I was confident I knew the schedule. If I hadn’t taken the time to make it, then nothing would have been ready in time. As it turned out, the list worked wonderfully.

When our guests arrived, the kids were safely asleep in bed, my wife had finished assembling the nibbles, and I was hard at work cooking. My wife did the pre-dinner entertaining whilst I got all the final bits of the main course ready. This worked well. I was focussed, the food got delivered on schedule, and everyone enjoyed it. Great.

What I perhaps wasn’t expecting was just how little I would have to contribute after the meal was done. In usual dinner party style we adjourned to the lounge for coffee and chocolates and grown up chatter. But I had nothing left to give. Once more, I was the quiet one in the corner that wasn’t joining in with the conversation very much.

You may be surprised to hear that I wasn’t expecting this. I’m usually quite chatty at dinner parties, especially once alcohol has kicked in a bit. As someone who doesn’t discuss things verbally with people all that often or indeed all that articulately, rare occurrences like dinner parties at other people’s houses tend to provide something of an outlet for me. Alcohol helps.

But not that night. The intense focus on the list of things that needed doing, and the effort involved in preparing everything had wiped me out. I wanted so much for everyone to be impressed with the food that I had put every last ounce of effort into it, and left nothing for the social side of the evening.

This is another of my traits that I put down to my AS. Whenever I concentrate intently on something for any length of time I end up feeling tired and withdrawn. It’s a similar feeling to the one I get when I’ve experienced sensory overload. I feel vacant, and almost as though I’m looking at a video of the world around me rather than real life – like I’m detached from reality in some way. I get the feeling even after short periods of concentration – I’ll get it after publishing this article, for instance.

At least, with only six of us there, there wasn’t a great deal of time spent with people talking over each other. This meant that whilst I may not have been saying much, I was at least able to follow and enjoy the conversations. I think six people is about the right number for me for an evening like this. Any more and regardless of whether I’m the host or not, I’ll start to loose track of conversations, and the general background noise will start to annoy me and eventually overload me.

Did anyone notice my lack of input? I’m not sure, but it probably doesn’t matter. Everyone – me included – had a good time, and that is more important.

It’s interesting that we chose a roast dinner for the main course as we thought that would be an easy option. I think that the next time we entertain in this way, I’ll try and come up with a main course that can have at least some elements prepared ahead of time.

That way I might have a little something left to give in the second half of the evening.

The cuckoo in the nest of life

One of the really great things about the Internet from my perspective is that you can learn from others. Each morning I eagerly look at my Google Reader to see which of the blogs that I follow have new entries. I follow lots of content about a lot of different things, and I learn a lot from the experiences of others, but perhaps my favourite blogs are those written by others on the Autism Spectrum.

This morning I read a short but rather striking piece by Sophia Battenburg on her An Ordered Mind blog. I say striking, because as often happens with AS blogs, the writer has put things in a slightly different way to me, and from that I’ve seen new connections to how I behave and interact that I’d not seen before.

Sophia says, in the context of having her routine interrupted by noisy people in her living space:

I am coming to terms more with emotions, as I’m conscious that I block a lot of the negative ones out.

This rings true for me. What it has also done is make me think about why both I and Sophia block out the negative emotions in situations that we are not comfortable with. I think I know why.

Both Sophia and I did not discover our AS until we were adults. This means that we’ve grown up having to make sense of the world from an angle where it actually doesn’t make a great deal of sense a lot of the time.

In my case at least, social interaction has most of the time come from repetition of what I’ve seen others do, through a bit of guesswork, and from learning when my reactions have seemed to be inappropriate. In other words, it’s lacked the intuition that most people use. In order to survive, I’ve had to blend in, using mimicry.

You have to remember that this was the thing that came naturally to me, not the intuitive interactions that my peers used. It seemed like the normal thing to do, even if it was a little confusing, as it didn’t seem to be quite the same as what my peers were doing.

With all this in mind, you can see how a situation such as that described by Sophia ends up with her bottling up her negative emotions. When I feel uncomfortable with a situation such as invasion of my space by noisy people, I too will bite my tongue.

Why? Because I have observed over the years that no-one else comments on it.

These days, I can see that no-one else sees it as a problem – they simply don’t have the same sensory overload and broken routine issues as me. Until it became clear how my Asperger’s affects me, I assumed that others too felt the same discomfort, but simply didn’t feel it polite to comment on it. As my social responses are primarily learned from others rather than being from original thinking, I’ve always towed what I think is the correct line. I say nothing, because that is the response of those around me. I bottle up the discomfort and negative emotions, just like Sophia.

Those of us who grew up with undiagnosed Asperger’s are cukoos in the nest of life. We mimic those around us to get by. If that means keeping quiet about situations that cause us discomfort, then that’s what we do, because that’s what those from whom we learned appeared to be doing.

Can I break this behaviour now that I’m aware of it? I think so. Ask me in a year.

The momentum of life

Life has a momentum to it.

Perhaps everyone’s life does. Raising a family, working for a promotion at work, striving towards long term goals. All of these give you a momentum in life.

The momentum I’m talking about here is much shorter term than any of these though – it’s the daily momentum of what I’m doing.

Let me explain:

I need to plan. If I don’t, I’m lost. My planning allows me to see what shape the day is going to take.

Once I’ve planned, my day starts to gain momentum. I know roughly where I’m going, and what I need to do to get there. I have my to-do list with me, and I know what I’m going to get done.

The problem comes for me when plans change. They often do, of course – that’s just the way life goes. Most people would take this in their stride – they would quickly rejig their mental plan of what they need to do, and then just get on with it. Not a biggie.

I find this difficult. My momentum makes me want to keep going along the path I’d previously decided upon. I struggle mentally to break the momentum. It takes time, and effort on my part.

You can almost see this in action, if you change my plans.

You’ll first see me annoyed. I will likely try to persuade you not to change the plan. I’ll make suggestions about how we could do your change of plan later.

If this fails, I’ll agree to your change of plan, and I’ll then go quiet. I’ll probably look down hearted. Inside I’ll be performing that mental struggle. It can take a while. During this time, I won’t be part of your change of plan. I may however be with you – driving to the supermarket to pick up groceries perhaps – but mentally I’m back down at home or work, trying to stop my train continuing down the track it was told to take this morning.

If you know me, you’ll probably notice the silence and lack of interraction. If you don’t, you probably won’t – I’ve learned enough over the years to at least partialy disguise what’s going on.