Diagnosed: Part 2

Where do I start?

Two weeks ago I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. That didn’t come as a surprise – I have after all been talking on this website for nearly eighteen months now in a matter-of-fact way as though it was already a done deal. The diagnosis left me feeling both shocked and relieved. Yes, shock. It’s all very well researching and then convincing yourself that the balance of evidence says you have Asperger’s, but its a very different thing to be told it by someone who is qualified to do so. There is now no room for doubt. I was right, and I no longer need to worry that terrible what if: What if I am wrong?

Wednesday 12th May 2010 wasn’t a life changing day for me – the life changing day was the now forgotten date back in autumn 2008 when my wife sowed the seed in my mind that I might have Asperger’s. May the 12th was however perhaps the start of a new chapter in my life. Diagnosis may mean I can move forward with confidence in my life. Diagnosis may mean that I can negotiate a better way of working. Diagnosis may mean that I can get some help in making my marriage and other relationships work a little more smoothly. Diagnosis may bring me some peace of mind. Maybe.

But all that is for the future. Right now, I still feel a little in limbo. Whilst I was told at the end of the assessment that I have Asperger’s, the report has yet to land on my door mat. And without that a little part of me still hasn’t accepted things, and I haven’t felt able to ask myself what next.

But I can’t put off writing any longer. My pressure cooker of internalised thoughts and feelings is likely to explode soon if I dont let some of it out. My anxiety is back too, and is not giving me an easy ride.

So. What happened on D day?

For a start, I took the day off work, despite my assessment not starting until 17:30. My thinking here was that if I went to work, then I’d either arrive at the assessment overly stimulated from work, or I’d just sit at my desk all day getting nothing done other than getting more and more anxious. My parents had been drafted in to collect the kids later in the day, and to put them to bed for us. Both knew about the appointment, but didn’t seem to want to mention it. I think the nearest we got was when discussing food for the evening. Might me and my wife want to go out for a meal when we get back? I doubted it, but suggested a takeaway. My mum commented that I might feel quite down when I got back, so perhaps takeway was the better option. Hmmmm. After a little reflection, this meant only one thing to me. That she though I was going to come back having been told I didn’t have AS. Oh well. I decided that I really needed to put that out of my mind.

So, instead of work, my wife and I went shopping for the day. There is of course a risk in this too – the large shopping centre we went to could easily sensorily overwhelm me just as much as work. We were lucky – with it being a week day, it was reasonably quiet, and we took our time, not rushing or feeling under any pressure to be anywhere.

As the afternoon progressed, I started to get more nervous, and less able to potter around the shops. The final half hour before we had to leave for the assessment went on forever. When we did leave, I drove. This again was a calculated move on my part – by driving, I had to concentrate on the roads and the other cars, leaving little brain capacity for nerves and anxiety. It worked, for the most part, but as we pulled up and parked in the church car park next door to the building where the assessment was taking place, the anxiety once more had room to express itself. I felt terrible.

The twenty minute wait for the assessment to start went on forever, and during this time, I found myself shaking and unable to focus on anything at all.

In complete contract, the next ninety minutes or so passed in a rushed blur. After an initial five minutes or so where I found it difficult to come up with the right words, I managed to relax, and Special Interest Number One of the last eighteen months or so was able to take the floor and ensure that I got my point of view across.

Ninety minutes. It’s not long to impart enough information to base a diagnosis on. Whilst various subjects were covered in enough detail, I ultimately left feeling that others weren’t covered, and in some ways that left me feeling cheated.

After the assessment, my wife was ushered in and asked a few questions, but the Prof had already made it clear that he’d reached a conclusion about my diagnosis.

And that diagnosis: Well, I have Asperger’s Syndrome. I sank into my chair when the Professor finally said it. Those words felt like they had weight. My feeling of relief was huge.

And then some more detail: I have particularly difficult issues with social interaction and theory of mind – I don’t read many nonverbal cues, and as I don’t have a good theory of mind about myself, I find it difficult to put myself in other people’s shoes. In addition, I clearly have many day-to-day problems caused by Dysexecutive Syndrome – or executive dysfunction as I’ve referred to it throughout this blog. The Professor likened my problems in this area to ADHD, although stressed that he didn’t think I had ADHD itself.
There are also some areas where I have less of a problem. I used a great deal of expression during the assessment, and was able to convey my point of view well. The professor also noted that I was very well aware of my own limitations, and had clearly made adjustments throughout my life to try and cope and work around them – long before I suspected I had AS.  These were all things, he said, that he didn’t see all that often in people with Asperger’s. The professor used an interesting phrase to describe this. He suggested that my Asperger’s was in some ways mild. He then went on to clarify this by saying that in many ways this made the life of the affected person more complicated and difficult, as they were far more aware that they were different, and they often saw the consequences of their differences and had to deal with that.

I understand where the Professor is coming from on this, but I was, and still am somewhat uncomfortable about his choice of language. I don’t like the use of the word mild, because I feel it conveys the wrong message. Not to me, as such, but to other people who don’t understand the condition well. I can understand and accept that I have difficult problems in some areas, and far less of a problem in other areas that encompass the AS definition. But try telling someone that you have Mild Asperger’s. It clouds the waters, and almost certainly makes the situation more confused – if its only mild then clearly it isn’t much of a problem, is it?

So there you go.

When we got home, my mother was keen to know the outcome. She eventually asked after haf an hour or so, and I told her very simply – I have Asperger’s. Clearly, the right response was difficult to find. She said that it had been obvious from my mood – I was elated, and that actually the important thing was that I made the most of things. Ummmm…. Thanks mum.

–

So, where next?

I’m not sure as yet. I’m hopeful that the arrival of the written report will act as a catalyst for moving things forward. Both my wife and I are likely to visit the Professor again for an hour of talking about what happens next. I think we both need to hear about the pros and cons of being more open to others about my diagnosis. My AS has clearly impacted on my work life in unexpected ways over the years, more often than not getting me into trouble or causing unnecessary friction. We also need to hear about what might help both of us going forward.

Would being open about my AS make things better or worse? Do you have any strategies that might make life more straight forward?

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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.

Peter Pan’s new coat

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.

Tools of the trade

In the front left pocket of my jeans is a pen. And my mobile phone. Oh, and a tiny little USB thumb drive with data for things I’m working on. That last item is a new addition in the last couple of months.

In the front right pocket of my jeans are all my coins, and some used tissues. I know. The tissues should really be in the bin. If I need to take my watch off – like when I bath the kids, for instance – it goes in that pocket too, despite me wearing it on my left wrist.

In the back right pocket of my jeans are receipts that I’ve not dealt with yet. The back left pocket of my jeans is always empty.

In my coat, the left hand inside pocket has my wallet, and my list book. The inside right pocket has any keys I happen to have with me.

Predictable.

Comfortable.

Of course, when I’m at work, the pen, the list book and my phone will all be in front of me on my work table – but that’s predictable too.

I’m fussy about the tools I use.

The pen is a Fisher Space Pen, in brushed chrome. I love its simple lines, its small size when shut, and the feel of the brushed metal in my hand. I can of course depend on it to write on anything too.

The list book is a Italian leather-bound lined CIAK Notebook. Its small enough to fit into my coat pocket, yet large enough to be useful. The paper is thick and a lovely cream colour. It is a pleasure to use.

I carry the pen and the book because I need a list to help me organise my day. The list tells a tale of predictability too.

Each day gets it’s own double page in the book.

At the top of right hand page, I write the date:

Wednesday 20090806

My head likes the logic of the date format  use, which has come from my life in IT. If you view the date as a number in its own right, then the number will always be bigger than it was yesterday. I always underline it too. This date format can have hours minutes and seconds added to it too without the incremental pattern breaking, though clearly this level of detail isn’t needed here.

Below the date is a blank line, and then a list of items that I need to do for work that day. I leave a space at the start of the line for a priority number that I can add later, and then I draw a little check box, and then write the task. I use a number of shorthand tricks:

□ #5437: @PC – What needed?
□ Call @TG – place order?
□ AHU4: Fault. Raise call?

At the bottom of the right hand page I write a letter to indicate which shift I am on at work, and then my actual start and end times. Below this I’ll note any time taken for lunch, and next to the time worked I’ll tot up the total for the day, when it’s time for me to go home:

L: 0945 – 1815    8h15m
15m lunch

Above this, I leave a blank line, and then write my list of tasks for the day that are non work related, back up the page towards the other set of tasks.

With my lists written, I can then prioritise. The priorities go before the checkbox, as I mentioned above. I use the following:

* 1 2 3

I hand draw the star as a five pointer, and it generally indicates something I really have to get done. You can guess how priorities 1 to 3 stack up after this.

Occasionally I draw a star with a circle round it. This is used rarely and indicates something that really really really needs to get done that day

I don’t always tackle the list in the order of priority I have assigned. They are my rules, so I can break them as much as I like too. Generally, if I have a 1 or 2 priority item that I know will only take a few minutes to complete, I’ll do that before I tackle a star item that I know will take longer. I have no hard and fast rules about whether work items should be tackled before non-work items.

When I complete an item, the check box for it gets a tick, and I feel a degree of satisfaction.

If some event of interest happens at work, that I might need to refer back to at a later date, I write it between the two lists on the right hand page.

As the day progresses, I’ll start to use the left hand page in the list book. This serves multiple purposes.

Firstly, starting at the bottom, and working up, I’ll list items I’ve spent:

□ Cash in +50
□ Lunch 4.23c
□ Tesco 78.45d -> 16 clothes + groceries

There’s that shorthand again. The ‘c’ or ‘d’ after the amount indicates cash or debit card, and I categorise how our money is spent (Hey – they are just more lists when it comes right down to it). Eventually this all feeds into Wesabe, where I track our spending habits. At that point, the check box will get a tick.

At the top of the left hand page, I’ll often add events happening that day:

* @1030: Team conf call
* Collect A from Nursery on way home

The rest of the page is used for whatever it is needed for. This could be work or non-work related notes, or more frequently sub lists where a work-related list item is broken down into smaller items, each with their own check boxes so I know what I’ve got done.

Weekends are of course rather simpler. There is just one list, and no work times to note.

So there you have it.

You know, until I actually wrote about it just now, I really wasn’t aware of just how much effort I’ve put into devising this system. If you’re not autistic then you’ll probably think I’m crazy to have thought about this so much. If you’re on the spectrum, then I hope that you’ll see just how much order it adds to my life, and can appreciate how much it helps me to get things done.

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!

The Mother of all Special Interests

Warning: Many of my articles may appear to be a bit unusual to those of you who don’t have an autism spectrum disorder. I do however usually expect those of you with an ASD to understand and empathise with that I’ve got to say, and I trust that you do. Be warned that this article may appear to be very left-field even to those of you who usually understand my work. The article is also rather long.

The following is all true and from the heart. I hope you can take it at face value.

I grew up in a family of mixed but unspoken religious views.

My father never spoke about his take on religion, and my mother went to the local Methodist church every Sunday. Until the age of eleven or so, my brother and I went too, and attended the Sunday School as well.

By the age of ten or eleven I was developing a strong sense of logic, one that has stayed with me ever since. I reached the conclusion at around that age that the bible was just a set of stories – the people mentioned had never existed, and that the church was playing a cruel trick on those who attended. I also decided that Sunday School was a lightly masked attempt at brain washing those who were too young to make up their own minds to become believers.

I told my mother about my thoughts, and following a brief argument I no longer attended church. I had made my own mind up, and logic told me that church wasn’t for me. Over the next few years I’d tell my school mates that I was an atheist if anything remotely like religion cropped up as a conversation.

Then, when I was fifteen, something happened that would change how I saw the world forever. I changed my views on religion and why we are here, and many other things besides.

You may be suspecting that I had something of a religious awakening, and in some ways it was – but at the same time it was something completely different.

This is the story behind what would turn out to be the biggest and most obsessive special interest of my life to this date, and the profound effects it has had on me.

When I was fifteen, I had an after-school newspaper delivery round. I’d pick up the local evening paper from the little newsagents a half mile from my house, and I’d spend forty five minutes or so wending my way back home delivering papers as I went. I’d done this for the previous couple of years, and could do the job pretty much with my eyes closed. I never did though – then as now I spent my time observing the world, seeing the patterns in every day things.

It was early autumn, and the evenings were drawing in. It was around 16:45 and still light – dusk was probably another hour away. I’d finished delivering the papers and was making my way up the little lane that led to our house. The road is single track and one way with the traffic flowing in the opposite direction to my up-hill walk, so I walked close to the side, near to the slightly ramshackle dry stone wall. As I passed the gate into the field on my left, something flew silently over my head, above the trees. Thirty seconds or so later I was passing the first of the houses on my left something caught my eye, and I looked up, whilst still walking.

The next five or six seconds would change my life forever.

What I saw made me stare wide eyed. I followed it, whilst still walking as it tracked across from the left of my view, over the park to my right and over the brow of the hill. I was agog, but not frightened. It was dark in colour, and cigar shaped. It had an intensely bright white light about half way along it that stayed on, and about half way through my sighting an intense red light came on towards the back of the object and then stayed on. Both lights had a strange single colour wavelength feel to them – much more like the colour you get from an LED than from a regular light. The object made no sound, and size-wise was equivalent to holding my thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart at arms-length.

I walked the remaining ninety seconds or so home, and sat down a little dazed. I was the first one home. What had I seen? We lived at that time about 20 miles away from one the UK’s large airports, and our house was over one of the regular approach paths to it. I saw planes every day, and they didn’t look like this, nor sound like it either. What’s more the object was flying at 90 degrees to the usual flight path, and felt to be flying much lower, although it’s impossible to judge the height of an object that is uniform in size and colour. Perhaps it was very small and flying low and fast, or maybe it was much bigger and flying slower. I couldn’t say then, and I can’t say now.

My mother arrived home some fifteen minutes later, and I made a decision about what I’d seen. “I’ve just seen a UFO”, I told her, and I explained what I’d seen. I don’t remember her reaction, or indeed my immediate thoughts and feeling from that point about it in detail.

What I can say is that my life took a new direction from that point onwards. I needed to know more. I took books out of the library about UFOs. I bought some books with my pocket money too. I read everything I could find. I joined the regional UFO group, and started getting and pouring over their amateur magazine.

In ways similar to my later discovery and dawn of understanding of Asperger’s, I started to see that I was far from alone in the sort of experience I had witnessed.

The group I’d joined had aspirations being UK wide, and they were publishing various case studies of famous (well in UFO lore at any rate) events. I spent my spare cash on buying lots of it, re-reading it over and over again.

Clearly, this had become in Asperger’s terms, a special interest. It was so much more than that though. It was obsessional. It was deeper than that even. Getting embroiled in a subject like this is in my book very similar to getting deeply into religion. You ask the same sorts of philosophical questions about where you come from, and just what your role in the universe is. Where did we come from? As a deep logical thinker and from a science background, this was a profound question to be asking.

And then there was the anxiety. This perhaps is the one feeling that you wouldn’t see coming. The more I read, the more I saw a hidden sinister side to things. I had a huge feeling that something big and organised was going on across the world, and that whilst it was understandable that the populace didn’t know about it, it seemed that perhaps the governments didn’t know it either. If they did, I got the impression they were powerless. That feeling not only made me hideously anxious at times, I also found it chilling, and at times terrifying. It felt like I was in on a big secret, and that no-one around me saw it.

Odd things happened. I attended two UFO conferences put on by the regional group that I’d joined. These proved to be strangely tense affairs, with people looking shiftily at each other for the whole day. One of the speakers mentioned that he was aware that there were undercover military people in the room. Another speaker’s presentation was ruined because their slides had been tampered with, rearranged into the wrong order. A previously working slide projector suddenly didn’t work when it was needed for the first time. All in all these conferences were strange.

And then there was the day when I was around 18, where I told my then girlfriend about my sighting. She went white, and started to tremble. She couldn’t immediately tell me why. Eventually, on another day she felt able to tell me. A couple of years previously she’d turned a corner on a road near her house and confronted a huge object hovering above the road. Despite not being good at reading non verbal signals, I could see she was terrified just recounting this to me. She said her memory of what happened next was hazy, and that she couldn’t tell me any more that day. Indeed she never chose to bring the subject up again. I can’t say that I blame her.

My obsession followed me to University when I was 19. As I’ve written elsewhere, I had trouble making friends at University, and I felt very disjointed from the usual university life. I received some counselling towards the end of my first year there, and as the obsession-lead anxiety was at times a big part of the problem, I once spent a whole hour of counselling just pouring out my knowledge and theories of UFOs to the counsellor. How very wonderfully, one-sidedly, Aspie.

Eventually the obsession waned. I think this probably happened once I left university, moved to London, got as job, and started living with my girlfriend. Perhaps I’d grown up a little. Perhaps I found new special interests that took it’s place. By the time this happened, UFOs had been my obsessional special interest for something like seven years. It had taken over my life at times, and had permeated pretty much every aspect of my life.

It’s never quite gone away. The fear and anxiety flares up from time to time. I repeated my hour-long monologue to another counsellor when I was being treated for depression in my final years in London. It cropped up again at bed time last night, which is why I’m writing this today. Last night I could feel the fear once more, and could hear my heart beating in my chest.

The reasons for it recurring, of course, is that I have no concrete answers. I may have spend huge amounts of time and effort trying to understand what my sighting meant, and what lay behind it, but I never did reach any conclusions that I had any way of proving.

Conclusions about UFOs are hard to come by. Many thousands of people see unidentified objects in the sky every year. Many of these are trained observers. There are a remarkably small number of similar shapes of object that come up time and again, and there are characteristics such as the lack of any noise from the object that are very commonly reported too. My logic tells me that I saw something real. Extrapolating that tells me that thousands of people a year also see real objects.

Do governments have a better picture of what is going on than I do? I suspect so, to a degree.

Were famous incidents such as the supposed Roswell crash actually UFO related? I have no way of knowing.  I’d put money on these objects having crashed somewhere at some time. But Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947? I don’t know.

Did I see something man-made and super secret? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Reports from the 1940′s talk of similar objects. I doubt very much we had the appropriate technology at that point in time.

Did the Dogon tribe from Mali get their thousands of years old folk lore that appears to rely on modern astronomy from extra terrestrials? I don’t know. I’ve read a book that suggests they did.

Were the stunning photos taken by Ed Walters in Gulf Breeze, Florida, in the late 1980s actually faked? I don’t know, but on the balance of probabilities, I suspect so.

Is the whole Majestic 12 thing for real? I don’t know. Could be. Might not be. People really do go to unimaginably long lengths to fake UFO-related material, and I’ve never understood the rationale behind that, so who knows. In the midsts of the obsession, the Majestic 12 documents seemed like a smoking gun. But was that just gullibility on my part?

I have, however, reached conclusions of sorts about God and my place in the universe.

I think life exists in many places in the vastness of space, and whilst I don’t believe in a God that took his time to create the Earth and everything on it, I can these days happily conclude there is some form of higher power at play. This may, as I tend to think,  spring from the physics of the universe itself, but I see no problem with someone else describing this as God, or Allah, or anything else for that matter. My place in things is here on earth at a wonderfully exciting point in human existence. I’m a tiny dot in a vast existence that stretches billions of miles in all directions, and that feels a good place to be.

What did I actually see that day half a life time ago? I don’t know.

But I did see something real, and it has shaped my life.