To Michelle Miller, chief social work officer for Edinburgh.
We are the local group of Asperger and high functioning autistic adults, ELAS. Our support for each other includes speaking up concerning life dangers and sharing awareness of them. We are a voice heard by other services, against any of us coming to harm, getting exploited or manipulated, in positions of vulnerability.
Hence, we are alarmed to hear that social work services now deny that it is their role or their power, to intervene against any party putting us in positions of vulnerable harm, when this is outside any services run by social work itself. You say this in your letter of Nov 27 to our member Maurice Frank.
In society broadly, it is commonly known and understood that exactly this is the purpose of social work's existence. It is common knowledge when support issues are discussed in the autistic community on the web, that social work is the party who you are entitled to expect a response from to these situations. Its function is to prevent harm coming to anyone in any vulnerable position, anywhere in society, by responding on the evidence whenever evidence of ill treatment is raised. It is immaterial who runs the place where it happens.
If this ceases to be the case, then we directly ask: how are any of us ever safe, committally for certain, from bullying or discrimination or any ill-treatment in attending any service that claims to be suitable for us? All Asperger and HFA adults are classed as vulnerable. We will be endangered, in all services, if there is not defined to be any local authority to complain to with a committal automatic duty, standing accountable directly to the merits of evidence in each case that arises. This does not require you to act as other organisations' internal complaint investigator, but simply to make them do that completely and properly not corruptly, and you to take action if they defend any distressing or discriminatory practices.
You stated in your letter that the council has no role thus. The local coordinator of Choose Life confirmed that the council most certainly does have a role, as when an organisation falls under mental health she identifies a Mr John Armstrong, "joint programme manger for mental health", as having a responsibility. Yet you wrote that the council has no role at all. Do you stand by denying his function? The public would be very alarmed to know that contrary to such factual evidence, social work denies there is any obligation by the council towards autistic adults being exposed to ill-treatment in any services run by other parties than the council itself. They will recognise it as an abdication of function.
This ethical emergency now exists, gives us a duty to let all aspies know they are potentially left unsafe in any service and always have those grounds to give against using any service, unless in reply you are committal not noncommittal that social work's popularly known role is automatic not discretionary.
Update: Anyone who reads our letter can see that it was asking for a position on the safety of all aspies in using services, not an answer to a personal case. Yet social work sent us a brush-off reply saying just that they can't answer on a personal case because of confidentiality. So there is some more to know about them, they are willing to waste a month testing if we are stupid. So we wrote back, repeating that the general position for all is what we are seeking.
From our minutes, Feb 14 meeting:
"Social Work Correspondence
Another reply has been received to ELAS letters expressing concern about the way some social workers deal with people on the autistic spectrum, but sadly it was vague and non-committal in its wording."
The one good thing we extracted from them was a recognition of needing to continue talking to about the personal case. Previously they had been trying not to talk at all, so it is progress when the fact of talking becomes their defence. That is an implied acknowledgement of the need to intervene, which can be cited in other cases too - if folks know of it.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Circulated from Norma Curran, Coordinator, Values Into Action Scotland.
Please circulate this to anyone who will benefit from receiving this information.
Very soon, people on Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance and 'incapacity related' Income Support will have to undergo the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) test. If they pass the test they will go onto Employment and Support Allowance.
If you are called for an assessment, it is important that you know as much about the Employment and Support Allowance as possible. Please click here to access information issued by the Department for Work and Pensions on Employment and Support Allowance and the Work Capability Assessment.
Kind Regards
Norma
We add new items to our website on a daily basis so don't forget to it check out at www.viascotland.org.uk and tell us what you think!!
Please circulate this to anyone who will benefit from receiving this information.
Very soon, people on Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance and 'incapacity related' Income Support will have to undergo the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) test. If they pass the test they will go onto Employment and Support Allowance.
If you are called for an assessment, it is important that you know as much about the Employment and Support Allowance as possible. Please click here to access information issued by the Department for Work and Pensions on Employment and Support Allowance and the Work Capability Assessment.
Kind Regards
Norma
We add new items to our website on a daily basis so don't forget to it check out at www.viascotland.org.uk and tell us what you think!!
Thursday, November 4, 2010
No Earth for the Meek to Inherit
How far to Betney Manor? I look at my map as again the windscreen wiper jams. Out I must get and fix it as the November rain buckets down on the Fens. A minor fault; but I am still 20 Km short of my destination. I squirt WD 40 into the innards of the motor and lo! The wiper goes back and forth noisily. So I resume my journey across the monotonous Fens and note changes at the crossroads where I have photographed my young daughter. How revolting this treeless landscape and how lucky I am to live in mountainous Avalonshire with its island-choked Pool where I sail my dinghy.
At last I see a sign for Betney Manor and there it is in a hillock maybe just five metres above the surrounding fields. It is a very imposing brick Georgian mansion with a Doric frontage and enormous iron gates adorned with a coat-of-arms bearing the likeness of a Norman knight on horseback. The Zakopane is so plebeian compared with the expensive cars in the drive and I reflect: this mansion is a full 10 Km from the nearest station. I would have been soaked to the skin if I had come by train and walked, fit man that I am, as a mist rises and night gathers.
Cocks crow; a wan sun shines from a milky blue sky; though dressed in my usual clothes of tweed jacket and cavalry twill trousers I am fit to meet any company as I go to the refectory and pause to comb my hair. My tie flaunts our Contributionist emblem; the outspread-winged Welsh Heraldic Dragon with glasses and bowler hat, as I am accosted by comely young ladies who say that they are research assistants at Cambridge University and I say that my name is John Alsop – see the tag on my lapel – I teach Geography at the Caediwpre Secure Special School where President Wearman’s sons are incarcerated for rape. Questions asked about their behaviour and I say that they are so disruptive that they have been keltied quite often. This is the only school in Britain where kelties are permitted and I have to say that they are elctroshockers which operate by piezoelectricity generated by the operator’s wrist.
Eager young men ask me about my Zakopane: the thriftiest car on the road but capable of just 90 KPH. It took me a whole day to drive from Charford, my home town in Avalonshire. Yes I know how Zakopanes can run off almost any combustible liquid including substances not talked about in front of ladies! And Polish engineers have developed a whole range of vehicles powered by Zymowski engines – combining internal combustion with steam power – that might power public transport or even airliners when oil supplies run out.
Distinguished Speaker after Distinguished Speaker on the rostrum: all are pessimistic about the future of Mankind and few have any remedies. Now I am called to give my presentation on Contributionist ethics and our proposed successor civilisation. I describe how my boss the illustrious Welshman Alan Moelwyn-Wright boosts the IQs of Caediwpre inmates by 20 points and they do Open University Courses but this is no guarantee that they will not reoffend upon release. Sadly so many do and Alan has to admit that the best he can do is teach lifeskills but he cannot turn fundamentally evil young men into law abiding citizens merely by teaching school subjects. I speak about our concept of the quality of life and show a film about the achievements of Friarshill School the crack school in Wales and perhaps Britain whose Headmaster is Alan’s son Bob.
Now I deal with Contributionist eugenics. I say, Earth cannot go on absorbing billions more people. There is bound to be a famine as the other speakers declare: In the ensuing chaos the infrastructure will collapse and survivors may not have the technology to rebuild civilisation on sustainable principles. We Avalonians have gone far to achieve that – but out electric cars have insufficient range to get from Avalonshire to the Fenlands. We consume about a third of the national average energy consumption; we recycle everything possible; we make clothes from nettle fabric; our orchards and market gardens feed us; and there’s a fish farm in the Pool of Avalon that supplies live fish to Caediwprenians who greatly benefit from a fish diet. You have seen our sons and daughters in action – taking part in adventure sports, the arts and demanding hobbies.
(A clip of a working model future solar airship in action followed by one of a slipsail cargo ship, then we see children doing geometric proofs on the beach at Gaer Rufenig, like Euclid himself would have done with measuring rods and enjoying themselves enormously then come clips of our twinned cities St Petersburg Munster and Avignon and finally a crowd of foreign children playing folk tunes in the market square at Romanbridge.) But even if we all adopted Contributionism habits the Americans and Chinese will still wreck the planet. I speak about Heimlerene which sterilises people and how 30c worth per head added to food like Mars Bars or Lucozade would sterilise everybody apart from graduates and those with IQs over 120. So engineering a population crash without killing a single soul.
“Great minds think alike” says Sir Samuel Hillelson the eminent biologist. “We want to implement precisely what you advocate Mr Alsop – but if word got out about the proceedings of this conference I fear that we would all be killed by religious extremists, Catholics Evangelicals and Muslims – and no government has the political clout to enforce out own eugenics programme which differs from your ideas in minor details. Yet the effort must be made. Are we and you the crowning glory of Evolution? We must grasp the nettle, and maybe by stealth, for the benefit of our descendants, put Heimlerene in staple foods otherwise there will be no Earth for the meek to inherit...”
At last I see a sign for Betney Manor and there it is in a hillock maybe just five metres above the surrounding fields. It is a very imposing brick Georgian mansion with a Doric frontage and enormous iron gates adorned with a coat-of-arms bearing the likeness of a Norman knight on horseback. The Zakopane is so plebeian compared with the expensive cars in the drive and I reflect: this mansion is a full 10 Km from the nearest station. I would have been soaked to the skin if I had come by train and walked, fit man that I am, as a mist rises and night gathers.
Cocks crow; a wan sun shines from a milky blue sky; though dressed in my usual clothes of tweed jacket and cavalry twill trousers I am fit to meet any company as I go to the refectory and pause to comb my hair. My tie flaunts our Contributionist emblem; the outspread-winged Welsh Heraldic Dragon with glasses and bowler hat, as I am accosted by comely young ladies who say that they are research assistants at Cambridge University and I say that my name is John Alsop – see the tag on my lapel – I teach Geography at the Caediwpre Secure Special School where President Wearman’s sons are incarcerated for rape. Questions asked about their behaviour and I say that they are so disruptive that they have been keltied quite often. This is the only school in Britain where kelties are permitted and I have to say that they are elctroshockers which operate by piezoelectricity generated by the operator’s wrist.
Eager young men ask me about my Zakopane: the thriftiest car on the road but capable of just 90 KPH. It took me a whole day to drive from Charford, my home town in Avalonshire. Yes I know how Zakopanes can run off almost any combustible liquid including substances not talked about in front of ladies! And Polish engineers have developed a whole range of vehicles powered by Zymowski engines – combining internal combustion with steam power – that might power public transport or even airliners when oil supplies run out.
Distinguished Speaker after Distinguished Speaker on the rostrum: all are pessimistic about the future of Mankind and few have any remedies. Now I am called to give my presentation on Contributionist ethics and our proposed successor civilisation. I describe how my boss the illustrious Welshman Alan Moelwyn-Wright boosts the IQs of Caediwpre inmates by 20 points and they do Open University Courses but this is no guarantee that they will not reoffend upon release. Sadly so many do and Alan has to admit that the best he can do is teach lifeskills but he cannot turn fundamentally evil young men into law abiding citizens merely by teaching school subjects. I speak about our concept of the quality of life and show a film about the achievements of Friarshill School the crack school in Wales and perhaps Britain whose Headmaster is Alan’s son Bob.
Now I deal with Contributionist eugenics. I say, Earth cannot go on absorbing billions more people. There is bound to be a famine as the other speakers declare: In the ensuing chaos the infrastructure will collapse and survivors may not have the technology to rebuild civilisation on sustainable principles. We Avalonians have gone far to achieve that – but out electric cars have insufficient range to get from Avalonshire to the Fenlands. We consume about a third of the national average energy consumption; we recycle everything possible; we make clothes from nettle fabric; our orchards and market gardens feed us; and there’s a fish farm in the Pool of Avalon that supplies live fish to Caediwprenians who greatly benefit from a fish diet. You have seen our sons and daughters in action – taking part in adventure sports, the arts and demanding hobbies.
(A clip of a working model future solar airship in action followed by one of a slipsail cargo ship, then we see children doing geometric proofs on the beach at Gaer Rufenig, like Euclid himself would have done with measuring rods and enjoying themselves enormously then come clips of our twinned cities St Petersburg Munster and Avignon and finally a crowd of foreign children playing folk tunes in the market square at Romanbridge.) But even if we all adopted Contributionism habits the Americans and Chinese will still wreck the planet. I speak about Heimlerene which sterilises people and how 30c worth per head added to food like Mars Bars or Lucozade would sterilise everybody apart from graduates and those with IQs over 120. So engineering a population crash without killing a single soul.
“Great minds think alike” says Sir Samuel Hillelson the eminent biologist. “We want to implement precisely what you advocate Mr Alsop – but if word got out about the proceedings of this conference I fear that we would all be killed by religious extremists, Catholics Evangelicals and Muslims – and no government has the political clout to enforce out own eugenics programme which differs from your ideas in minor details. Yet the effort must be made. Are we and you the crowning glory of Evolution? We must grasp the nettle, and maybe by stealth, for the benefit of our descendants, put Heimlerene in staple foods otherwise there will be no Earth for the meek to inherit...”
Friday, October 1, 2010
Bus again already !
Bus 841 doing service 41, a part route bus ending at Waverley, Sep 30. Driver announced the end of service and forced folks to get off, a stop before Waverley, at Frederick Street corner, and openly told questioners it was because he wanted his dinner.
Waverley means Waverley, Bridge or Steps, east end of Princes Street. Absolutely not a point west of the Mound.
Bus complaints, with all the local companies, have a very bad track record of them hiding behind various European rules for workers to claim they can't reveal, whether drivers who bully passengers actually have suffered commensurate and deterrent retribution.
This case cuts right through that corrupt princple. If a service ends early and folks are charged a further fare on the next bus, that is extortion of false fares. When you have a free pass, if you have to bleep it again on the next bus after an incident like this, then the driver's offence extorts the company a false second fare at public expense.
Hence, the company can either be publicly pilloried as extorting extra fares by not operating as billed, or else it must tell us quite specifically and committally that as a fact it is recovering the extra fare from the driver, as retribution, not from the state.
Valuable information on the disability discrimination law has been shared by the mental health campaign Vox. It requires accommodations to be made for all disability groups' needs in using ordinary facilities which they can use, like a bus. Under this, an accommodation that autistic spectrumites are entitled to, is that all information is to be taken literally, including the destination on the front of a bus. We can't be expected to guess culturally that a bus is not really going to where it says but to somewhere short of there. Hence, disability discrimination law requires all buses saying "Waverley" to actually go as far as Waverley Bridge or Steps. See.
Waverley means Waverley, Bridge or Steps, east end of Princes Street. Absolutely not a point west of the Mound.
Bus complaints, with all the local companies, have a very bad track record of them hiding behind various European rules for workers to claim they can't reveal, whether drivers who bully passengers actually have suffered commensurate and deterrent retribution.
This case cuts right through that corrupt princple. If a service ends early and folks are charged a further fare on the next bus, that is extortion of false fares. When you have a free pass, if you have to bleep it again on the next bus after an incident like this, then the driver's offence extorts the company a false second fare at public expense.
Hence, the company can either be publicly pilloried as extorting extra fares by not operating as billed, or else it must tell us quite specifically and committally that as a fact it is recovering the extra fare from the driver, as retribution, not from the state.
Valuable information on the disability discrimination law has been shared by the mental health campaign Vox. It requires accommodations to be made for all disability groups' needs in using ordinary facilities which they can use, like a bus. Under this, an accommodation that autistic spectrumites are entitled to, is that all information is to be taken literally, including the destination on the front of a bus. We can't be expected to guess culturally that a bus is not really going to where it says but to somewhere short of there. Hence, disability discrimination law requires all buses saying "Waverley" to actually go as far as Waverley Bridge or Steps. See.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Bus pass danger
If you have a concessionary bus pass, be alarmed and logically outraged at the danger involved in finding that the words printed on it may not be honoured.
A pass bears a date that it is "valid until." That means it is valid on the day concerned, that is the common usage of valid - valid until the day which is the last day of validity.
The scanners that read the passes when you get on the bus may not agree, and worst, they are not all following the same line everywhere. On the pass's last day, you can use it on First Bus, totally normally, travel miles from home, then find that Lothian Buses' scanners reject it and deem it as expired already.
What is most dangerous about this illegal mess, is that you are miles from home when this happens, as it did to me today on the way to work. You have begun your travel on a basis that the pass is okay. What if this happened at the other end of the country? What if you were coming home from holiday on the pass's last day?
Folks who are not getting a new pass will thus find themselves conned as to the oast day of the facility's availability. This will happen to folks who have a pass on grounds of DLA and whose level of DLA changes.
Most passholders, me included, are getting a new pass, and I was relieved to get my application accepted at the library 3 weeks ago after, when I tried at 6 weeks, getting told I had to wait until only 2 weeks, which would have been a kife-edge discomfort. But I have written here already about my strong view on the dangerous unworkability of needing to carry any physcial identfiier at all to entitle you to travel, because of what can happen, how massively your day can go wrong, if it gets lost or stolen which is not your fault. This is made a disability discrimination issue by our spectrum, in particular by ADHD and dyspraxia, which carry an increased risk of losing things. This as far as I am concerned already makes all need for physical tickets and passes an illegal medical discrimination. But obviously, the political world has not yet chosen to buy a message that makes such a radical change, never mind the danger that all public transport passengers are in at all times.
That is why I would have felt completely stupid and humiliated if I lost my new pass while still having the old one valid, it was wrong to choose to take that risk. Hence I chose instead to keep on using my old pass right up to its last day.
The scanners have never been necessary either. They are only there to count passengers for the company to claim back their fares. When bus passes began there were no scanners, it just worked by show Most pass users know how the scanners have periodic phases of unreliability, especially on Stagecoach. They cause frustrations and practical delaya at stops, and concerned baffled oldies find their scanners not resistering until several atempts.
Now, who is going to take responsibility for putting the system right urgently? Transport ministry, council office that issues passes, or Lothian Buses for having its scanners set wrong? Meanwhile this can happen to anyone any day, which is misleading hence illegal. We have written to the council office first. Intowork had been put to extra inconvenience to drive me to work.
The position now, is that the authorities can no longer answer, without by it acknowledging the safety case that passes and tickets must be totally abolished. All we need to effect a massive reform overdue by 2 centuries, is for you to take an interest in their answer and not run away from the issue's originality. Remember, these safety issues can happen to you, in any travel.
When you have a bus pass in recognition with special needs that is actually in recognition that coping with transport operators' self-interested demands on passengers and relating successfully to their staff can be difficult. Hence, the powers that be now stand asked directly: should folks with an acknowldged extra need and a communication diffculty look after our own safety when we travel. They can't answer no. See, that would be an open statement of englect of us and our safety. Don't take care of your own safety? The whole health and safety system and the whole law of negligence would collapse. Hence they have to answer yes, no alternative.
But in answering yes, to my reason for caring for my safety by continuing to use my old pass up to the last day - they acknowledge the fact that reliance on physical losable passes and tickets is unsafe. That makes it illegal and invalid, an acknowledged violation of safety, for them to allow tickets and passes and passports and any system at all of carried physical documents verifying your status, to continue to exist.
Maurice Frank
A pass bears a date that it is "valid until." That means it is valid on the day concerned, that is the common usage of valid - valid until the day which is the last day of validity.
The scanners that read the passes when you get on the bus may not agree, and worst, they are not all following the same line everywhere. On the pass's last day, you can use it on First Bus, totally normally, travel miles from home, then find that Lothian Buses' scanners reject it and deem it as expired already.
What is most dangerous about this illegal mess, is that you are miles from home when this happens, as it did to me today on the way to work. You have begun your travel on a basis that the pass is okay. What if this happened at the other end of the country? What if you were coming home from holiday on the pass's last day?
Folks who are not getting a new pass will thus find themselves conned as to the oast day of the facility's availability. This will happen to folks who have a pass on grounds of DLA and whose level of DLA changes.
Most passholders, me included, are getting a new pass, and I was relieved to get my application accepted at the library 3 weeks ago after, when I tried at 6 weeks, getting told I had to wait until only 2 weeks, which would have been a kife-edge discomfort. But I have written here already about my strong view on the dangerous unworkability of needing to carry any physcial identfiier at all to entitle you to travel, because of what can happen, how massively your day can go wrong, if it gets lost or stolen which is not your fault. This is made a disability discrimination issue by our spectrum, in particular by ADHD and dyspraxia, which carry an increased risk of losing things. This as far as I am concerned already makes all need for physical tickets and passes an illegal medical discrimination. But obviously, the political world has not yet chosen to buy a message that makes such a radical change, never mind the danger that all public transport passengers are in at all times.
That is why I would have felt completely stupid and humiliated if I lost my new pass while still having the old one valid, it was wrong to choose to take that risk. Hence I chose instead to keep on using my old pass right up to its last day.
The scanners have never been necessary either. They are only there to count passengers for the company to claim back their fares. When bus passes began there were no scanners, it just worked by show Most pass users know how the scanners have periodic phases of unreliability, especially on Stagecoach. They cause frustrations and practical delaya at stops, and concerned baffled oldies find their scanners not resistering until several atempts.
Now, who is going to take responsibility for putting the system right urgently? Transport ministry, council office that issues passes, or Lothian Buses for having its scanners set wrong? Meanwhile this can happen to anyone any day, which is misleading hence illegal. We have written to the council office first. Intowork had been put to extra inconvenience to drive me to work.
The position now, is that the authorities can no longer answer, without by it acknowledging the safety case that passes and tickets must be totally abolished. All we need to effect a massive reform overdue by 2 centuries, is for you to take an interest in their answer and not run away from the issue's originality. Remember, these safety issues can happen to you, in any travel.
When you have a bus pass in recognition with special needs that is actually in recognition that coping with transport operators' self-interested demands on passengers and relating successfully to their staff can be difficult. Hence, the powers that be now stand asked directly: should folks with an acknowldged extra need and a communication diffculty look after our own safety when we travel. They can't answer no. See, that would be an open statement of englect of us and our safety. Don't take care of your own safety? The whole health and safety system and the whole law of negligence would collapse. Hence they have to answer yes, no alternative.
But in answering yes, to my reason for caring for my safety by continuing to use my old pass up to the last day - they acknowledge the fact that reliance on physical losable passes and tickets is unsafe. That makes it illegal and invalid, an acknowledged violation of safety, for them to allow tickets and passes and passports and any system at all of carried physical documents verifying your status, to continue to exist.
Maurice Frank
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Advice Shop
The Advice Shop, on South Bridge, the council's so-called service for money problems, advertises in its own shop window that it's impartial. It's not impartial at all, and has now admitted the fact in the written minuted record of meetings hosted by social work about a complaint.
I have been fighting for years over a council tax appeal, which I repeat annually, which the council refuses to recognise as an appeal. This is obviously a money problem of malpractice - lodging council tax appeals is an entitlement enacted in law, and the council absolutely does not have the power it is claiming to exercise,. it does not have a power unilaterally to decide that any appeal should not be recognised as an appeal.
The Advice Shop will refuse to take up such a case or represent you. It is outside its powers, because it is a conflict of interest to pursue your fight against the position taken by the same council as pays their salaries. This they have openly said in answer to the complaint. How impartial is that?
But there is a deeper concern, for the ethics being shown to vulnerable groups, and specially to those with a communication problem. Advice Shop will not actually take this position of refusing until you complain against them through social work, and in my case it has taken as long as 2 years, from first contact, to reach this position. The type of case that Advice Shop now say they can't take on, at first oh yes they do take on. They take you on, on a false basis, but never actually engage with the council on behalf of your case. They try to manipulate you into giving in to what the council says. They keep sneaking that assumption into their advice, while declaring themselves not qualified to answer your reasons for holding that the council is wrong. If you stand by it and press them for a committal position on what you are saying, they will take a view against pursuing your conflict with the council's position, on the excuse of the worst-case legal risks, no matter how obviously the council's position is wrong, while continuing to refuse to take any position on the merits of your reasons for saying the council is wrong.
In effect this means they will side with the council, against you their client, and test your will to stand up to it. Then they will say, we have reached an impasse and you won't cooperate with our advice.
They won't do what they literally claim they will do. Indeed, at the time of accepting my case they gave me a form to sign to allow them to represent me, which would give them a blank cheque over what to do, and when I carefully added extra words to it to tie them only to uphold my case not retract it, they made pressurising noises and hand moves trying to stop me. I knew not to trust their agenda, from that moment on, after seeing them willing to try to make you sign things under pressure instead of you taking your time to scrutinise them first. This is a public help service towards folks in all sorts of vulnerable positions, doing this. Testing our ability to stand up to themselves, in the hour when we had come seeking support in standing up to the council!
I have established now, factually, through social work, the well foundedness of complaining of these practices. It is an ethically disturbing pattern of testing our vulnerability to manipulation in conflict with our own wishes.
I have been fighting for years over a council tax appeal, which I repeat annually, which the council refuses to recognise as an appeal. This is obviously a money problem of malpractice - lodging council tax appeals is an entitlement enacted in law, and the council absolutely does not have the power it is claiming to exercise,. it does not have a power unilaterally to decide that any appeal should not be recognised as an appeal.
The Advice Shop will refuse to take up such a case or represent you. It is outside its powers, because it is a conflict of interest to pursue your fight against the position taken by the same council as pays their salaries. This they have openly said in answer to the complaint. How impartial is that?
But there is a deeper concern, for the ethics being shown to vulnerable groups, and specially to those with a communication problem. Advice Shop will not actually take this position of refusing until you complain against them through social work, and in my case it has taken as long as 2 years, from first contact, to reach this position. The type of case that Advice Shop now say they can't take on, at first oh yes they do take on. They take you on, on a false basis, but never actually engage with the council on behalf of your case. They try to manipulate you into giving in to what the council says. They keep sneaking that assumption into their advice, while declaring themselves not qualified to answer your reasons for holding that the council is wrong. If you stand by it and press them for a committal position on what you are saying, they will take a view against pursuing your conflict with the council's position, on the excuse of the worst-case legal risks, no matter how obviously the council's position is wrong, while continuing to refuse to take any position on the merits of your reasons for saying the council is wrong.
In effect this means they will side with the council, against you their client, and test your will to stand up to it. Then they will say, we have reached an impasse and you won't cooperate with our advice.
They won't do what they literally claim they will do. Indeed, at the time of accepting my case they gave me a form to sign to allow them to represent me, which would give them a blank cheque over what to do, and when I carefully added extra words to it to tie them only to uphold my case not retract it, they made pressurising noises and hand moves trying to stop me. I knew not to trust their agenda, from that moment on, after seeing them willing to try to make you sign things under pressure instead of you taking your time to scrutinise them first. This is a public help service towards folks in all sorts of vulnerable positions, doing this. Testing our ability to stand up to themselves, in the hour when we had come seeking support in standing up to the council!
I have established now, factually, through social work, the well foundedness of complaining of these practices. It is an ethically disturbing pattern of testing our vulnerability to manipulation in conflict with our own wishes.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
University with Asperger's
My name is Brian Brodie. I am a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, where I read Business Studies (and, for the first three out of four years, Accountancy) from 1992 to 1996, and gained a Bachelor of Commerce degree. I have Asperger Syndrome, not picked up on or diagnosed until years later. At the time I was at EU there was little or no knowledge of Asperger’s and certainly no help or assistance for those with the condition in their life at university. Therefore, I’m writing as someone who went through university with undiagnosed Asperger’s about the experiences I had.
I studied Business Studies and Accountancy partly because of persuasion (and dissuasion from doing a subject of more interest to me) and partly because of indecision at the time as to my future career. My accommodation in Edinburgh in the first year was at Pollock Halls of Residence, and straight away I found I was experiencing problems fitting in to life at university both at the halls of residence and elsewhere. Initially I was socialising with a group which included people I knew from my high school, as well as some people I’d met at Pollock. I found myself coming under a lot of peer pressure to drink heavily like other students did (when at the time I was underage). I also had no idea how to socialise properly in a way that fitted in well with these groups. These difficulties led to me being rejected rather quickly by these groups, and becoming a loner within the university setting. In the four years after that I made virtually no friends, preferring to be alone anyway as I became very depressed and, unfortunately, disenchanted with the university environment.
Academically, I was not very well prepared for the different structure of study at university, compared to high school. It was difficult for me that things were a lot more unstructured. There were a number of lectures and tutorials per week but other than that, studying was a lot more independent. I soon found I was failing a lot of exams, needing to resit many, and so realised I needed to be doing a lot more study than I initially thought. I found it a struggle to study anyway, not only because the subject didn’t interest me very much, but also due to demotivation in both study life and wider university life. In spite of all that I pushed onwards and got my degree.
Social problems continued from the second year onwards as I had to move out of Pollock and start to share flats with other students. This was an extremely difficult thing for me to do. In the first flat I shared, I only lasted the first semester as the other flatmates felt I didn’t fit in and I was asked to leave. I then moved into a house with some other students (each having their own room) where I had some bad experiences of bullying from some of them. In the final two years I was in another shared flat where I somehow got through the two years living very separately from my flatmates. As I had not made friends at uni, it meant having to share flats with people who were previously unbeknown to me which did not help matters.
Since graduating, I have been in various jobs and I feel most of my working career has not gone as well as hoped, after getting a degree. Having Asperger’s has caused difficulties in the workplace and my jobs have tended to be insecure. I feel my degree in Business Studies isn’t commensurate with the jobs I’d have good potential in, however fortunately I am in a job now where my situation is a lot better and I'm a lot more stable.
I studied Business Studies and Accountancy partly because of persuasion (and dissuasion from doing a subject of more interest to me) and partly because of indecision at the time as to my future career. My accommodation in Edinburgh in the first year was at Pollock Halls of Residence, and straight away I found I was experiencing problems fitting in to life at university both at the halls of residence and elsewhere. Initially I was socialising with a group which included people I knew from my high school, as well as some people I’d met at Pollock. I found myself coming under a lot of peer pressure to drink heavily like other students did (when at the time I was underage). I also had no idea how to socialise properly in a way that fitted in well with these groups. These difficulties led to me being rejected rather quickly by these groups, and becoming a loner within the university setting. In the four years after that I made virtually no friends, preferring to be alone anyway as I became very depressed and, unfortunately, disenchanted with the university environment.
Academically, I was not very well prepared for the different structure of study at university, compared to high school. It was difficult for me that things were a lot more unstructured. There were a number of lectures and tutorials per week but other than that, studying was a lot more independent. I soon found I was failing a lot of exams, needing to resit many, and so realised I needed to be doing a lot more study than I initially thought. I found it a struggle to study anyway, not only because the subject didn’t interest me very much, but also due to demotivation in both study life and wider university life. In spite of all that I pushed onwards and got my degree.
Social problems continued from the second year onwards as I had to move out of Pollock and start to share flats with other students. This was an extremely difficult thing for me to do. In the first flat I shared, I only lasted the first semester as the other flatmates felt I didn’t fit in and I was asked to leave. I then moved into a house with some other students (each having their own room) where I had some bad experiences of bullying from some of them. In the final two years I was in another shared flat where I somehow got through the two years living very separately from my flatmates. As I had not made friends at uni, it meant having to share flats with people who were previously unbeknown to me which did not help matters.
Since graduating, I have been in various jobs and I feel most of my working career has not gone as well as hoped, after getting a degree. Having Asperger’s has caused difficulties in the workplace and my jobs have tended to be insecure. I feel my degree in Business Studies isn’t commensurate with the jobs I’d have good potential in, however fortunately I am in a job now where my situation is a lot better and I'm a lot more stable.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Fairest Maid of Graemesburgh
I step out of Graemesburgh Portgate station into the rain drenched streets of the city, and I am disoriented. I ask a woman with umbrella the way to Portgate and she points to the right. I go and there it is exactly as I remember it from my first ever visit. I pause to look at the city's coat-of-arms above the arch that is just wide enough to take a car and then on I go towards the Conference Hall with plenty of time for my engagement.
I had come here with a party of my fellow Glasgow University students but left them when they went into a raucous dive where pop music deafened me. I had on me a Purma camera and there in front of me is one of the old "vennels" between the houses giving on to a courtyard where just as forty years ago I see tubs of carnations jostling beside objects like old cartwheels. Beyond, the Graemeshire moors melt into the low scud brought on this unreasonable gale as I quicken my stride.
The Portgate is cobbles and half way along is a ruined chapel through whose arches I pointed the Purma and took timeless views of this ancient city founded by Admiral Alan de Graeme and running through my head are half remembered lines from the famous ballad of that name:
"Bold Alan de Graeme raise your standard once more!
Send forth your brave men from the Menteithshire shore
Past skerries and airds where waters flow deep
By verdant wide pastures where graze cattle and sheep"
In the coach there was Jenny Atchison bright and fair, brought up in Graemesburgh, that looks over the harbour from whence Alan de Graeme sailed with his flotilla to defeat Edward the Hammer's army at Castle Island in 1297. She regaled with us the history of her city and on the way back we sang that ballad with gusto. Whenever I hear it played in the streets of Wallaceburgh during the Arts Festivals I see Jenny as a little young lass with sparkling eyes and oh the magic of her voice. I wanted to marry her but I could never summon the courage to even ask her to accompany me on a Day for Two train trip to Inversnaid to linger by that burn immortalised by Gerald Manley Hopkins whose bust graces the station platform at Inversnaid.
I was so caught up with the momentum of my studies to ask girls to my lodgings in Byres Road where that dragon of a landlady Mrs Lenski would surely have thrown me out. I spotted Jenny in the refectory chatting to Roderick Beal captain of the Rugby Club and my heart sank. How DID Roderick win a place at university? All beef and not competent at driving his old Fiat Firenze which I knew for sure had brought about a string of drunken-driving convictions. I would bump into her from time to time in the Ronald Laing Building and oh whenever she spoke she mesmerised me!
But always a curtain would crash in my mind as I recalled the nude frolic at Brannockstow in 1953 wit my cousin Laura parading her breasts and something else. That led to such a shock but worse was to come a few weeks after when preoccupied with my disgrace. I forgot to look where I was going on my way to Corchester Grammar School and ended up under a lorry and losing my feet.
Then followed nigh on two years of agony before I attended Netherover Remedial School in the heart of Kent, and all the paradoxes which resulted from meeting Alan Moelwyn-Wright my honorary brother. I think, as I identify all the historic buildings in Portgate which I photographed with that Purma whilst Jenny and my fellow students listened to abominable racket and swigged the local beer.
It is far too wet to use the Pentax, and utterly pointless, too. For any more photographs of Graemesburgh will remind me so painfully of Jenny and what is missing from my life - a loving wife. Even Alan cannot extirpate the pain in my mind that has arisen out of the Brannockstow nude frolic and what happened at Hogganfield Park on the outskirts of Corchester where Provendermill Lane veers right, from the Manchester Road beside the lake and up and over a hillock and so to the Grammar School. I AM TO BLAME shouts the gale in Father's voice as I relive in my dreams the awakening in the hospital with both feet amputated.
When I graduated I moved back to Corchester where I had spent my primary school years before my father became Borough Treasurer of Whiteseaton, but a short cycle ride from where Alan had moved to at Abbotshythe in 1954. There I had a job as a photographic technician with Baddeleys who at one time were the leading specialists in unusual photographic techniques. All because I had presented samples of my work displayed every week in the University Refectory when I ran the camera club - so many indeed taken with that Purma! a British made camera of the 1940s with its pendulum-activated shutter! bought for a princely pound from the Glasgow street market! It was a thoroughly fulfilling career until Baddeleys went bust - when was that? 1974? or the hot summer of Seventy Five?
They allowed me to wear jodhpurs at Baddeleys. I am execrably uncomfortable in ordinary trousers and fearful that my false feet will slip off as they certainly did during a model railway exhibition in Manchester in 1985 and I was arraigned before the Officers of the Manchester Model Railway Club for that calamity. I see myself reflected in a mirror in that furniture shop - the fan twill Gripperbreeks locking the prostheses in place so I feel as normal as can be. Then I recall fleeting liaisons with Corchester girls and having to tell them why I dress as a horseman.
Lovemaking, like everything else has to take place with my breeches on. I will NOT allow anybody but Limb-Fitters or Doctors to see me with my breeches down. So when my brother barged into my bedroom at Lairigealt Cottage to see me with my remnants exposed, there was a terminal row. Now he is serving a prison sentence for assaulting equally handicapped Jonathan Seabright the electronics engineer whose appliances called Seabright Owls detect intruders in many neighbourhoods.
Lovemaking... Longing to hug Jenny Atchison... yet what father did to me - I was a sex-maniac, he insisted, so giving rise to the delusion that I would go mad and indecently assault women. And now I am past sixty how I hunger for a woman's caress - to be a young man again and take a lass as fair as Jenny up a lofty mountain! Still the rain teems down and my hat gets saturated and how far it is to the Conference Hall - up a flight of steps and oh is it the arthritis now affecting my knees...
This Sunday, I am feeling my dignity. But next Sunday if it is bright I shall be utterly along with nobody to say a word to all day long... and my loneliness will get the better of me unless it is so bucketing wet that I shall merely stretch my legs around Baxtermere.
I feel so envious of all men who married well, now with adult children to be proud of. I bump into the graduate offspring of fellow graduates and feel such an enormous pain... Dorothy Coates married Alastair Mackenzie for instance and their son Brian is a tall strapping lad who left the family's opulent home in Castle Stirrat to join Boeing in Seattle and marry an Oregon girl. Then John Brooks married Diane Spelding and both are teachers at Graemesburgh Academy... Peter Groves hit it off well with Ursula de Bruyere and HIS children live in a chateau down in Provence... WHO will buttonhole me in the foyer? HOW FAR NOW as I feel incipient CRAMP in my left thigh?
I was curious as all children are, about the workings of the human body. It was just as fascinating as the discovery of algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics and French in my first year at Corchester Grammar School. Why should my father's reprimand on that fateful morning so scar my soul that whenever I see a nubile girl I feel both the urge to cuddle and kiss and a fear beyond the limits of language - a sub-animal fear of being caged for life in a lunatic asylum? Absurdly, I might get electrocuted if ever I touched a girl - her body like the conductor rails of the line from Carkilty to Graemesburgh Portgate.
Old, weary and lonely with nobody to care for me in Carkilty near my birthplace. No grandchildren to be loyal to, no-one to give all of myself to - and bitterly envious of Alan who was almost as severely scathed as myself, for DEBAGGING ME in the dormitory at Netherover School and I FORGAVE HIM the following morning.
I hear THAT BALLAD being played in the foyer as my glasses mist up.
"Bold Alan de Graeme, raise your standard once more
Reclaim our wide realm by the Menteithshire shore!"
It HURTS, how it does, that melody I first heard when the future seemed bright when I was young. Now there is only the deepening darkening pit of lonely decrepitude and nobody to comfort me, NOBODY TO BE LOYAL TO! How I long to have won the hand of bright Jenny Atchison, the fairest maid of Graemesburgh....
David Seagrave, Dunfermline, August 2007
NOTES TO ACCOMPANY "THE FAIREST MAID OF GRAEMESBURGH"
Many listeners are charmed by my lyrical descriptions of apparently imaginary places but the explicit moral message of "The Fairest Maid of Graemesburgh" must not be obscured. Yes I challenge readers to identify two cities scrambled up to create Graemesburgh and they may be taken aback by the references to what Alan de Graeme did. The main point of the story is how the narrator was so scathed by the event at Brannockstow that he developed an inextirpable fear of going mad and indecently assaulting girls. Something rather similar happened to myself and I have written this story partly as a form of catharsis but paramountly to bring into the open the idea that people are SCARRED FOR LIFE by traumatic experiences with sexual elements.
No less a man than Alexander Neill was severely punished as was his sister for taking their clothes off and exploring their anatomical differences. This was one of the reasons why he founded Summerhill School. I need NOT give details how I was scathed by something rather like the Brannockstow event. I want to explore the mechanisms that give rise to my lifelong aversions to human contact and why I feel an acute revulsion for many people which is beyond the limits of language and how it and my own "Brannockstow" has poisoned my attempts to find a wife. Is it true that influential Christians in the corridors of power have suppressed research into the effects of sexual traumas upon people because the findings might shatter the dogmas at the core of organised religion? I must also deal with why I find "LOVE" repulsive as it means for me abject submission to my stupid parents' will and so to loss of dignity and self esteem. Yet I admit that at age 68 I am frequently aroused by "dolly-birds" and have a strongly repressed impulse to hug and kiss nubile girls, whereby a curtain crashes down in my mind. I must also discover why certain women remind me of piles of excrement, and at another level I find a quite alarming resemblance of schoolboys to ducklings or wildfowl. There are times when I cannot bear to look at people because at a pre-rational level they are unspeakably repulsive so I have to remove my glasses and so I am NEVER in eye-contact.
I wanted to read for a doctorate by doing research into my own aversion to people because there are surely quite a number of supremely compos mentis upright honourable people who are deeply ashamed of their irrational aversion to people and this has blighted their lives in the same way as my own. If I cannot enjoy a happy marriage because of the deep seated aversion for sexual intimacy brought about by MY "Brannockstow event" then I should strive to unravel the mechanism of the aversion in the hope that other fellow sufferers can overcome it. Surely it stands to reason that this dark side of our nature should be thoroughly investigated so that all the intensity and fear and superstition is dispelled and those so hurt by sexual matters of ANY kind can go forth in life able to enjoy happy marriages.
I most urgently await feedback.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, 15-1-2010.
=====================================================================================
There is a most pressing need for forums where people as scathed as myself can disclose every hurtful detail of sexual and other traumas. Mine was so intense that I am beset by a fear of going mad and indecently assaulting potential partners that persists to this day. I get erections every night and half awake I say sexual things, sometimes in French and German, like a line from Anouilh's play BECKER where the King says, "Je veux une fille" - "Get me a whore", and I have fantasies which Christians would burn me at the stake for disclosing. Had BROTHELS been as acceptable as Betting Shops in London in the 60s I would have used one. In Germany there are FLIRT CLUBS where nervous shy people can learn how to have sexual intimacy.
I had come here with a party of my fellow Glasgow University students but left them when they went into a raucous dive where pop music deafened me. I had on me a Purma camera and there in front of me is one of the old "vennels" between the houses giving on to a courtyard where just as forty years ago I see tubs of carnations jostling beside objects like old cartwheels. Beyond, the Graemeshire moors melt into the low scud brought on this unreasonable gale as I quicken my stride.
The Portgate is cobbles and half way along is a ruined chapel through whose arches I pointed the Purma and took timeless views of this ancient city founded by Admiral Alan de Graeme and running through my head are half remembered lines from the famous ballad of that name:
"Bold Alan de Graeme raise your standard once more!
Send forth your brave men from the Menteithshire shore
Past skerries and airds where waters flow deep
By verdant wide pastures where graze cattle and sheep"
In the coach there was Jenny Atchison bright and fair, brought up in Graemesburgh, that looks over the harbour from whence Alan de Graeme sailed with his flotilla to defeat Edward the Hammer's army at Castle Island in 1297. She regaled with us the history of her city and on the way back we sang that ballad with gusto. Whenever I hear it played in the streets of Wallaceburgh during the Arts Festivals I see Jenny as a little young lass with sparkling eyes and oh the magic of her voice. I wanted to marry her but I could never summon the courage to even ask her to accompany me on a Day for Two train trip to Inversnaid to linger by that burn immortalised by Gerald Manley Hopkins whose bust graces the station platform at Inversnaid.
I was so caught up with the momentum of my studies to ask girls to my lodgings in Byres Road where that dragon of a landlady Mrs Lenski would surely have thrown me out. I spotted Jenny in the refectory chatting to Roderick Beal captain of the Rugby Club and my heart sank. How DID Roderick win a place at university? All beef and not competent at driving his old Fiat Firenze which I knew for sure had brought about a string of drunken-driving convictions. I would bump into her from time to time in the Ronald Laing Building and oh whenever she spoke she mesmerised me!
But always a curtain would crash in my mind as I recalled the nude frolic at Brannockstow in 1953 wit my cousin Laura parading her breasts and something else. That led to such a shock but worse was to come a few weeks after when preoccupied with my disgrace. I forgot to look where I was going on my way to Corchester Grammar School and ended up under a lorry and losing my feet.
Then followed nigh on two years of agony before I attended Netherover Remedial School in the heart of Kent, and all the paradoxes which resulted from meeting Alan Moelwyn-Wright my honorary brother. I think, as I identify all the historic buildings in Portgate which I photographed with that Purma whilst Jenny and my fellow students listened to abominable racket and swigged the local beer.
It is far too wet to use the Pentax, and utterly pointless, too. For any more photographs of Graemesburgh will remind me so painfully of Jenny and what is missing from my life - a loving wife. Even Alan cannot extirpate the pain in my mind that has arisen out of the Brannockstow nude frolic and what happened at Hogganfield Park on the outskirts of Corchester where Provendermill Lane veers right, from the Manchester Road beside the lake and up and over a hillock and so to the Grammar School. I AM TO BLAME shouts the gale in Father's voice as I relive in my dreams the awakening in the hospital with both feet amputated.
When I graduated I moved back to Corchester where I had spent my primary school years before my father became Borough Treasurer of Whiteseaton, but a short cycle ride from where Alan had moved to at Abbotshythe in 1954. There I had a job as a photographic technician with Baddeleys who at one time were the leading specialists in unusual photographic techniques. All because I had presented samples of my work displayed every week in the University Refectory when I ran the camera club - so many indeed taken with that Purma! a British made camera of the 1940s with its pendulum-activated shutter! bought for a princely pound from the Glasgow street market! It was a thoroughly fulfilling career until Baddeleys went bust - when was that? 1974? or the hot summer of Seventy Five?
They allowed me to wear jodhpurs at Baddeleys. I am execrably uncomfortable in ordinary trousers and fearful that my false feet will slip off as they certainly did during a model railway exhibition in Manchester in 1985 and I was arraigned before the Officers of the Manchester Model Railway Club for that calamity. I see myself reflected in a mirror in that furniture shop - the fan twill Gripperbreeks locking the prostheses in place so I feel as normal as can be. Then I recall fleeting liaisons with Corchester girls and having to tell them why I dress as a horseman.
Lovemaking, like everything else has to take place with my breeches on. I will NOT allow anybody but Limb-Fitters or Doctors to see me with my breeches down. So when my brother barged into my bedroom at Lairigealt Cottage to see me with my remnants exposed, there was a terminal row. Now he is serving a prison sentence for assaulting equally handicapped Jonathan Seabright the electronics engineer whose appliances called Seabright Owls detect intruders in many neighbourhoods.
Lovemaking... Longing to hug Jenny Atchison... yet what father did to me - I was a sex-maniac, he insisted, so giving rise to the delusion that I would go mad and indecently assault women. And now I am past sixty how I hunger for a woman's caress - to be a young man again and take a lass as fair as Jenny up a lofty mountain! Still the rain teems down and my hat gets saturated and how far it is to the Conference Hall - up a flight of steps and oh is it the arthritis now affecting my knees...
This Sunday, I am feeling my dignity. But next Sunday if it is bright I shall be utterly along with nobody to say a word to all day long... and my loneliness will get the better of me unless it is so bucketing wet that I shall merely stretch my legs around Baxtermere.
I feel so envious of all men who married well, now with adult children to be proud of. I bump into the graduate offspring of fellow graduates and feel such an enormous pain... Dorothy Coates married Alastair Mackenzie for instance and their son Brian is a tall strapping lad who left the family's opulent home in Castle Stirrat to join Boeing in Seattle and marry an Oregon girl. Then John Brooks married Diane Spelding and both are teachers at Graemesburgh Academy... Peter Groves hit it off well with Ursula de Bruyere and HIS children live in a chateau down in Provence... WHO will buttonhole me in the foyer? HOW FAR NOW as I feel incipient CRAMP in my left thigh?
I was curious as all children are, about the workings of the human body. It was just as fascinating as the discovery of algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics and French in my first year at Corchester Grammar School. Why should my father's reprimand on that fateful morning so scar my soul that whenever I see a nubile girl I feel both the urge to cuddle and kiss and a fear beyond the limits of language - a sub-animal fear of being caged for life in a lunatic asylum? Absurdly, I might get electrocuted if ever I touched a girl - her body like the conductor rails of the line from Carkilty to Graemesburgh Portgate.
Old, weary and lonely with nobody to care for me in Carkilty near my birthplace. No grandchildren to be loyal to, no-one to give all of myself to - and bitterly envious of Alan who was almost as severely scathed as myself, for DEBAGGING ME in the dormitory at Netherover School and I FORGAVE HIM the following morning.
I hear THAT BALLAD being played in the foyer as my glasses mist up.
"Bold Alan de Graeme, raise your standard once more
Reclaim our wide realm by the Menteithshire shore!"
It HURTS, how it does, that melody I first heard when the future seemed bright when I was young. Now there is only the deepening darkening pit of lonely decrepitude and nobody to comfort me, NOBODY TO BE LOYAL TO! How I long to have won the hand of bright Jenny Atchison, the fairest maid of Graemesburgh....
David Seagrave, Dunfermline, August 2007
NOTES TO ACCOMPANY "THE FAIREST MAID OF GRAEMESBURGH"
Many listeners are charmed by my lyrical descriptions of apparently imaginary places but the explicit moral message of "The Fairest Maid of Graemesburgh" must not be obscured. Yes I challenge readers to identify two cities scrambled up to create Graemesburgh and they may be taken aback by the references to what Alan de Graeme did. The main point of the story is how the narrator was so scathed by the event at Brannockstow that he developed an inextirpable fear of going mad and indecently assaulting girls. Something rather similar happened to myself and I have written this story partly as a form of catharsis but paramountly to bring into the open the idea that people are SCARRED FOR LIFE by traumatic experiences with sexual elements.
No less a man than Alexander Neill was severely punished as was his sister for taking their clothes off and exploring their anatomical differences. This was one of the reasons why he founded Summerhill School. I need NOT give details how I was scathed by something rather like the Brannockstow event. I want to explore the mechanisms that give rise to my lifelong aversions to human contact and why I feel an acute revulsion for many people which is beyond the limits of language and how it and my own "Brannockstow" has poisoned my attempts to find a wife. Is it true that influential Christians in the corridors of power have suppressed research into the effects of sexual traumas upon people because the findings might shatter the dogmas at the core of organised religion? I must also deal with why I find "LOVE" repulsive as it means for me abject submission to my stupid parents' will and so to loss of dignity and self esteem. Yet I admit that at age 68 I am frequently aroused by "dolly-birds" and have a strongly repressed impulse to hug and kiss nubile girls, whereby a curtain crashes down in my mind. I must also discover why certain women remind me of piles of excrement, and at another level I find a quite alarming resemblance of schoolboys to ducklings or wildfowl. There are times when I cannot bear to look at people because at a pre-rational level they are unspeakably repulsive so I have to remove my glasses and so I am NEVER in eye-contact.
I wanted to read for a doctorate by doing research into my own aversion to people because there are surely quite a number of supremely compos mentis upright honourable people who are deeply ashamed of their irrational aversion to people and this has blighted their lives in the same way as my own. If I cannot enjoy a happy marriage because of the deep seated aversion for sexual intimacy brought about by MY "Brannockstow event" then I should strive to unravel the mechanism of the aversion in the hope that other fellow sufferers can overcome it. Surely it stands to reason that this dark side of our nature should be thoroughly investigated so that all the intensity and fear and superstition is dispelled and those so hurt by sexual matters of ANY kind can go forth in life able to enjoy happy marriages.
I most urgently await feedback.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, 15-1-2010.
=====================================================================================
There is a most pressing need for forums where people as scathed as myself can disclose every hurtful detail of sexual and other traumas. Mine was so intense that I am beset by a fear of going mad and indecently assaulting potential partners that persists to this day. I get erections every night and half awake I say sexual things, sometimes in French and German, like a line from Anouilh's play BECKER where the King says, "Je veux une fille" - "Get me a whore", and I have fantasies which Christians would burn me at the stake for disclosing. Had BROTHELS been as acceptable as Betting Shops in London in the 60s I would have used one. In Germany there are FLIRT CLUBS where nervous shy people can learn how to have sexual intimacy.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Vagabonde
The Filmhouse's season on French director Agnes Varda featured a particularly haunting moody film I had last seen 20 years before on Channel 4. Conversion to big screen intensity gave a terrific edge to that shaky feeling when you relive in full a distant memory. Vagabonde (also billed as Sans Toit Ni Loi, without roof or law) is about a young woman fleeing from all bonds with the society around her, and the emotional impact she makes before and by her death in a farm ditch. Compare watching it when the film was new and the story felt recent, to revisiting it now after so long, when the perspective is now even more moving, that the world has moved on without this character who it gave no place to and is oblivious to the dimmed trace that she ever lived. Just like life has been for how many millions of real folks who deserved better?
As nothing much has shifted in economic life, the story has not lost its contemporariness, save for the thought that it is about someone who lived before blogs. We are not told how serious is what Mona has run away from, only that she has chosen this aimless rural wandering, with just a backpack and a tent as possessions, over being a shorthand secretary. That is what makes her enigmatic, to the film characters she encounters. Can we who are not making the same choice, make sense of it? and of what our answer says about freedom and society? Mona finds nothing of value that lasts, in her journey, yet there are any number of reasons why she may be right to have fled from oppressive life options, that even knowing her fate we can't say she should have stuck with them.
She liberates for a moment a housebound old lady who is stuck having games of family respectability played around her. They get drunk together. But as for when chances arise for Mona to attach her life to those of any of the folks she meets, the practical questions never work out, and the moment is always lost. We are all drifting around in collision and clash and rivalry and trickery, when you find yourself with no niche amid those negative forces it becomes this impossible to create one yet guard your freedom too. There is a parallel with what happens to refugees.
Even the "counterculture" lets her down, but viewers with harsher down to earth minds might see it as her letting it down. A green philosopher-farmer takes her in and gives her some land, then throws her back out for failing to put the work into it, and calls her hut dirty too. So bloody what, how dare he, it's her own room? and the work is new to her, she needs room to find her pace. While preening his ego with the delusion that he was offering Mona help, he was power-tripping, insulting her, doing her emotional hurt and feeling good about himself at her expense.
This is an all too common pattern: autocratic help. It may epitomise how the counterculture failed, the same way as school and communism and Victorian parenting and psychiatry and the World Bank fail. The giver of help must force the results, loses the faculty of wanting to see that results might be a harder to attain than instantly, brings in ideals of their own to push onto the helped person, becomes a tyrant, takes away their freedom, their own being. It actually ruins the chance of attaining a practical success, it destroys. It's playing God: "I cast you out, a fugitive and a vagabond shall you be." My sympathies are totally with Mona in storming away from him feeling cheated. It sums up the world's failing of her and of millions of folks through history who it has given no niche of viable free life to. THEY ARE THE MARTYRS. Vagabonde lives this failiure of the world at its most intense, when suffered not from the state but from the nature of real people. It deeply offends fairness, that in his high handed sneer the jerk predicts Mona's fate correctly, but that his own treatment of her helps to cause it. How often does that happen? "Yah boo, you'll end up in some stigmatised lowlife state unless you live exactly as I say." It has been said too many times to children by adult controlling egos, and in mental health work.
Mona fits that emotionally egalitarian theme in the Old Testament, of unlikely figures getting called to a task sometimes beyond their own awareness - for perhaps she does achieve a purpose, just by bearing witness to her choice, helping the folks she meets to judge their own life choices with a deeper insight re fairness and ties. They recognise the dilemma just as the viewer does. At the level of practical comforts we who are not living like her may feel lucky for it, yet she is lucky not to be tied down as we often are, to fight prolonged life issues and quarrels. That may be what matters most to her, she may have good cause to feel lucky she has escaped that. It's swings and roundabouts, it is never assumable what is lucky or not in anyone's life.
Yet it seems a clear issue of luck that your martyrdom might happen at the wrong time. It is distressing to have to think and remember the likelihood that there have been unrecognised aspies of my age who got into states of collision with society that led to endings like Mona's in the film's era, which was in the dark ages before aspies emerged, and meant missing out on being in the scene now and all it means for scoring against past wrongs.
Those of us who have made a defining escape at some time in our life, but without it placing us on the streets, are very personally impacted by this question. Like my escape from my teachers, in the same year as Vagabonde was made, 1985: itself also haunting to look back at! I have the anti-school issue in my life, as an emotionally vital prolonged cause, I want the means to pursue it all the way, so I feel lucky that in a sedentary life I have the means. Mona might instead feel lucky not to have any such prolonged issue in her life, or emotional tie to its pursuit. Even when she dies in the ditch she may be relieved she has been sucessful in avoiding the burden of having a prolonged issue to cope with, which would have restricted her choice to march away from her unhappy working life. Maybe if she had been restricted by the emotional importance of other life issues already in progress, she would still just have strongly needed to escape. The threshold might or might not be higher, for we don't know what she escaped from.
Certainly if my escape from my teachers had resulted in a life and fate like Mona's, it would have been every bit as vital a matter of survival, still a million times worth doing. I affirm that from watching Vagabonde. Yet my avoidance of that fate also really matters. Since my first watching, at a hard economic time when my escape was still fairly recent and life not much rebuilt at all, time has let me advance it to a far more complete distance from everything about my teachers and make it clear to all, with successive acts of writing against their ideas. Time, like this, is exactly what Mona's path did not give her. Neither may it be what she needed, and you never want the stress for relying on it when it is still future, but without it, no chance for good surprises like the aspie scene's creation, to come along in your future. Another unsolvable dilemma there. It puts my escape experience, and anyone's, into this context of 2 alternative paths: the effort of long term struggle or the finality of quick martyrdom. Circumstances don't always give us the choice between them, they may lead us to one or the other, and that has to be the weight off our consciences at the hour of our death.
You see that when Mona is lying in the ditch in exhausted tears. Life eventually is just that. Not a place where anything good can be relied on. It is tempting to credit that scene as the meaning of life. Mona dies of living on her own terms, true to herself. Snooty respectable viewers will pounce to judgment against that, yet it is a far better fate than dying in a war for a state that rates ordinary lives expendable, or of an industrial disease after being a good worker who never went on strike, or by violence in a place where you chose to remain, or full of psychiatric drugs. It encapsulates the grounds for a gnostic disgust at this life. If we find ourselves with a better chance than Mona of extending our lives' duration, what does that mean, when it the chance aspect of it is so unfair? Life only has meaning when lived in a state of struggle against all its unfair aspects. Purpose lies in being identified personally with the struggle and with what you stand for, so that it becomes what you are remembered for, by as much of the world after your time as remembers you at all.
If Vagabonde is haunting because of this, then also because any aspie viewer can identify with any figure drifting on the margins, observing society critically and fearfully from the outside, not managing to connect lastingly with it. Mona is certainly not autistic, she is too easily able to hitch-hike and to ask for favours like refills of her water bottle, for that. But here is the amazing twist -not in the story but in real life. The actress who plays Mona is Sandrine Bonnaire, who has an autistic sister and much more recently made the angry documentary film Her Name Is Sabine, which we also saw at the Filmhouse as an Elas party, about how the mental health system drugged her and made her condition worse. Might this biological link to autism have enhanced her acting ability to portray outsidership and engimatic distance? It means looking at Vagabonde now in the eerie light of remembering having no idea of this, no knowledge yet of aspies or of being one, at the time of originally seeing it and feeling such a strong impact.
Maurice Frank
As nothing much has shifted in economic life, the story has not lost its contemporariness, save for the thought that it is about someone who lived before blogs. We are not told how serious is what Mona has run away from, only that she has chosen this aimless rural wandering, with just a backpack and a tent as possessions, over being a shorthand secretary. That is what makes her enigmatic, to the film characters she encounters. Can we who are not making the same choice, make sense of it? and of what our answer says about freedom and society? Mona finds nothing of value that lasts, in her journey, yet there are any number of reasons why she may be right to have fled from oppressive life options, that even knowing her fate we can't say she should have stuck with them.
She liberates for a moment a housebound old lady who is stuck having games of family respectability played around her. They get drunk together. But as for when chances arise for Mona to attach her life to those of any of the folks she meets, the practical questions never work out, and the moment is always lost. We are all drifting around in collision and clash and rivalry and trickery, when you find yourself with no niche amid those negative forces it becomes this impossible to create one yet guard your freedom too. There is a parallel with what happens to refugees.
Even the "counterculture" lets her down, but viewers with harsher down to earth minds might see it as her letting it down. A green philosopher-farmer takes her in and gives her some land, then throws her back out for failing to put the work into it, and calls her hut dirty too. So bloody what, how dare he, it's her own room? and the work is new to her, she needs room to find her pace. While preening his ego with the delusion that he was offering Mona help, he was power-tripping, insulting her, doing her emotional hurt and feeling good about himself at her expense.
This is an all too common pattern: autocratic help. It may epitomise how the counterculture failed, the same way as school and communism and Victorian parenting and psychiatry and the World Bank fail. The giver of help must force the results, loses the faculty of wanting to see that results might be a harder to attain than instantly, brings in ideals of their own to push onto the helped person, becomes a tyrant, takes away their freedom, their own being. It actually ruins the chance of attaining a practical success, it destroys. It's playing God: "I cast you out, a fugitive and a vagabond shall you be." My sympathies are totally with Mona in storming away from him feeling cheated. It sums up the world's failing of her and of millions of folks through history who it has given no niche of viable free life to. THEY ARE THE MARTYRS. Vagabonde lives this failiure of the world at its most intense, when suffered not from the state but from the nature of real people. It deeply offends fairness, that in his high handed sneer the jerk predicts Mona's fate correctly, but that his own treatment of her helps to cause it. How often does that happen? "Yah boo, you'll end up in some stigmatised lowlife state unless you live exactly as I say." It has been said too many times to children by adult controlling egos, and in mental health work.
Mona fits that emotionally egalitarian theme in the Old Testament, of unlikely figures getting called to a task sometimes beyond their own awareness - for perhaps she does achieve a purpose, just by bearing witness to her choice, helping the folks she meets to judge their own life choices with a deeper insight re fairness and ties. They recognise the dilemma just as the viewer does. At the level of practical comforts we who are not living like her may feel lucky for it, yet she is lucky not to be tied down as we often are, to fight prolonged life issues and quarrels. That may be what matters most to her, she may have good cause to feel lucky she has escaped that. It's swings and roundabouts, it is never assumable what is lucky or not in anyone's life.
Yet it seems a clear issue of luck that your martyrdom might happen at the wrong time. It is distressing to have to think and remember the likelihood that there have been unrecognised aspies of my age who got into states of collision with society that led to endings like Mona's in the film's era, which was in the dark ages before aspies emerged, and meant missing out on being in the scene now and all it means for scoring against past wrongs.
Those of us who have made a defining escape at some time in our life, but without it placing us on the streets, are very personally impacted by this question. Like my escape from my teachers, in the same year as Vagabonde was made, 1985: itself also haunting to look back at! I have the anti-school issue in my life, as an emotionally vital prolonged cause, I want the means to pursue it all the way, so I feel lucky that in a sedentary life I have the means. Mona might instead feel lucky not to have any such prolonged issue in her life, or emotional tie to its pursuit. Even when she dies in the ditch she may be relieved she has been sucessful in avoiding the burden of having a prolonged issue to cope with, which would have restricted her choice to march away from her unhappy working life. Maybe if she had been restricted by the emotional importance of other life issues already in progress, she would still just have strongly needed to escape. The threshold might or might not be higher, for we don't know what she escaped from.
Certainly if my escape from my teachers had resulted in a life and fate like Mona's, it would have been every bit as vital a matter of survival, still a million times worth doing. I affirm that from watching Vagabonde. Yet my avoidance of that fate also really matters. Since my first watching, at a hard economic time when my escape was still fairly recent and life not much rebuilt at all, time has let me advance it to a far more complete distance from everything about my teachers and make it clear to all, with successive acts of writing against their ideas. Time, like this, is exactly what Mona's path did not give her. Neither may it be what she needed, and you never want the stress for relying on it when it is still future, but without it, no chance for good surprises like the aspie scene's creation, to come along in your future. Another unsolvable dilemma there. It puts my escape experience, and anyone's, into this context of 2 alternative paths: the effort of long term struggle or the finality of quick martyrdom. Circumstances don't always give us the choice between them, they may lead us to one or the other, and that has to be the weight off our consciences at the hour of our death.
You see that when Mona is lying in the ditch in exhausted tears. Life eventually is just that. Not a place where anything good can be relied on. It is tempting to credit that scene as the meaning of life. Mona dies of living on her own terms, true to herself. Snooty respectable viewers will pounce to judgment against that, yet it is a far better fate than dying in a war for a state that rates ordinary lives expendable, or of an industrial disease after being a good worker who never went on strike, or by violence in a place where you chose to remain, or full of psychiatric drugs. It encapsulates the grounds for a gnostic disgust at this life. If we find ourselves with a better chance than Mona of extending our lives' duration, what does that mean, when it the chance aspect of it is so unfair? Life only has meaning when lived in a state of struggle against all its unfair aspects. Purpose lies in being identified personally with the struggle and with what you stand for, so that it becomes what you are remembered for, by as much of the world after your time as remembers you at all.
If Vagabonde is haunting because of this, then also because any aspie viewer can identify with any figure drifting on the margins, observing society critically and fearfully from the outside, not managing to connect lastingly with it. Mona is certainly not autistic, she is too easily able to hitch-hike and to ask for favours like refills of her water bottle, for that. But here is the amazing twist -not in the story but in real life. The actress who plays Mona is Sandrine Bonnaire, who has an autistic sister and much more recently made the angry documentary film Her Name Is Sabine, which we also saw at the Filmhouse as an Elas party, about how the mental health system drugged her and made her condition worse. Might this biological link to autism have enhanced her acting ability to portray outsidership and engimatic distance? It means looking at Vagabonde now in the eerie light of remembering having no idea of this, no knowledge yet of aspies or of being one, at the time of originally seeing it and feeling such a strong impact.
Maurice Frank
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
voting hung
Which kind of economy would you prefer us to have?
Germany: Largest economy in Europe, already out of recession, hung parliament since 1961.
Greece: Bankrupt, draconian cuts causing civil unrest, electoral system designed to prevent hung parliaments.
The question comes from Unlock Democracy.
There is a Conundrum Farm near Berwick On Tweed, adjacent to the border. Here's the puzzle. Scotland, hung parliament since 1999, England, maybe having a last minute panic against it. When we went to Berwick, the grass and the road, and further away the shops, looked the same both sides of the line.
I want an economy where minorities' needs have to be listened to, around what type of jobs and education we can cope with. So that some care is taken to make it work out right, to society's gain. Hung or nearly hung parliament is best for pushing these concerns.
Polling day: I'm annoyed to hear 2 workmates today saying they missed the registering deadline and so they think they can't vote. This link shows they can still vote at their former addresses: http://www.runnymede.gov.uk/portal/site/elections/menuitem.253bb9aafce9ffd18bfbfb10af8ca028/
and they wouldn't believe it. They thought they couldn't vote. When one is keenly supporting the same side as me, too: grrr. The way the deadline for registering has been publicised or not, too much at the last minute, has not been clear enough with enough advance notice for all the folks it would catch, that is an item of democratic deficit, even for NTs, and it could be even more so for folks who take messages literally. Will aspies, except the ones who are really keen on politics, remember when they move home, or when an election is called, to check on their voter registration? When the system for doing that, replacing the old reliance on the annual canvass, is fairly new? There should be a message given out to do it, every time anyone registers a change of address.
Results day: I think these concerns about the clarity of messages to voters have been borne out shockingly by all these stories from the English cities of voters getting stuck in long queues and shut out at 10 o'clock and missing their chance. Just as passionately unfair to them as to all the 17 year olds who are emotionally abused by missing their vote by very short margins of age. You can imagine an aspie voter faithfully taking literally the public information that they can turn up any time before 10 o'clock and vote. Any contrary conclusion would have to be reached in an unwritten way.
I fear all unforseen events that can happen during a day to knock out your schedule, and how big the hurt would be of losing your vote because of a disrupted day. So I vote as early as possible. First thing.
Germany: Largest economy in Europe, already out of recession, hung parliament since 1961.
Greece: Bankrupt, draconian cuts causing civil unrest, electoral system designed to prevent hung parliaments.
The question comes from Unlock Democracy.
There is a Conundrum Farm near Berwick On Tweed, adjacent to the border. Here's the puzzle. Scotland, hung parliament since 1999, England, maybe having a last minute panic against it. When we went to Berwick, the grass and the road, and further away the shops, looked the same both sides of the line.
I want an economy where minorities' needs have to be listened to, around what type of jobs and education we can cope with. So that some care is taken to make it work out right, to society's gain. Hung or nearly hung parliament is best for pushing these concerns.
Polling day: I'm annoyed to hear 2 workmates today saying they missed the registering deadline and so they think they can't vote. This link shows they can still vote at their former addresses: http://www.runnymede.gov.uk/portal/site/elections/menuitem.253bb9aafce9ffd18bfbfb10af8ca028/
and they wouldn't believe it. They thought they couldn't vote. When one is keenly supporting the same side as me, too: grrr. The way the deadline for registering has been publicised or not, too much at the last minute, has not been clear enough with enough advance notice for all the folks it would catch, that is an item of democratic deficit, even for NTs, and it could be even more so for folks who take messages literally. Will aspies, except the ones who are really keen on politics, remember when they move home, or when an election is called, to check on their voter registration? When the system for doing that, replacing the old reliance on the annual canvass, is fairly new? There should be a message given out to do it, every time anyone registers a change of address.
Results day: I think these concerns about the clarity of messages to voters have been borne out shockingly by all these stories from the English cities of voters getting stuck in long queues and shut out at 10 o'clock and missing their chance. Just as passionately unfair to them as to all the 17 year olds who are emotionally abused by missing their vote by very short margins of age. You can imagine an aspie voter faithfully taking literally the public information that they can turn up any time before 10 o'clock and vote. Any contrary conclusion would have to be reached in an unwritten way.
I fear all unforseen events that can happen during a day to knock out your schedule, and how big the hurt would be of losing your vote because of a disrupted day. So I vote as early as possible. First thing.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Local campaign on compulsory treatment
Aspies may have past experiences and/or future worries with the mental health system. We have contact with it for getting diagnoses, and some folks have ongoing contact with it over coping issues or anxiety or depression. We may have had aspie life problems grouped under the mental health label in the past, or be dealing with services where there is still an overlap.
So we are concerned with the safety of our civil liberties, and the fact that aspieness is not a mental illness and aspies are still ordinary citizens. We must be on guard against any reading of mental health issues into what are actually aspie items, and any impulse to turn them into grounds for authoritarian interventions by the mental health system.
Edinburgh Users' Forum, which is part of the local collective advocacy for mental health, is doing a local campaign on the problems arising in compulsory treatment or the threat of it. Whether interventions were unjust, the effect of being threatened with them or actually suffering them, the practicalities observed by the system when making an intervention, and whether it was avoidably frightening. They are looking for personal stories to draw info from.
So if the mental health system features as an issue in either your present or your past, please respond at the following link...
www.surveymonkey.com/s/7CTRGL2
... to speak out about it.
Even if you have not experienced anything to do with compulsory treatment, but just you have made or wanted to make an "Advance Statement", like a living will that will apply if it ever happens, you can still valuably respond. They want to know about this too. Advance Statements were introduced in 2005 but folks are still finding it difficult or confusing to get information about them.
So we are concerned with the safety of our civil liberties, and the fact that aspieness is not a mental illness and aspies are still ordinary citizens. We must be on guard against any reading of mental health issues into what are actually aspie items, and any impulse to turn them into grounds for authoritarian interventions by the mental health system.
Edinburgh Users' Forum, which is part of the local collective advocacy for mental health, is doing a local campaign on the problems arising in compulsory treatment or the threat of it. Whether interventions were unjust, the effect of being threatened with them or actually suffering them, the practicalities observed by the system when making an intervention, and whether it was avoidably frightening. They are looking for personal stories to draw info from.
So if the mental health system features as an issue in either your present or your past, please respond at the following link...
www.surveymonkey.com/s/7CTRGL2
... to speak out about it.
Even if you have not experienced anything to do with compulsory treatment, but just you have made or wanted to make an "Advance Statement", like a living will that will apply if it ever happens, you can still valuably respond. They want to know about this too. Advance Statements were introduced in 2005 but folks are still finding it difficult or confusing to get information about them.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Contributionism
This is an article written by David Seagrave about Contributionism, which has appeared in the publication Asperger United.
Contributionism: a psychic lifebelt?
I was diagnosed with AS at age 62. As early as age 9, in 1950, I saw a yawning disparity between my parents' religion and the world I was growing into. My parents practised Thomas-the-Tank-Engine Christianity - that is, Christian dogma at a reading age of 7. My short story Saint James the Less has the boy of 10 meet the man I was to become in 1984.
In 1953, I was dared to commit pranks with a sexual content and I was expelled. This inflicted inextirpable irrational guilt which was greatly worsened by chronic unemployment. My father made me out to be flawed from head to toe. My very name stank of abject ignominy. I was sent to Red Hill Remedial School which moulded my character.
Following a narrow escape from a railway accident I had a major row with my father who insisted that God had contrived me to miss the doomed 7:43 from Hastings that was preordained to crash at Hither Green to warn the world that He is in charge. I was so sickened by this claptrap that I should repent and attend Church regularly and go to bed at 9pm sharp! So I created a plausible myth about Alan, aka the Socrates of Charford.
Alan may be the pseudonym of a real old Redhillian. He dares to invent a better code of behaviour than Christian morality after he too misses that 7:43 train in 1967. He too was taught to question the wisdom of our elders, so his brainchild, Contributionism, amounts to a moral Highway Code as logical as arithmetic.
Contributionism incorporates de Chardin's idea that humans are cells in God's brain, so it is possible definable as a religion. In also incorporating the Pelagian heresy, that we do not need to pray to God, and the concept of reincarnation in parallel universes, it is arrant heresy to Christians and has landed me in trouble for expounding its tenets.
When I took up climbing lofty mountains, I underwent a metamorphosis which I describe in many of my literary works. I also underwent convulsive paradigm shifts at Red Hill. When I was maimed I had to redefine myself and a decisive moment was the ascent of Cader Idris with false leg. I call this change of life-perspective "growing dragon's wings". All of us can view society from aloft, so we see through the myths, lies and half-truths forced on us by the people in power.
I would earnestly wish to liberate Neil and all the others, who were squashed in the name of God, by taking them on excursions to the wild beauty in Fife, and teaching them my hobbies. As a young man living in London, every Sunday I went on hikes along then-just-closed railways where I would melt into the landscape and unravel my mind.
Following an assault in my home, I am so traumatised that I want to move to a quiet cathedral city environment, perhaps Dorchester, there to set up exactly the supportive community which Alan operates. If I was to set up a supportive community at Prince Charles's eco-town of Poundbury near Dorchester many Aspies could reach me from London and nearby. Then at last I could play Plato to Alan's Socrates and provide a psychic lifebelt to all.
Contributionism: a psychic lifebelt?
I was diagnosed with AS at age 62. As early as age 9, in 1950, I saw a yawning disparity between my parents' religion and the world I was growing into. My parents practised Thomas-the-Tank-Engine Christianity - that is, Christian dogma at a reading age of 7. My short story Saint James the Less has the boy of 10 meet the man I was to become in 1984.
In 1953, I was dared to commit pranks with a sexual content and I was expelled. This inflicted inextirpable irrational guilt which was greatly worsened by chronic unemployment. My father made me out to be flawed from head to toe. My very name stank of abject ignominy. I was sent to Red Hill Remedial School which moulded my character.
Following a narrow escape from a railway accident I had a major row with my father who insisted that God had contrived me to miss the doomed 7:43 from Hastings that was preordained to crash at Hither Green to warn the world that He is in charge. I was so sickened by this claptrap that I should repent and attend Church regularly and go to bed at 9pm sharp! So I created a plausible myth about Alan, aka the Socrates of Charford.
Alan may be the pseudonym of a real old Redhillian. He dares to invent a better code of behaviour than Christian morality after he too misses that 7:43 train in 1967. He too was taught to question the wisdom of our elders, so his brainchild, Contributionism, amounts to a moral Highway Code as logical as arithmetic.
Contributionism incorporates de Chardin's idea that humans are cells in God's brain, so it is possible definable as a religion. In also incorporating the Pelagian heresy, that we do not need to pray to God, and the concept of reincarnation in parallel universes, it is arrant heresy to Christians and has landed me in trouble for expounding its tenets.
When I took up climbing lofty mountains, I underwent a metamorphosis which I describe in many of my literary works. I also underwent convulsive paradigm shifts at Red Hill. When I was maimed I had to redefine myself and a decisive moment was the ascent of Cader Idris with false leg. I call this change of life-perspective "growing dragon's wings". All of us can view society from aloft, so we see through the myths, lies and half-truths forced on us by the people in power.
I would earnestly wish to liberate Neil and all the others, who were squashed in the name of God, by taking them on excursions to the wild beauty in Fife, and teaching them my hobbies. As a young man living in London, every Sunday I went on hikes along then-just-closed railways where I would melt into the landscape and unravel my mind.
Following an assault in my home, I am so traumatised that I want to move to a quiet cathedral city environment, perhaps Dorchester, there to set up exactly the supportive community which Alan operates. If I was to set up a supportive community at Prince Charles's eco-town of Poundbury near Dorchester many Aspies could reach me from London and nearby. Then at last I could play Plato to Alan's Socrates and provide a psychic lifebelt to all.
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