Edinburgh Asperger's

Getting your classic Yahoo mail back

2012-01-14T15:34:00.003Z

Anyone who has the "upgrade" version of Yahoo email and has found it total rubbish, here is a way to change it back. The upgrade version is full of difficulties the old did not have, you can't backspace or else you just have to put your password back in, and can't delete drafts without getting a crazy message "one of the drafts you are trying to delete is open. Please close it " - and what the hell do open and closed mean? There is no explanation of that from Yahoo.

Go here: help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/ymail/context/migrationv2.html

When the page opens---scroll down about midway until you see this---"What if I don't want to upgrade to the newest version of Yahoo! Mail"?----If you do not want to upgrade, please "click here" to use Yahoo! Mail Classic.
("click here" is a blue link). Return to Classic is immediate and permanent.

This came from here answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AgLeOawNBx_FJd7AqN2xgXcD.Bd.;_ylv=3?qid=20120113110800AAOha2E fantastic how many folks will be grateful for this answer. As written there, the New "Improved'' (sic) Mail is very buggy, unstable & a total pain in the butt. There are literally thousands & thousands of users complaining they can't use their mail like they used to.

stressing me

2012-01-06T16:04:00.004Z

In the news today a compensation award for stress for a teacher who suffered a ridiculous workload. Resulting in a radio Scotland phone-in this morning on teachers' work conditions and stress. I failed to get mentioned on it that the media has regularly shown interest in overstressing of teachers stress and none at all in overstressing of their students. Never have I heard a phone-in on that.

It's now hitting 30 years since I was overwhelmed by a ridiculous workload at school, and I never got any chance to seek a compensation award through any industrial injury type of route. Employees get that, school students don't. The system assumes their abilities can be decided for them, and they are not free to walk out of the situation if it becomes impossible as it did for me. It is a lot harder and riskier a prospect for the mishandled school student who has left school with consequently no prospects, to simply sue, and besides, crises at school bring in the teenage mental health systems, who themselves can take sharply against you if you resist getting bossed around by them just as badly as by your school. The student becomes a mental health issue, with all that means for civil status, because of their teachers' actions which are not the student's fault. Then they are not going to be supportive witnesses for you, instead their attitude that you are mental unless you change yourself to fit in with all their ideals makes any suing impossible.

The emergence of aspies has been the life miracle I needed delivering into my hands proof that aspie skills at some limited types of fact retention had been the real explanation of the personal details that made my teachers recklessly greedy. Never was proving this point helped by the media recognising student stress as any sort of major issue. Now, we in the aspie scene know that student stress has been a recurring aspie experience from constant misreading of us by educators. The trusting public who believe reality is everything the tabloids and BBC say it is, still have no knowledge of this at all. They still only hear of the teachers suffering.

Maurice Frank

For our convenience ?

2011-11-17T17:02:00.011Z

Further to March 21 post "no loo Inverness to Edinburgh".

Perhaps randomly by the right person being in the office, I got a reply to another incident of the stopping Citylinks failing to observe the Forth road bridge stop, which are not always answered at all and has been a recurrent problem ever since the present road layout was put in after the tolls were abolished. Getting an answer to this, I combined a response to it with asking again after the Inverness loo incident and how it had never been answered. So 8 months after it happened, I have extracted these thoughts from Citylink:

"Our coaches are equipped with on-board toilet facilities, however on the occasion where these are not functioning or an alterative vehicle without toilet facilities is used, the driver should make toilet stops for passengers. I am very sorry that on this occasion the driver did not make a toilet stop en route, however please note that he/she may not have known to do so unless a request was made by a passenger." and "If there are no toilet facilities or they are not functioning properly, the driver will make stops at the request of passengers. If you are not comfortable asking the driver to stop during the journey, then you can explain when boarding that you may need a toilet stop and the driver should schedule a stop en route."

Still none of this announced routinely to passengers: you have to suffer and complain and chase up a missing answer before you get this.

Perhaps at the time the blog post here made them decide it was scarier to answer than not, because the absence of a toilet at Broxden was clearly going to be indefensible in any answer they could give. "I can advise you that there are now toilet facilities at Perth Broxden, which were installed in April." Of course that's after we were there, and knowing that facility did not yet exist on the day we were there, they let that driver drive for 3 1/2 hours without any routine instruction to stop.

The present position is still unsatisfactory. They are sticking to making you make a request to the driver. That means you have to realise the situation as soon as you get on, and that is when he is busy checking everyone else on and loading the baggage. To make a request during the journey you have to distract the driver when on a fast road, which may be dangerous or not allowed, and it may be ages before he has any cause to stop. Has customer services thought of that? You have to you know a good time to make the request, when travelling through remote country. Those are too much logical burdens to leave to passengers. The only way I can see it being safe to use these long distance services, is if I carry a printed copy of their email with me, so that if landed with a no toilet bus I can show the driver there is an instruction from a higher level to make a stop. You could carry a printed copy of this posting.

Maurice Frank

tickety boo

2011-10-04T17:25:00.008+01:00

Sailing Calmac's ferries in the Western Isles has become safer since I did an island hopping holiday back in 1992. Then, they collected your ticket only at the sailing's end. Anyone could get on but it committed you to still have this losable small object in your possession, not lost or stolen, at destination. Exactly what would happen to you carried fear through uncertainty. During that holiday I did indeed come across a case, an old lady in a disembarking queue in front of me had lost her ticket during the journey and was trying to cope by cracking jokes about going to jail. But this is a humanly sick situation against all practical common sense. What if she had been robbed, and she the victim had to talk of going to jail? I last saw her standing to 1 side with the ticket man, no idea what happened, I just wonder if the same would have happened to a teenager as to an old lady, both equally innocent.

I remember the system making me anxious all that holiday, and not being attracted to the Western Isles again for a long time. That old system is now gone, and that is some welcome progress, for Elas's recent visit to Mull and Iona. Now they do the tickets at boarding, less scary. But it would still seriously foul up your life to lose a ticket in those remote small port villages with scant buses or emergency facilities. It remains an example of how dangerous tickets are as a system, and have been for 200 years, and how the danger discriminates against anyone with a condition increasing their likelihood to lose small objects. Which is my case for banning tickets.

Duart castle, on Mull, is using a ticket system with echoes of Calmac's old one, for its private buses that meet the ferries at Craignure. If you get on without a prebooking, the driver gives you a ticket that you only pay for when you reach the castle entrance kiosk, along with your admission. The ticket's corner is cut off to validate it, then you need it in that condition for the bus back. As the castle is far up a track winding through empty farmland, a longer trek from the nearest village than it looks on the map, dear me you want the bus back. But that means not losing your ticket as you carry it around with you all the time you are at the castle. As a coastal promontory in a Hebridean firth, this is prone to be a windy spot, with quick change weather. We saw it go from sunny to misted up in a few minutes. Yet the entrance kiosk has no shelter attached to it for the customer standing on the outside. You have no shield from the wind, as the man comfortably inside the kiosk hands out to you your clipped ticket, and a little till receipt for your admission, and maybe a note in your change too as bus plus admission is £11. 3 bits of paper, none of which must you allow to blow away or else your day is wrecked big time. So pronto you have to find a spot to park yourself, back to the wind, to sort them all out. Sit on the step beside the kiosk, is what I did.

What are the castle folks going to do with anyone who can't do a long country walk and who is stuck there with a loss of ticket? When the castle wants to close at day's end, and the stranded person is missing their ship off the island too, let's wonder? It makes a disability question that should be pressed. As a practical matter of safety, your status in moving around should never be allowed to depend on the successful safekeeping of several small scraps of paper in a windy place.

What about your bigger bulkier travelling baggage? Does that carry anxieties? Procedurally or emotionally, do you cope better with keeping it with you at all times or with leaving it in a place of safety? There is an aspie coping question in there, and you want the answer to work for you. Consider this prize piece of ticketing logic, from Oban station's baggage lockers: "This contains the security code needed to recover your luggage and keep it safe." Keep it safe: can you find any practicality and logic in a system where retaining possession of a number code on a ticket and not losing it is critical to recovering possession of your safely stored possessions? I can't even look down that vortex, the anxiety this should logically give you. You need safe storage, so keep something else safe as you go around ... I mean ... This is all some of what tickets, and their acceptance as a concept, do to our lives.

Maurice Frank

Housing with Asperger's

2011-09-20T00:24:00.002+01:00

My personal experience of living independently in housing. Some of this is on the Hurtful Experiences blog but I've expanded it to include, for example, my student experiences. This does not reflect the experience of the Aspie community as a whole, but does show what it CAN be like.

I have lived independently since the time I first left home in order to attend university at Edinburgh. However, independent living in different types of housing has been a challenge as a person with Asperger's.

At university I first stayed in Halls of Residence. From a housing point of view this was very good as an introduction to independent living. It was a good transition because not all aspects of independent living had to be dealt with all at once, for example meals were served at the refectory instead of having to be made by the student at this point. Halls of Residence did however mean close interaction with dozens of other students and having to try to fit in, which I found very difficult especially coming fresh into a student populace with people from many different backgrounds.

Halls of Residence tend to be an option for only the first year, with students normally getting together to share flats in subsequent years. But I did find the social environment at university overwhelming, with it being very difficult to fit in and make friends at university. Therefore I certainly did not know anyone well enough to share a flat with them. For the start of my second year I found myself moving into a flat where there was a vacancy to make up four flatmates, flatmates whom I did not know, indeed this was the way of things until I left university. In this new flat the other flatmates did not take to me very well, so much so that I was forced out of the flat after just one semester.

Having to share with previously unknown students did greatly increase my risk of personality clashes. For the remainder of my second year I moved into a house where there were eight students, each with their own room, which gave me a little more space to myself. Again, though, I did not fit in well with the other students and it went as far as bullying, even physical bullying at times.

My third and fourth year were spent in the same flat where although I managed to experience no serious problems with the other students, neither did I fit in well and it seemed I was tolerated as long as I kept myself to myself.

Following my graduation as a student and having independence with a career, my housing experience would become an even greater challenge in coping with the housing I've lived in and the neighbours there, because of repeatedly ending up beside antisocial neighbours. All too often indeed, they have been the sort of neighbours who get evicted or are in danger of it.

Things went well enough at the first address I lived when first working in a career. It was a bedsit, yet that was a step up in size from the sort of living space I had as a student! I really appreciated my independence there and quite enjoyed life living there. I was however looking to buy my own flat.

In the flat where I first lived as an owner occupier I settled in very well for a while and enjoyed myself. It was a studio flat, which was what I was able to afford then, but it was within a nice quiet cul-de-sac. I found however that although I wasn't sharing flats with people, sharing a stairwell with neighbours would still be very socially difficult. I had a next door neighbour who it was apparent didn't like me very much. For some reason he was always saying I was standing outside the Playhouse early in the mornings, when I was never near there in the mornings. He must have thought I was hiding something, and so I was a liar. (Given the location perhaps there was a suspicion - and intolerance - of homosexuality?)

Then one night I went to the pub across the road and said next door neighbour was there. He assumed a threatening manner of approach towards me, starting to manhandle me, causing me to fear assault, and accusing me of everything under the sun. Including a paedophile - which is what sticks out in my mind. Everyone else in the pub could see he was being out of order and was trying to stop him. But I was so traumatised I put my flat up for sale, and bought another one to move to.

At this new address, a tiny one-bedroomed flat on the high street in Dalkeith, there was only one other flat in the stair. But I'd walked straight into a situation where they were extremely noisy neighbours, with them and their friends loitering in the stair using drugs almost every day. This and other destructive behaviour went on until they were evicted. After that I lived in a period of peace, something unusual for me. But I found another major difficulty in housing, namely that getting agreement for communal repairs was difficult, never mind getting contractors to fix a job properly. This sort of thing requires social and negotiation skills which proved too intricate for me to manage. The roof of the flat had leaks in several places, something I tried for three years to get fixed. In this time there were four repairs carried out yet none of them worked properly. This situation caused me plenty of anxiety. I eventually moved on because I was trying to trade up the property ladder.

House prices at this time were rising at such a fast rate that once my flat was sold, I couldn't manage the jump up the ladder and had to rent for a while. The flat, although in an ex-council suburb, was in a good location for me. Again, extremely noisy neighbours above, groups of youths often loitering outside, my windows regularly being panned with stones. Again I was living in very little peace. That family was then evicted but replacement neighbours were not much better.

I eventually got back on the property ladder as an owner occupier, but what a mistake. The flat was on an ex-council estate, and it was what I was able to afford at a time prices were still going up and up. It was by far the most traumatic living experience I have had. Again, a neighbouring flat was home to a very antisocial family, and youths loitered beside my flat (residents of neighbouring flat plus friends) almost every night, often drinking/smoking/drug using, usually committing horrendous disturbances. Vandalism on many occasions, even urinating in stair. I have had people waiting outside the flat with a baseball bat. I lived life in a complete, debilitating fear. I suffered severe mental health problems due to living there, especially as the situation never improved in over 3 years.

On top of that family, another one lived next door to me briefly, and this led to one of two severely distressing recent incidents. At 3am one morning a gang came to the door of their flat to repeatedly knock on their door, and this escalated to disturbance over about an hour and an eventual stabbing incident right outside my flat. It appears the family left the flat straight after that. Only a month after this there was a wild party which led to an evening of disturbance and rioting in the stairwell all evening and overnight, where there was some destruction including windows being smashed, which caused further trauma.

This is how difficult it can be for an Aspie living independently, if left to find housing like most people would do. Indeed I bought some of these flats in the first place due to intense pressure from parents and/or church members for home ownership, despite my better judgment and freedom of choice (the above experiences do speak of how limited my options have been). It was up to me to stand up to such pressure and use my own judgment. Yet people have known my level of anxiety or what it would be under pressure in order to use scare tactics, making the persuasion outweigh my ability to resist, therefore I ended up in situations of distress when I did live in the flats.

Although I attempted to sell my last flat, this was unsuccessful. The fact I even attempted, by which time the property market had crashed, speaks of how distressed I was. After continued incidents, I have now rented the flat out because I just wasn't coping, while doing what I think works best for me as a living situation which is to privately rent. This gives me more choice than mainly the ex-council flats I could afford to buy and also makes me more flexible for moving if I was uncomfortable. I have been in the new rented flat for six weeks and though I did have an attempted break in on only the second day, at least so far it has been very comfortable and peaceful.

Brian Brodie

not the driver's fault

2011-08-21T20:24:00.002+01:00

Usually when I post crossly about buses, it is because of what the driver has done. Of course, rivers are human and humans are usually bad but drivers are not always bad. This time the driver was very apologetic and friendly about the bureaucracy he had been subject to and it wasn't his fault at all.

Consider a bus, in a rural area where they can't easily put a replacement on, that suffers a big delay from a breakdown, but eventually manages to limp to its outer destination. It arrives there in time to turn round and operate a return service on time. But it doesn't. Why? the driver is not allowed to. The situation has caught up with the rules about his driving hours. he is forced to take a half hour break and sit twiddling his thumbs, even thought it means the bus will run half an hour late, and passengers will be half an hour late and miss conne3ctions event though the bus was physically there in time to run on time. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This actually happened this week on the Carse of Stirling services by First bus.

This may be health and safety, from the point of view of regulating the driving. But what use is that if passengers' coping safety is affected by having their day's plan and connection knocked out. As encountered on meet-ups, some aspies go get bewildered in unfamiliar places. The power to run transport late and not to make passengers immune from the consequences for further transport, is still an issue of power and that's why no health and safety rules get made out of that. Like, having to employ more staff so that buses can't get trapped at the outer end of routes and forced to do a silly delay like this.

Maurice Frank

DELICATE TOPICS MUST BE DISCUSSED OBJECTIVELY

2011-08-05T19:27:00.001+01:00

Though I have formidable academic and extracurricular achievements to my credit I am a desperately unfulfilled man burdened with irrational guilt after childhood traumas and my Christian father’s constant denigration. My life has been so blighted by stigma that I have struggled to solve it by turning it upside down and writing about characters who suffer the way I still do.

“The Librarian of Charford” was to have been a TV serial life “Doctor Finlay’s Casebook” which was to disseminate information about delicate topics EXPRESSLY sp that those who suffer badly from stigmatisation would cease to feel bad and develop coping strategies. I had written episodes soon after graduation. Leading character Alan (Moelwyn)-Wright moved back to Charford in Avalonshire to become its librarian. He teams up with head librarian Bill Carter and others who have relatives with mental health problems. Each harrowing situation is portrayed accurately but sensitively and some touch upon taboo topics. At the end of each episode the public were to be shown BOOKS on the topic in question. It was rejected OUT OF HAND because Alan is the purported inventor of a Code of Behaviour called Contributionism that makes institutionalised religion REDUNDANT and he is a shameless reincarnationist.
Had it gone ahead, the English speaking world would be fully equipped to deal with the entire range of distressing events that happen to everybody sometimes in our lives. By now I would have a worldwide reputation as a scriptwriter who has successfully and creatively transformed my very own most hurtful experiences into episodes with the explicit moral messages that all of us deserve to be treated with dignity; and it would have substantially alleviated the acute mental pain which accomplishes a variety of situations where formerly people suffered in silence rather than risk being ridiculed, ostracised or perish the thought incarcerated in mental hospitals.

John Stuart Mill the champion of women’s rights in Victorian Britain declared that whenever influential minorities declare that certain topics are TABOO it’s the duty of wise and caring people to OFFEND such people by open unbiased discussions of the taboo topics. I have in fact clashed with CATHOLICS because I live by Mill’s principles and Alan Wright a.k.a. The Socrates of Charford is necessarily true to his/my Contributionist view that he has a categoric duty to help all who suffer from the affliction itself compounded by the public prejudice about it.

I have written scripts based upon my very own hurtful experiences and those of people such as a young psychology graduate wrongfully detained in a mental hospital (This is the monologue called ANDREW SINCLAIR YOU ENJOY YOUR DIGNITY) whilst I have two other Monologues of varying length, and a Radio Play. I have written Video Scripts about characters with OCD and Asperger’s Syndrome, both of which I suffer from. A supremely hurtful event invariably gives rise to a work where I carefully alter the details so that only I myself know the real people involved. This is why I set my works in a very necessary parallel universe with alarmingly altered geography and fictional Parliamentary constituencies &c.

Despite the sexual liberation of the 1960s, many people are loath to talk about their sexual problems. In the recent past, religious authoritarians have put unseemly pressures on broadcasters to suppress debates on sexual deviations that are quite harmless, which are lumped together with practices that can do long term damage. Moreover research into the effects of sexual deviations and abuse has ceased (perhaps because of interference by church people?) I read of far too many adults burdened with DELUSIONS OF FLAWEDNESS like myself and all this has come about from Christian upbringings and notably from mis-education in Christian schools. Then there are people like myself who dare not disclose that they have intense aversions to particular minorities for fear of being branded racists or misogynists. A supremely hurtful experience in early childhood might be scrambled up with a memory of somebody who looks rather peculiar or speaks differently. When I was about 5 I was scared of NUNS who looked sinister – I thought that they had NO HEADS! Even now I feel a mental tremor at the sight of a nun. An acute aversion to a regional accent may have arisen from say a teacher with that accent who was a bully. A deep seated revulsion can be firmed early in life and persist. The sufferer feels that he will be ridiculed if he talks about it.

My “Pure OCD” is bound up with experiences in early childhood and still flares up when triggered by such matters as the sight of my brother’s handwriting. I can provide a Video-script where the names of real people in my life have been artfully swapped around. It deals with a young man who like Lord Reith, assaulted his elder brother and was never allowed to forget the event. He develops an intense irrational conviction that he will go mad and assault short bespectacled men (who resemble MYSELF!) and this gets the better of him until he meets MY DOPPELGANGER after this doppelganger LIKE MYSELF gets assaulted by 3 boys. Then a young lady enters his world and she too suffers. The work ends in a paradox where MY DOPPELGANGER, physically incapable of harming anybody, discloses that he is still besieged by a delusion that he will go mad and assault his well-built, bullying brother Dominic.
I have begun to write video scripts where the action takes place on hikes through beauty spots and the characters enjoy restorative calm – see my Flyer about Wilderness Hikes. I contend that if actual people adopted my principle of writing about taboo topics set in a parallel universe they would not only cathart their own mental abscesses but enable fellow sufferers the wide world over to compare experiences and discover common ground, therefore to adopting coping strategies.
With Alan Wright’s strict consequentialism as a better yardstick than Christian morality the outcome would be that sufferers from acute mental agony about taboo topics would CEASE TO FEEL BAD and recover, so resume their dignified roles in Society.

Q.E.D.

David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, 6-8-2010.

BEAUTIFUL HANDS OF GOD

2011-08-05T18:28:00.001+01:00

BEAUTIFUL HANDS OF GOD

I see myself reflected in the glass doors of the Ronald Laing Building at Glasgow University on this bright spring morning - all clean, white shirt, knife-edged creased grey flannel trousers, tweed jacket and most important of all the Contributionist tie with dragon’s wings outspread which allegorises the Founder of our movement. To think that before I was referred to him I took no pride in my appearance and was oblivious of my shabbiness! Nor did I know that I had Asperger’s Syndrome.

“Tony Bratch” enquires the receptionist and I nod assent. She pins on my lapel a badge bearing my name then I file into the lecture theatre ten minutes early with my two heavy holdalls filled with teaching aids. Students arrive and I check the equipment. A screen lights up and it displays the structure of polytime – a convoluted shape resembling a tangle-up of hosepipe that goes on for ever and ever. Longitudinal stripes in contrasting colours bisect lines like bar codes.

“Ladies and gentlemen we have here Tony Bratch who is going to explain what he calls “Polytime” – and he will make shattering disclosures about the destiny of every one of us... Over to you, Tony.”

I am no longer scared of speaking in public. I say I come from Corchester in Corveshire and I am a disciple of the illustrious Welsh philosopher Alan Moelwyn-Wright who is also the headmaster of Treheol College in Delormebury, for children with distressing peculiarities. I am going to talk about the structure of Time and how is affects all of our destinies. I myself have time warp experiences and so has my sister Gillian. When I was a baby, my parents told me, my sister shook me violently, when she was six. This may account for my persistent lucid dreams of being a boy called John Eccleshall from Staffordshire, a county that cannot possibly exist. She is older than me and she somehow had foreknowledge of where I would go when I was a small boy such as the precise spot in the Longmynd – a miniature mountain in Shropshire where I had scrambled at the age of three. I too had precognitive dreams about Wolstanbury which I had never set foot in when my sister took up her job there... that is dreams of its market square and Gothic chapel like structure covering the market cross, and the precise colour of the walls in her office as though my soul had taken leave of my body and I floated through walls to see Gillian with a man who has a handlebar moustache – her boss – I described him precisely and that was the trigger for her to tell me all her precognitions about myself. Then she showed me J W Dunne’s book An Experiment With Time and J B Priestley’s play I Have Been Here Before...

I brandish the books and resume.

Dunne has dreams of seeing the Daily Telegraph three weeks ahead of publication and one dream was that there had been a disaster that claimed four thousand lives – a volcanic eruption in the West Indies. Three weeks alter Dunne was horrified to pick up the paper and read that FORTY thousand people had died on the island of Martinique when they were burnt alive by incandescent gas. That prompted Dunne to do private research and ultimately write this now famous book that explains polytime. Some time later Dunne met the playwright J B Priestley who wrote the play about parallel universes I Have Been Here Before... Yes it has been performed in the University theatre nearby so all in the audience are familiar with the plot, how the scientist Gortler from a parallel universe steps into our time to prevent a suicide and save a firm from closing down and other effects of that catastrophe.

“I have stepped from one parallel universe to another in lucid dreams”, I continue. In these dreams I am a pupil at a Stafford school in this cathedral city located where a tributary of the Trent loops around a low gravel hill deposited by a glacier, on which the cathedral stands. One line forks to London and the other to Bristol I presume. In the heart of Stafford is a windmill without sails and a waterwheel beside a mill lade and also a row of old almshouses. I feel that I have lived in Stafford all my life but on waking I am in Corchester where the Trent Gorge cuts through the blood-red sandstones of the Pinnacle Country..... with the main railway from London going underneath the Shrewsbury to Derby line and opposite Corchester as you full well know the lofty cliffs of Honours Broadstone that fall sheer a hundred meters and loom above the London to Glasgow line... I hope that I am not boring you with my description of this preposterous city of my dreams...”

I seem to have got everybody’s attention as I continue, feeling very anxious now...

“In my dreams about my life as John Eccleshall I find myself on a bicycle cycling towards the town which bears my name. It is a charming place of Tudor houses with timber colonnades and it lines in a hollow. On the way there is a lace there the road dips, and a roundabout is perched on a hillock above a railway line. I lose control here and I am thrown over the handlebars onto the track and an electric train bears down and I cannot move and I wake up in terror in Corchester...”

Bright-eyed people in the sea of faces. I am not boring them, I hope...

“My sister Gillian has similar nightmares which end when she is told by a policeman that her brother John was pitched off his bicycle near Norton Bridge. In her dreams she sees signposts bearing authentic names which do not appear on our gazetteers. They are of Saxon derivation and allude to the topography of this preposterous Staffordshire – a county where rovers wind across fertile plains crossed by busy railways and highways, definitely not the rugged Pinnacle Country of Corveshire clothes in pine forests.”

I then point to the big diagram and say that this represents a simplification of polytime, then I enlarge a section to show what I mean... a shape like a salami sausage with slices and a longitudinal line marked arbitrarily with my birth year 1981 and my sister’s birth year 1974 and this year 2008. I declare that our universe is an infinitessimally thin salami slice of the complex slice in the first diagram which is itself only schematic. I cannot draw polydimensional shapes but I simplify...

I show an enlargement. The hosepipe is curved and along its length there is a line marked 14 Sept. 1981 and another, my sister’s birthdate 15 June 1974. I say in every 14 Sept 1981 I will be born, perhaps as Tony Bratch, perhaps as John Eccleshall, likewise my sister Gillian will be born on successive 15th Junes in every salami slice, then I point to serial reincarnations since the dawn of history and now refer to my mentor’s past lives starting from ancient Greek times when he was a contemporary of Pericles. I extrapolate Alan’s future lives as ref lines of segments of a huge circle which may be part of a spiral reading back to successive Ancient Greek Hegemonies, Roman Empires, Albigensian Crusades and so on to reincarnations as part of a Windsor King where Alan will not be burnt as a heretic but flourish in a Britain with free speech and become the founder of a movement which lifts the veil of Mortality to show how if we struggle to live exemplary lives we will be born again and again in serial reincarnations and in parallel universes to become Hands of the Cosmic Mind we call God. I now project the points on this spiral where my lives interact with Alan’s lives and what flows from them is a burst of light – symbolising how Alan has taught me the ways of Right Living but before I was referred to him I was a very disturbed adolescent. Now he has unlocked my mind it is my duty as his disciple to pass on to everybody my experience of the parallel universe where I was John Eccleshall who was evidently drunk in charge of a bicycle and lost his life by crass carelessness. But the Gods in the Great Beyond reincarnated me as Tony Bratch expressly in order to meet Alan and absorb his teaching...

(Will I be flayed by the Christians for saying that?)
..... + I must talk about theology but not repeat not Christian theology. We are all immortal souls and we are reborn in successive parallel universes. Some of us have acquired the faculty to slip between universes... and this gives rise to what is the most important finding of all. There is serial reincarnation and there is parallel universe reincarnation. My mentor lives several lives and so did his wife and son. Bob Wright has proved to the world that he was headmaster of Friarshill Grammar School in Romanbridge in Tudor times till he was flung off the Roman Bridge by Mary Tudor’s thugs. Now in every life we live, to quote Masefield’s Creed we suffer the consequences of dissoluteness in past lives or reap the rewards of being virtuous. So our immortal souls, everybody have a kind of psychic DNA which is modified by our personal behaviour. As Masefield so eloquently expounded in A Creed it behoves us all to live virtuous lives.

On the train I suffered a gypsy who stank of unwashedness as I was busy preparing for this presentation. I threatened to have him put out of the train as he was looking over my shoulder at my portabrain and reading my lecture notes and so I quizzed him. It was obvious that he was of lowly intelligence and he was trapped in a karmic cycle of what we call gricehood.

(Do these people understand Alan’s beautiful coinage from the German word Greis to denote self-inflicted stupefaction...? Carry on, Bratch!)

I am simply horrified to read about the alcohol problem with grips Scotland. We Contributionists are strict teetotallers and one of our number is David Derrypool, graduate of your University who lives at Carkilty. There he is in the audience. David has vainly tried to provide edifying pursuits for his neighbours but he has been rebuffed at every attempt. Now we Contributionsists regard the Poet Laureate John Masefield as no less an avatar – a messenger of God than Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and of course Christ. Masefield’s Creed has apparently been written in every parallel Universe as that Code of Behaviour which is founded in the teachings of avatars sent to us...

I show the next diagram. How souls migrate from one Dunnean time-cycle to the next. I say that the most highly evolved souls of all may have this faculty to slip along the axis of polytime at right angles to our own cycles. In all the successive parallel universes there can be slight differences caused by changes in people’s fortunes – a shop is sold to another owner – a boy is killed when pitched into the path of a train – a frail child dies – but in another cycle he survives to become a judge. A battle might have been won by someone else long ago and Britain became part of a French or Norwegian empire so her people alive in the equivalent of 2008 might speak languages more akin to French or Norwegian than our English. Then there will be universes where glaciers completely altered geography as seems to be the case when I was John Eccleshall. Now David Derrypool might pick up the thread after our presentation because HE has had disturbing dreams of a world where he lived in a city called Stafford with much in common with the Stafford of my lucid dreams to the extent that I hold that he and I have slipped along this axis – our life-lines clearly marked – precisely in order that we should meet and collaborate to elucidate the nature of polytime....

Another diagram. A globe marked Tony Bratch emanates light. Next to the globe is the likeness of a dishevelled man as a silhouette. I say that there is no way I can teach the concept of polytime and all that flows from it, to the gypsy on the train as he simply lacks the intelligence to grasp it. He is doomed for evermore to live like Plato’s cave dwellers...

I show a globe marked Tony Bratch speaking into a microphone and a symbolic world listening. The world-globe and the Tony Bratch globe emanate rhythmic pulses of light as on the time-sausage sparks fly along its longitudinal axis.

“If you understand the mechanics of your own immortality, dear friends, as a result of my talk, you will daily endeavour to improve yourselves and one another...”
(Globes grow bigger as they emit sparks of varying colours and merge with one another to shower rays in all directions.)

“and that is how you create your own psychic DNA... for as Masefield declared, every thought or deed in every life affects your potential to be either trapped in the darkness of gricehood like that gypsy – or growth to enjoy such superior abilities and aesthetic awareness - that like all of us Dragon Tie wearers your only passion will be to share the fruits of your self-createdness – and so all of you dear friends I trust will say NO to the DEMON DRINK and grow to be beautiful Hands of God.”

David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, May 2008

nor the NHS, when it means catching you with hidden charges

2011-07-05T19:21:00.004+01:00

Experienced today the surgery in South Queensferry trying to do this.

You go to see your GP about a medical enquiry he needs to write a letter about for you to show to a third party. There are lots of situations in which a public office might ask you to make such an enquiry, e.g. the council. When you go back to surgery later to collect the letter, reception tells you there should be a charge of £15 for it. Tells you it does not count as NHS work. You had been to your GP appointment in good faith as an ordinary NHS appointment. There is no publicised or displayed info saying otherwise.

In this case, nothing of this had been told to me at the appointment nor ever by the GP himself. The situation was even more irresponsible for it being left to word of mouth whether you were informed, and the receptionist herself having to ask doubtfully whether the the doctor had said it - and hence did not feel able to press the charge, so at least a small victory there. A frightened elderly patient without any self confidence might not be so lucky. But receptionist put in place a notice to expect charging for any future letters: and this interferes with something in mid stream. It may well not be the GP's fault either, but done undercutting his work, for his good helpful letter concluded, "If you require any further information please do not hesitate to contact me" - those are not words consistent with any idea of charging the reader for acting on them.

NHS Lothian complaints department made known that GP surgeries are now working semi-independently under contract and there are no consistent NHS rules on what they can charge for. Not very widely known to vulnerably trappable patients is it? I have made a complaint about the boundaries in any case like this, and about any charging when you go to your GP for health info that another public office wants from you.

Don't let the council make it up as it goes along

2011-06-24T21:26:00.009+01:00

From Local Government Finance Act 1992 section 81, which creates the power of council tax appeals in the Act's Scottish section:

(1) A person may appeal to a valuation appeal committee if he is aggrieved by -
(a) any decision of a local authority that a dwelling is a chargeable dwelling, or that he is liable to pay a council tax in respect of such a dwelling.
(b) any calculation made by a local authority of an amount which he is liable to pay to the authority in respect of council tax ....

From www.scotland.gov.uk/library3/localgov/ctha-00.asp "What are the grounds for appeal?"

If you disagree with the levying authority's decision that your dwelling is chargeable,
if you disagree with the levying authority's decision that you are liable to pay the council tax in respect of a particular dwelling, or,
if you disagree with the calculation of your bill

You can check out the full act yourself. It states simply and clearly that if you want to appeal any disagreement you have with the calculation, any error that you personally perceive in it, you are absolutely entitled to do that. That power of appeal is written literally in the law. As aspies know, what is literally said is what is said. In the written law and the public info on it there is absolutely nothing, not a word, that says the council ever has any power to say that it refuses to recgonise your appeal's existence or to carry it out as a case, on grounds of its view of your appeal's merits. It has no power whatever to say, we don't think this is a "relevant" subject for an appeal so by our say-so you are not getting an appeal held.

It follows that it has no power or entitlement further to threaten to take you to court unless you acquiesce to this. You would then be under threat of legal penalties precisely for following exactly what the law says!! It would not be possible to rely on any law as literally meant, or to know that following it means less trouble than not following it. A system of law would not be operating, arbitrary terror would be operating instead, if a council was ever upheld in behaving this way. Over council tax appeals or over anything else ever.

The duty that public bodies have to communicate fully and effectively with us, especially with us because we come under disability equality, rules out the council inventing rules of its own that are not there in the rules issued to the public, of a nature as to let it conveniently suppress appeal cases lodged against its own actions - and for it to claim to enforce what it has invented while ignoring the actual position.

More info from within the scene:
Autism, as a recognised disability, implies a number of rights in court settings. Probably the relevant one to follow up here is to have an ‘appropriate adult’ to provide support. The courts will generally take a helpful and sympathetic view of how to help people who are vulnerable or have disabilities, so long as they are primed beforehand to understand the situation. Often what happens with autism is that there is insufficient prior knowledge provided regarding what the problems are, and the person may present superficially as not having any particular disability.

Statutory rights are conferred by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, of which the UK Government is a signatory. These include a number of general principles and obligations in relation to equality and non-discrimination (Articles 3-5), and the requirement for States to take appropriate measures to provide access by persons with disabilities to the support they may require in exercising their legal capacity (Article 12), and to ensure effective access to justice for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others (Article 13).

The principle is that to provide an ‘equal basis’ a person with a disability requires such measures as will provide a level playing field with people who do not have a disability.

Written straight after a meeting with the council, that had to be lobbied for before it could be held!! about a dispute of this nature.

Maurice Frank

Straight answer?

2011-04-20T15:32:00.002+01:00

Consider whether you find the following at all constructive or committal as an answer. Whether you think it will change anything. Then consider election promises by parties, on public transport, that are always about promotinmg its use or making it cheaper: never about forcing bus companies to give straight answers to actually make passengers' lives more sensible.

Apr 2 email by me:

It has never made any sense that the 0915 service from Dalgety Bay is an X53. At that time of day it gains nothing from the omission of stops and that causes aggro which makes life harder for both drivers and passengers. Unnecessarily uncomfortable passengers, e.g. told they can't get off at the secondary West End stop (Drumsheugh Gardens) in Edinburgh, is uncomfortable for drivers too. It is a significant city destination stop. Being required to sweep past it when passengers want it, makes drivers' job more difficult. This is thinking of them too.

This is particularly so in the conditions now with the west end diversions, when folks are trying to find their way using common sense. There is no common sense, no practicality, no consideration, in an off-peak service like this one arbitrarily refusing to stop at the stop mentioned. Why is this journey being kept X?

Apr 20:
Thank you for your enquiry regarding service X53.

We endeavour to provide a mix of "all stops" and "limited stops" services along the corridor between Ferrytoll and Edinburgh. The vast majority of passengers prefer the quicker journeys offered by the X services, and we have tried to provide a suitable balance within the limited stopping pattern. However we appreciate that whilst this suits most of our passengers, there will always be a small number that find the stopping pattern of a particular service inconvenient.

I trust this helps to answer your query.
Regards
.. Commercial Manager
Stagecoach East Scotland

art at the gallery

2011-04-05T16:35:00.001+01:00

Enjoyed this decription of a some drawings that are on public exhibition in the Talbot Rice gallery:

"Untitled 1994, coloured crayon on paper."

I can do that, gizza art show.

no loo Inverness to Edinburgh

2011-03-21T19:17:00.011Z

"Stagecoach trains its entire staff in the importance of customer care and does not tolerate incidents such as the one you have described in your letter." So they welcomely wrote on 25 May 2007, concerning a jobsworth driver who was stuck in a queue on a sliproad at the Forth bridge and refused to let passengers off before reaching the stop, even though some were desperate for a pee which they had to take behind a junction box as soon as they got off. By that time the situation on that bus had got aggressive. I should think so.

Now that Stagecoach and Citylink have become half-merged, can we rely on the same principle to be brought out again? Yesterday, they put an ordinary Stagecoach express bus such as you see around Fife, with no toilet, onto an Inverness to Edinburgh Citylink service lasting 3 1/2 hours. Its driver was very good about it, full marks to him, when I asserted the right to get off for a pee at Broxden, the coach stop site on the edge of Perth - which itself has no loo. But what position are Citylink going to take on the driver of the connecting Glasgow coach, who refused to allow me to use his onboard toilet? "Absolutely not, no way, as soon as I'm loaded up I'm away." Peeing in the bushes instead meant climbing over a fence and squeezing under some very thorny vegetation, obviously without time to waste. An older passenger with limited mobility might find this too hard to do, yet is even more likely to need the loo. There was no other way to get out of sight, at least not without taking a long walk away from the coaches who might then go without them. They will be entitled by the facts of biology to go right where they are, the indecency will be Citylink's fault not theirs, won't it? I challenge Citylink to find any way to say otherwise, and next time we write any diversity feedbacks for the police we should put this to them too. This point needs committally forcing, to make the bus companies work properly.

Clamber into the bushes I did, promptly, in front of this driver. He knew it meant no chance to wash my hands, I suppose Citylink expects its other passengers to be happy with that? If his ego seriously expected me to continue my journey without going, he was delusional, with a delusion of authority over biology. No it was not established at any sod's order that I would hold on. If y' gotta go y' gotta go, asserted.

Sometimes it is part of autism, its metabolic and digestive issues, to need the loo more frequently. The willingness now found, of the operator of the longest trunk coach service through the middle of Scotland, to do this, puts a barrier between the aspie communities of the Central Belt and the north.

Maurice Frank

some progress on social work

2011-03-01T14:05:00.000Z

See post of 5 Dec 2010, update added to it. Not a lot of content in social work's answer but at least by defending that they are still talking about the personal case they admitted they have to do that. Have had a meeting with them at Waverley Court with opportunity to tell them more of the details.

Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us

2011-02-28T15:42:00.016Z

Elas is open to all spectrumites who can reach us and want to, any radius, and we go visiting the aspie scene in other places too. All who want to link up with an aspie scene where folks communicate freely across region and groups are democratic and uphold personal wellbeing with everyone getting their say. That is the aspie scene we want, and folks beginning to network across Scotland want too, and all spectrumites with important stuff to say want it.

We extend a standing invitation to all folks on the spectrum who are unhappy with groups of a less free nature, to link up with us. Nobody must feel stuck in a group that is not the right type for them just by where they live. There is a disturbing case happening in an adult aspie group in a region near us.

There is a group where all the deciding power belongs to the chair and committee of a broader autism society also working with kids. The society set up the group, and in that society the chair, who until recently was also the founder, has always been the dominant leader, the committee following like sheep. So the group's members don't have their own direct say in how the group runs, what practices it follows. Imposed on them from above like that, as a "code of conduct", they are not allowed to communicate with each other, using contact info given in their contact list, for any other purpose than to arrange social meet-ups. Unlike Elas they never do arrange meet-ups, either: how can they feel close enough to each other to do that with all their contact censored? How is such a ban enforceable, it has been asked? Data protection law, designed to fight spam and junk mail, can be misused to set conditions like this to what types of messages folks consent to receive using their data. But in that group, the trap comes from how this rule was first imposed. It was announced to be in effect without advance notice, before its contents were even declared, and before the members had any chance to make known to each other their own consents to receive other types of messages. So they can't make that consent known to other members who have not already consented to them to have it made known to them, and who for the same reason can't make that consent known either. So any 2 members are trapped in a vicious circle of neither being allowed to open up closer terms of contact with the other.

Members have been cut off from each other, and from receiving info from outside the group by email from other members. The leader hence holds control of what they receive. This Orwellian rule was introduced openly for the purpose of preventing members discussing with each other anything going wrong with the group, without having to go through the leader. Needless to say they have no blog like this one: they have always been welcome to use this one but did they know? Consider too that in this now low attendance and socially dead group whose meeting last week was actually abandoned, it is clear that a large proportion of the contact list is of lapsed or ex-members, yet their ability to contact each other or the remaining members or be contacted by them remains under the same restraint. They have no say over it, if they even realise it is happening. Elas's response to the autism bill consultations contrasted that model with our open and decentralised model. Watch out for this if you are joining or visiting any aspie groups in central/south Scotland: do they follow Elas's model or the other group's?

The problem society has also appointed a spokesman for the ruling committee on all issues to do with the contact list and banned all contact with any other committee members about those. Are you keeping up? Layer upon layer of paranoia. No sensible thinker can feel safe in an organisation that behaves like that: like a cult, tying you up in gags on talking about what is happening to you and hogging all power to the leadership. How are we going to retrieve our fellow spectrumites entangled under these tricky controls they have never had proper opportunity to consent to? Is that the challenge to its legality that will break it? we have that committee spokesman already questioned thus. This should concern the whole rest of the scene in Scotland, the free scene as it may now be worth calling it.

2 members of Elas used to also belong to this other group, and as a part of Elas's far wider success in keeping socials going it used to have some contact established with one of the other group's members. All swept away now. That is really helpful in defending and growing the scene's wellbeing, eh?

The group's trouble began when a member X, volunteering at an ecology centre, recommended another member Y to do the same. When the ecology centre discriminated against Y for being a victim already and rejected him, X brushed it aside and defended the ecology centre's discretion to do it and refused to take any stand against it. Y as a result made a complaint that X should not do support work, including for teenagers, in that autism society, and the bully-hurt of being expected to endorse that as part of life in the society. He tried to overcome prolonged hurtful noncommittality from the leader and force the right outcome on its moral merits by an email to the group members. This issue could not even arise in an independently organised adult group like Elas that is not tied to a bigger society and/or to endorsing any support work. If an X/Y situation happened in Elas, Y could just cut off speaking terms with X and not be pressed about it, and could tell the story and be deemed the justified hurt party, and X might have the brass neck to stay around but would not impinge on Y's life in any way.

The problem society's committee has defended and sided with X, this being paired with the ban on members discussing its merits as justice, and answered an inaccurate rewritten version of Y's complaint with a pile of personal attacks on Y that making the complaint was aggressive and constituted not caring about anyone. This when Y had obviously cared about fair play in the ecology centre's community, and when they made no comment at all about what had happened to Y in a previous workplace.

They ranted like the Tea Party extremists in America who don't believe in autism at all, saying aspies must not lobby for any special treatment at all, and must take "life's disappointments" as they come without lifting a finger to anticipate and prevent an unfairly big share of "life's disappointments" or else they are to blame for "expecting problems." They defended X as "being realistic". These are a rejection and denial of the same organisation's whole history and all the care which the parents in it have argued with schools for and expected this society's support against getting labelled arguers or troublemakers. It contradicts the whole principle of a support scene and the whole idea of supported employment services like Intowork, it is a harsh right wing attitude that we should go back to sinking or swimming in a neocon economy geared to reject us, exactly like before we were known to need any different at all. The committee spokesman accompanied this with reckless defamation threats against Y making any outside criticisms of the society at all no matter what happens inside it: say anything to the outside world and you risk being criminalised and going to jail. (Yet defamation is civil law, he had not even realised.) More sinister behaviour like a cult, constituting an attempt to blackmail through fear and to enslave a person into a control trap and into fearful silence. It has no force: it is an established part of fair civil life that an organisation's ideas and practices can be criticised on merit, accountably to factual accuracy.

Now, you would think it is important to challenge every member of the committee on whether they are behind this or are spoken for by it. No no, can't have that - contact with the committee about it, except the spokesman, is also banned !!! How then does Y even tell anyone else in the committee if the answers to issues never raised show that the complainer has been wilfully misrepresented, hence defamed indeed, to the committee? If the spokesman can imtimidate the person he is writing to, like Y, like this, then the same intimidation hangs over any committee members who step out of line. This kafkaesque tangle of bans on who may contact whom and about what, has grown into a monster. It allows no way to find out whether all the committee are behind any decision or spoken for by any answer and no means for dissenters to be discovered or to advertise their own existence. In such a situation, to set out these obvious facts in public and not succumb to the undemocratic threatening into silence, is actively a duty of not defaming the committee members: any of them might not be behind the shockers hissed in their name and might be gagged and in fear. The only way to see that nobody is under control and in fear of speaking, will be when that whole society that has so tragically chosen power against long lasting friendships and by it has collapsed into this horrifying condition, breaks under the self-inflicted cumbersomeness of its own barminess and falls apart.

But all the innocent members in it must be able to get out without having the aspie scene lost to them, and to find refuge in the rest of the scene unintimidated and no longer obeying any of that cult regime over who they may contact. Join us, or use us as a base to bypass that controlling society and to reestablish your local scene in a form with free contact again.

now uniforms take life, preventably

2011-01-13T18:06:00.013Z

Many papers today carry a child death story that challenges anyone willing to persist in believing there is any good at all in the physical world. In the Australian floods, a boy aged 13 was swept away and killed, along with his mum, when the floodwaters swamped their car, the reason why they narrowly missed rescue by a truck driver was because this boy made said rescuer save his younger brother first !

Now, there is more to this horror than accident. Here is the twist to make you angry, that adds to this story an element of human evil which our scene could have prevented: quoting from the Metro's story, "Ms Rice and her sons were returning from a trip to buy school uniforms when they were caught up in what police called an "inland instant tsunami."""

This is a child's life actually ended, entirely by reason of the prison badge of children's enslavement, and the obligation on families to actually buy with their own money the chains of their own oppression. To make this purchase mattered enough to go driving in the middle of a flood crisis for specifically this purpose, to buy a degrading slave costume whose communist purpose as openly declared by the nutty professor - see last post - is to airbrush away children's personal identity and give physical form to a state of possessed subjection.

For a century we have been told school uniforms do all these wonderful things. Anyone who defends them now is seen to defend costing lives and intentionally to be willing to cost more lives, and this is for a purpose of destroying liberty.

This includes any big autism organisation that continues not to speak out against them, and against all uniforms ever, as they owe to adult workers too. For years the big organisations have known this need exists. For years they have kept themselves on hobnobbing terms with employers and teachers. This boy most likely was not one of us, and there is no need for him to have been. Remember, acting on aspies' biological needs will get rid of uniforms, not just for aspies, but for everyone. If the big autism organisations had done this, then thanks to autism knowledge, uniforms could have been eradicated all over the democratic world years before now, for everyone. Then, by the reported facts, this family's fatal car journey would not have happened.

This be on the head of all limits to publishing of facts, all control and filtering of issues, that has existed in the autism scene. In the media too.

Meanwhile, yesterday, here, parliament threw out Hugh O'Donnell's bill for an autism strategy, at first stage, by 109 votes to 5. I watched them in the public gallery, all jumping on the momentum to say oh it's not proven what difference this would make oh we need less obligations for service users to run around trying to enforce and we need more time muddling along as we are. The way they seized on the committee report to criticise the bill for being too noncommittal! is an irony howling against the way all law is practised at present. All of them every day are in the political class's game of always being noncommittal, and now they have damned a bill for the same thing.

It is an indictment of the NAS for its insistence on legalese drafting of the bill. In the consultations last year, we put in for using ordinary language, and through it, for having some committality about what the bill would definitely make happen. The NAS have dominated this entire campaign, and their aversion to committal obligations to any issues that come from us to them, has delivered this rubbish outcome for them and us alike.

Maurice Frank

horrific professing

2011-01-07T17:01:00.017Z

A psychology professor, Thomas MacKay, got a story run in the Sunday Herald saying school uniform prevents teenage violence. Front page of today's Metro is about a terrible schoolboy gang murder in London, which on the evidence the story reported, was committed while wearing school uniform. There is the professor's stark answer.

So far from schools meriting respect as in his theory, such murders show also that herding children together like cattle into a jungle-like mass in day prisons called schools is desperately unsafe and destructive of civil order, let alone of personal wellbeing and belonging. It always was, this has always been apparent from all the history of bullying. I have a strong need to make the same case from the history of teachers misusing their power and having greedy ambitions that make the child suffer. But bullying and violence is the present issue this great big professor has argued on.

This professor is popular with politicians, he was praised in a book by Gordon Brown and he has been advising the SNP government on educational psychology. He even used to be head of the British Psychological Society. How rational is that?, 2 items the Herald story did not mention, are:
* that the professor is an Evangelical, which itself involves a psychology for proclaiming truth unsubstantiated out of thin air, and for needing to bend all psychology to match with the social attitudes in a few arbitrary ancient scrolls that oppress women and defend slavery,
* and that he has already worked in autism a lot.

Now, if he knows autism, how can he possibly not know about what are termed "sensory issues"? Our sensitivities to rubbing fabric and texture and heat, which make our bodies often biologically incompatible with narrow Victorian norms of dress and prove our physically real need for total freedom of dress. Autism proves all dress codes and uniforms a serious bodily harmful human rights violation. A sensory irritation undermines our ability to concentrate and to function well. Hence, any discomforting clothes are a serious medical assault on our bodies. School uniform trousers did violence to my body, and gender discriminatory too when girls get a choice over their leg cover and boys don't.

My physically real need of health and wellbeing, to wear shorts perpetually, has always been upheld by the local supported employment service, to employers and to the benefits/training system. An adult precedent of autism need can never be rejected by anyone or else they would commit a disability discrimination. But if this holds for adults, it holds for children too. It is national scale biological harming of children, that this many years into autism awareness, school uniform still exists.

Where are the big autism organisations' efforts to save spectrumite children and indeed all children, and adults in the type of jobs concerned, from the primitive body slavery of uniforms? and to stop the march of oppressive ideas like this professors going without even media opposition ?

No oppositional letter was printed in the Sunday Herald, which thus appears to be in favour of pushing the professor's oppressive communist-style openly declared keenness to airbrush out individual identity. He openly wants the uniform to symbolise subjection to authority, in effect he openly admits it is a prison uniform. It will express values of violence to their own medical wellbeing, this he intends to make them feel respectful and positive towards adults, and this the Sunday Herald leaves unchallenged.

Not getting letters printed in national newspapers is quite normal or course, but the Sunday Herald can be a decent letter printer if you write a view that is already part of the predictable established package of progressive views. Thus I have had letters printed on proportional voting and on asylum injustice. But not on the moral desirability of exterminating tigers to protect human life, and not on this. The Sunday Herald shows an interest, not in unlimited critical thought, but only in selling already prexisting established safe attitudes on its side of politics.

Meanwhile, the professor himself can't be reached. So says Strathclyde university, for he has moved on from his visitorship there. So he is nicely shielded from ever getting notified of any medical objections to his oppressive ideas.

Maurice Frank

a letter sent from Elas to social work

2010-12-05T15:02:00.006Z

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.

2010-12-04T13:17:00.005Z

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!!

discriminatory aspie forum

2010-11-11T18:34:00.008Z

Elas was disgusted, several meetings ago, to hear of the plan by some aspies in Glasgow to create an all-Scotland aspie forum - whose membership would only be open to the diagnosed.

I can now confirm its existence - http://saac.freeforums.org

Their basic argument for doing it was that this gave them some sort of "careful" legal protection, because of paedo paranoia. Yet this is even in the adult section. In the kids' section it's more understandable that they are paranoid to have every possible edifice of personal check in place in defence against paedos, but even there, the existence of a supportive adult who thinks the child likely to have AS is enough for pinning down their identity, no extra protection than that comes from having a diagnosis rule.

A diagnosis rule is an apartheid wall between a clique and an underclass. For its victims it repeats every emotional abuse the NT world has done to them already. The selfishness of it, by jeering ribald voices who know they are already safely diagnosed, is exactly like a millionaire who rises out of the gutter then says abolish help for his friends who are still in it. Perhaps even worse, is that a diagnosis rule hands, by choice, to doctors, with their chaotically varied attitudes and educations, the power to choose who is in or out in the aspie scene !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Where then will go the message of all our awareness campaigns towards doctors, our calls for their autism education evidenced by the cases they rubbish?

That is one of the key items in any aspie advocacy or voice on services. The effect of a diagnosis rule is to suppress the issue, Where would this leave our friends starting out in Aberdeen, building up from a point where the folks they will find will be as yet undiagnosed? Or ARGH, dealing with service gaps in many remote areas? It's Central Belt selfishness again. This forum was proposed as an all-Scottish forum, and that claim will be false now, with the differences in ease of access to diagnosis from county to county.

Think how it makes diagnosis even more nerve racking, frightening, that it shall swing whether your fellow aspies have any compassionate welcome for you or not? If you are diagnosed, have you forgotten what the uncertainty before it felt like? What about if your past makes it feel dangerous to go anywhere near a psychiatrist? My way round this was exactly by getting into the scene first before making any move for diagnosis. Only our enemies are helped by taking that strategy away.

They know there are still widespread and very regionally unequal problems, across Scotland and even across the Central Belt outside the cities, in access to diagnosis and to any advice on where to go for it. I will have absolutely nothing to do with a forum that selfishly divides aspie against aspie like this. All caring folks don't join it. It does not speak for Scotland or for the many aspies in need, it speaks only for sloppy negative uncaringness.

Maurice Frank

No Earth for the Meek to Inherit

2010-11-04T13:49:00.002Z

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...”

Bus again already !

2010-10-01T16:29:00.008+01:00

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.

Bus pass danger

2010-09-24T18:26:00.014+01:00

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

Aspie awarded £10,000 damages after getting accused of being a paedophile

2010-07-28T12:27:00.001+01:00

A clear message, as well as an explicit moral message.

This story, from the Daily Telegraph today.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Law student wins £10,000 after being branded a paedophile on Facebook

A law student left fearing reprisals after he was falsely named as a paedophile on Facebook has won a £10,000 libel damages payout at the High Court.

Published: 7:30AM BST 28 Jul 2010

Chef, Jeremiah Barber, 24, posted child porn on the Facebook page of student, Raymond Bryce, along with the comment: "Ray, you like kids and you are gay so I bet you love this picture, Ha ha."

Barber, who had fallen out with Mr Bryce over an £80 debt, removed the post, made on 23 November 2008, within 24 hours.

But he later pleaded guilty to making and distributing an indecent image of a child at Stafford Crown Court and was ordered to carry out 150 hours unpaid work and handed a £1,200 costs bill.

Now top judge Mr Justice Tugendhat, sitting at London's High Court, has awarded Mr Bryce £10,000 in libel damages for the stress he endured, including anxiety that hundreds of people in his local area may have seen the post.

Mr Bryce, 24, who lives with his parents in Stone, Staffs, suffers from high functioning Asperger's Syndrome, but has secured a place on a full time degree course studying law at Stafford University.

The dispute between him and Barber, from Stafford, arose after Mr Bryce lent his former pal £80 and he failed to pay it back, said the judge. Mr Bryce's efforts to secure repayment included obtaining a County Court order.

Judgement was entered for Mr Bryce in the libel case in November last year but he had to return to the High Court for an assesment of his damages.

In the witness box, Mr Bryce said: "Jeremy Barber put a defamatory blog (sic) on Facebook and made me appear to be a paedophile with homosexual tendencies, neither of which is true. He did so with intention and malice.

"When I viewed the pictures I was shocked because they were repulsive and disgusting and in no way reflected my attitude to life. I asked for an apology which I have not to this date received. The whole thing has been distressing, not only for myself but for my family," he added.

Mr Bryce said there had been 11 links to the post, 2 comments from viewers, and more than 800 people would have been able to view the material.

Diana Bryce, Mr Bryce's mother, also took to the witnesss box to tell the judge how the whole family had been put in fear.

"Not more than three streets away from where we live, in a family that we knew, just because the dad looked a bit weird, he was accused of being a paedophile. The family was threatened and there was an arson attack and they all had to be rehoused.

"When Raymond told me about what had happened I was really upset. He couldn't go into town because you didn't know who had been looking at Facebook. It was a vile thing to do, for him and for all our family. This is what you don't want for your son or any of your children.

"He is very easy to send up and he's been the butt of their jokes for years. He was very easy to ridicule and bully, being autistic, and he's had it all his life," she added.

"It was a horrible and really stressful time for all of us. It wouldn't be nice for any family, not knowing how many people have read it and what people are thinking.

"Some people just think there's no smoke without fire," Mrs Bryce concluded.

Mr Justice Tugendhat said: "This was not only defamatory, but a defamation which goes to a central aspect of Mr Bryce's private life as well as his public reputation.

"This post was deeply offensive to him, but also a cause for alarm.

"He could not go out in public because he feared he would be a victim of violence, which is not infrequently the result for those accused of paedophilia.

"It is well known that people accused of being pedophiles may be subjected to serious violence, even when there is no basis for the accusation.

"I can infer that the number of people who saw this Facebook page would have been in the hundreds.

"This post was clearly a malicious act and the defendant has done nothing to express any regret.

"Damages in libel actions are awarded as compensation, not as punishment, to vindicate reputation, to compensate for harm to that reputation and as compensation for injury to feelings.

"I asses the damages in this case at £10,000," the judge concluded, also imposing an injunction banning Barber from repeating the libel.

Barber was neither present, nor represented, during the hearing.

Advice Shop

2010-07-22T11:23:00.007+01:00

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 practises. It is an ethically disturbing pattern of testing our vulnerability to manipulation in conflict with our own wishes.

University with Asperger's

2010-07-21T11:59:00.002+01:00

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.

The Fairest Maid of Graemesburgh

2010-07-13T21:25:00.003+01:00

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.

Vagabonde

2010-06-04T10:39:00.031+01:00

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

writers and artists

2010-05-12T18:58:00.005+01:00

It always pleases me, in solidarity with my Fife and Borders friends, to score points against "Number 6."

So I'm morally fulfilled to find other Elas friends also voicing a concern, over the creative writing booklet produced in the name of Autism Initiatives in Scotland, with contributions made up from folks who attend number 6. Implying that the contributors to it reflect the entire potential creative writing interest available in Scotland to such a group. This when in reality number 6's immoral and emotionally destructive territorial rule means that only folks who live in Lothian had any chance to contribute.

Our friend in Fife who is a prolifically driven creative writer and would want to take part in said group, languishes airbrushed right out of the reality being presented. Not a peep of acknowledgement of his existence. Or what of the folks in another city without yet any equivalent of number 6, Aberdeen, where our friends are still starting out in organising an aspie scene. What if you are a creative writer living there?

This is Autism Initiatives being wonderful do-gooders again, right?

voting hung

2010-05-04T16:48:00.010+01:00

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.

Local campaign on compulsory treatment

2010-04-06T15:08:00.005+01:00

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.

Contributionism

2010-01-06T00:28:00.002Z

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.

Genetic selection against us

2009-12-21T15:12:00.005Z

Genetic selection to prevent our existence is now demonstrably happening. See this page by Helen Keeler on fertility services rejecting eggs from women who have had aspie kids.

the-newrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/12/genetic-screening-for-as.html

Mentoring Aspies and providing them with Moral Armament

2009-12-15T23:50:00.002Z

We Senior Aspies have a paramount duty to young Aspies who have just set out on Life's journey in a manifestly evil world. When I left school in 1960 I admit that I was still emotionally a schoolboy until my mid twenties. I did NOT fall prey to charlatans as have so many young people today thanks to the lifeskills I learned at Red Hill Remideial School which decisively moulded my character in a quite unexpected way. Today a young person is readily drawn into gambling, binge drnking, indebtedness, drugtaking, and violence. Young Aspies are naive and gullible; so very much at risk from people with thoroughly ulterior motives who see them as soft targets - easily exploited. MORAL ARMAMENT of the kind I had learned at Red Hill Schiool enables young Aspies to see through deceptions and adopt measures to thwart the nefarious goals of people with evil inclinations.

Our duty to young Aspies is to provide them with this MORAL ARMAMENT. Our goals must always be kept in mind; our proteges deserve rewarding careers, happy marriages, the joy of parenthood, friendships and widening horizons that come about by the development of all their latent abilities.

(Important: Do not confuse Moral Armament with MORAL REARMAMENT a religious movement founded by a German that flourished for about 40 years and is now quite moribund).

Despite our Aspergerisms and ingrained autonomous relexes that give rise to distressing behaviours, we can overcome these Aspergerisms by acceptance, understanding and the lifelong exercise of STERN WILLPOWER. So each is destined in his own right way, an exemplary life to display (Q.v. below: "Exemplary Life Movement") We have apparently intractable problems to solve. The young Aspie who sees through the shallowness of modern society may well retreat into his private obsessionalisms and become totally isolated in what amounts to a private fantasy world. This is no less damaging than being corrupted by his peers and so acquiring a criminal record. IF Senior Aspies befriend such vulnerable young people it is OUR DUTY to provide them with a varied menu of life-affirming pursuits and training in vocationally related lifeskills.

We need a better Code of Behaviour than traditional morality.

Traditional Judaeo-Christian morality is very much a packhorse bridge truly collapsed under the traffic of modern wrongdoing. This morality was satisfactory for a quite primitive agricultural society. Its prohibitions are no longer appropriate to our world. Hence it is rightly rejected. But as the French philosopher Durkheim observed a century ago:

"the central problem of every civilisation is the restraint of greed" and

"those most in need of morality are those most likely to reject it"

I owe my late, devoutly Christian father an enormous backhanded compliment following his fatuous fulminations during a row about religion in 1967. This spurred me to construct a Rational Code of Human Conduct thjat made God redundant, that came to be known as Contributionism. As 1967 was the year of the Gay News blasphemy trial I feared that I would be charged with blasphemy if I was found to be the author. So I invented a myth that it was the work of a schoolpal called Alan Wright, and this mythology has given rise to my greatest achievement in life, my trilogy of novels about Alan Wright, a.k.a. The Socrates of Charford (q.v. Appendix)

Functional and Dysfunctional Prohibitions

Orthodox Judaism lives in the past and its practitioners share a corporate obsessional compulsive disorder. It has failed to come to terms with science and the need for society to operate continuously day and night. Never more so than the Sabbatarian restrictions. A reliable source told me about an Orthodox Jew who alighted in a tiny Shropshire town just before dusk on a Friday in December because his religion FORBADE HIM TO USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT after dusk on Fridays and the train was delayed. He is said to have made a thorough nuisance of himself and eventually was taken willy nilly by police car to Shrewsbury! He lacked the intelligence to realise that no harm could come to him by travelling by train after dark on a Friday!

All those dogmatic religious people whom I have ever suffered were those who lacked the intelligence to cope with the world as we find it. That included my late parents, for whom, the correct wine to serve with roast beef was far more important than my schoolwork. I have yet to meet Christians who understand the elementary general science I had mastered even at age 12. All too often I meet Christians who are dangerously incompetent at such matters as using electricity. At Red Hill School, boys were encouraged to find out for themselves so I read science textbooks. Ar age 12 I had understood the principles of flight so well as to design and build a small model aircraft with swept back wings like the then state of the art Hawker Hunter fighter. My father sternly frowned upon my scientific hobbies particularly model railways. It was through model railways that I decisively overcame one major Asperger handicap - clumsiness with hands, and absorbed far more applied maths than I learned in school. Today however Christians in the Blair government are bent on prohibiting all those life affirming pursuits which form good character in young people.

YET self-destructive behaviours are tacitly condoned indeed encouraged (e.g. by the extension of licensing hours).

I have coined the word GRICEHOOD from the German GREIS, stupid old man, to denote a state of self-inflicted stupefaction. Our society is GRICEBOUND, incapable of rising out of this stupefaction. Advertisers GRICE (maliciously stupefy) the public.

What grices, diminishes people, and is evil. A rational code of behaviour would prohibit anything that diminishes anybody in any way. So to a total ban on smoking, gambling, and the consumption of substances which impair mental or physical functioning. It would however encourage every possible kind of life-affirming, mentally expanding activity. The outcome would be a society of polymaths such as I describe in my novella WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET (q.v.).

Moral watertightness is expected of Mentors.

All in a fellowship of Mentors have to struggle to live exemplary lives and abstain from any behaviours that diminish themselves or anyboidy else. They must therefore be teetotal non smokers who do not gamble, do not get into debt and do not over eat. Yet they can be excused minor peccadilloes which can be the vices of their virtues. It would be inconsistent of a Mentor for example to jump on anybody with bad handwriting if he wrote with an illegible scrawl. But Mentors can be excused such traits as parsimony, untidiness and scatterbrainedness.

Young Aspies at risk of psychotic breakdown if rejected by their peers.

We Senior Aspies must reach into the hurt minds of such people and gently guide them into as wide a range of wholesome challenging intelligence-enhacing pursuits as possible. Othersise as they are rejected by their peers they will be locked into their own private fantasy-worlds and never acquire either the lifeskills or the motivation to hold down jobs, still less find partners and ultimately when their partners die they will be totally incapable of fending for themselves.

Conflict with Religious Fundamentalists.

Aspies from Muslim, Catholic or fundamentalist Christian homes need very special care. There is a likelihood of a head on clash with paretns or siblings and priests because AS is seen as a besetting moral failing to be extirpated by cruel and ineffective "treatment". The client needs to be taken away from the damaging home environment and transplanted into a community where his latent abilities are drawn out (e.g. by taking up challenging outdoor activities). So to redefining himself in terms of his new found prowess and so to a convulsive paradigm shift, a penetrating change of attitudes, values and behaviour. Then (as I portray my characters in my Socrates of Charford scripts) the young person finds a partner and lives happily ever after in the felowsip of insightful people. However (as I have portrayed in a few of my scripts) it is likely that the young person will abruptly and painfully regress to his former self when in the company of culprit kinspeople. Then the young person needs a Mentor and Guide of the calibre of Alan Wright who always scorches the culprit kinspeople with righteous wrath. Aspies from fundamentalist backgrounds desperately need champions of the downtrodden, of the calibre of Alan Wright.

Conflict with "Mammonism"

The young Aspie has to live in a society bent on self-destruction. I am one of many who foresee the imminent breakdown of civilisation. Accordingly I have described a Successor-civilisation in my novella WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET. Here American businessman Lincoln Steen has a severely emotionally disturbed son who will not talk. He flies to "Avalonshire" in south Wales to observe Alan Wright's Contributionist civilisation - a society of polymaths whose only passion is to share the fruits of their self-createdness with their neighbours and Distinguished Foreign Visitors. Alan Wright agrees to treat Steen's son and his son moves to Avalonshire to flourish ever after. The basis of this civilisation is moral deveopment to Alan's own lofty level. This is quite independent of any pre-existent religious teaching but its ethics are congruent with those of Judaism, Nonconformist Christianity and to a certain extent, Buddhism. Masefield's poens SEEKERS and A CREED synerae to form much of Contributionst theology so that the fictitious Welsh city of Romanbridge becomes the "City of God, where Radiant people meet" in SEEKERS, whilst A CREED's Reincarnationist Strict Consequentialism is a more certain moral sheet anchor than any Christian prohibitionisms. So I portray a society where people with distressing peculiarities of every possible kind redefine themselves by their Contributions to the Common Good; and paramountly their practice of the Higher Loves.

"Love" is an utterly devalued word.

I replace it with the Greek words AGAPE, CARITAS and DELPHILY.

AGAPE is the general duty to care for the planet in every possible way.

CARITAS is the universl obligation of every adult to one another - "good Samaritanism".

DELPHILY is the highest of loves; care for someone as a Vessel of God, Willingness to make sacrifices for that person and in the ultimate resort, the duty to take such steps as are necessary to prevent a self-harming loved person from further harm. That may sadly include "sectioning".

Can we Aspies initiate a life-affirmation movement that might yet save Earth from Mankind?

There is NO active influential life-affirmation movement comparable to the Temperance Movement of a century ago. This was backed by the Nonconformist Churches and Scottish Presbyterianism. It provided wholesome pursuits for vulnerable young people and even operated an alcohol-free paddle steamer that took poor Glaswegians to fabulous distant places like Kilcreggan!

I put it to ELAS and PHAD and the Glasgow Autistic Centre.

I am now 64 years old and I have a paramount duty to pass on all my lifeskills, expereince, knowledge, insights and supremely my values to young Aspies before I die, so that they shall develop all their latent faculties and pursue careers, enjoy happy marriages, parenthood, friendships, widening horzons, fulfilment despite what we must all come to terms with. And so become what I term CARYATIDS after the statues in the Erectheum on the Acropolis - people who by their exemplary lives affirm the God Within Themselves and form the moral engine of society. So giving rise to that indefinitely sustainable society I describe in WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET. Accordingly I seek FEEDBACK from this Account and the next stage will be to draw up a programme with my commitment to give all of myself to the service of my fellow Aspies until I drop dead. Thus my life preaches my faith.

I anxiously await that Feedback from Readers of this Account.

David Seagrave, Kirkcaldy 3.1.2006

ELAS Weekend Away 2009 - Berwick-upon-Tweed

2009-09-29T22:31:00.001+01:00

The Berwick Trip

This year, the local Edinburgh-based AS group, ELAS, located their long weekend break in Berwick with the plan of hanging out together and exploring the attractions of the town and neighbouring Northumberland area.

The trip was organised by members of ELAS and consisted of seven AS people and a NT support worker. The ensemble took over a charming guesthouse, very close to the historic town hall, which had an elaborate layout of rooms and included external metal spiral staircases and balconies.

On Friday, we walked round the impressive Elizabethan Walls and visited the Gymnasium Gallery to see a film installation of abandoned Soviet gymnasia from the Brezhnev era.

On Saturday, we spent the morning in the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. We looked at the ruins of the Benedictine Chapel and walked around the striking Lindisfarne Castle. In the afternoon, we went to Bamburgh, a town dominated by a mighty castle, though only one of us actually visited it, the others went into town or set off on a trek along the lovely beach and dunes to Seahouses – a fish, chips and mushy peas paradise.

On Sunday, we went to Alnwick. We all went to the gardens except one who visited the large castle. With the sun shining, the gardens were beautiful. There were lots of things to see including the great water cascade, the tree house, the poisoned garden and the serpent garden full of intriguing water sculptures.

On Monday, some of us left early while others walked around the town walls down by the quay and scrutinised the ruins of the castle, viewed incongruously from the platform of Berwick Train Station. The last party caught the 3:55pm bus back to Edinburgh.

We mostly ate out. My favourite haunts were the Castlegate Café, Sinners, the Castle and the Maltings Theatre and Arts Centre in Berwick, the Bamburgh Castle Inn in Seahouses and the incredible tree house in Alnwick.

Power to all our friends

2009-09-29T18:42:00.005+01:00

When he became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown promised to reform our democracy. He said he'd listen. He said he'd learn. But he didn't act.

Over 2 years have passed since then and a few moments ago the PM finally promised a referendum on electoral reform - but not until after the next election. This is not enough.

Our democracy needs change. I know that you've already submitted your ideas to the POWER2010 campaign - you've already played an important role. But I need your help to spread the word. You can invite your friends to take part here:

http://power2010.org.uk/invite

Maurice - our movement just became all the more important. Today the Prime Minister had the opportunity to commit to real change, but he failed to do so. Delivering change now rests on each of our shoulders rather than his.

Together we can change our politics. But we need your help. Please invite your friends to tell us their ideas for change - it should only take you a minute or two.

http://power2010.org.uk/invite

The challenge has been thrown down - it's up to each of us to meet it.

Best wishes,
Pam Giddy
Director, POWER2010.

I justify this as relevant for this blog, because this is simply about ordinary folks' opportunities to participate in democracy, and if you like you can think of any particularly aspie ways it needs making easier to participate. Like maybe? Stronger ways of forcing committal answers out of them when you write to them, and avoid the need to struggle to to go to their "surgeries" and speak to them?

The idea I have submitted, is an automatic right that any person's knowledge about any ill-treatment that goes on as a result of regularly applied practices, that is not already wide public knowledge, to be published on a wide circulation scale. The stength of this idea is, it can be demanded not just proposed, because the state is seen to commit illegal vulnerable adult abuse if it refuses to actually implement this idea! Many of the unrealised wrongs that could then be publicised are aspie specific.

Maurice Frank

America and the Royal Bank of Scotland

2009-09-26T10:32:00.006+01:00

3 aspies in the Scottish scene, to my knowledge alone, have made recent or present visits to the United States. Others are more daunted by the fraught and risky pospect of that country's arbitrary and chancy entry barriers, which are on edge against any imperfection in foreign visitors, disabilities included, though this is never discussed in our media. It would very obviously be an injustice in the scene, if supportive chats and swapping of experiences should just accept easier US access for some than others. That the ups and downs of social experiences located in the US, for some, should be shared and receive support while not all are confident they would have access to that country at all. As a point of disability discrimination, such arbitrary difference between the accessibility of the same experience to folks with the same condition shouldn't be possible.

Now, more than just another protest that the big autism organisations will ignore as they always do with all ordinary aspies' issues. There is something timely to do about this one. While others have been having adventures in the US, I have had one concerning the US. Consider this. Read 3 paragraphs about a banking problem here at home, then see how it impacts on US travel. I have been writing the following to all the constitutional reform campaigns and others like Jubilee Debt.

**

The Royal Bank of Scotland, among the biggest players in the banking crash, has rejected doing a clear ethical duty for its customers against a blatant violation of a basic democratic principle: innocent until proved guilty. RBS is supposed to be getting cleaned up and showing us all so to rebuild confidence. Instead, there is now a reform to be forced in the West's basic standards towards its citizens by exposing that our second biggest bank is still offending.

There is now a security system around bank cards, that has never been publicly announced, in which your card can be blocked without warning while they check up on any activity that fits a profiling system's view of being suspicious. If you find your card blocked when you use it in a shop, you have to answer confusing security questions to RBS over the phone, which will take time, so unwarned you may suddenly face a choice between losing your card or missing transport and not reaching your next destination - on time or at all. It happened to me after I used my card to pay 50p for a coach seat reservation, because that is an unusually small transaction and card fraudsters often test systems with "dummy transactions" of this size. Okay if they explain this to folks, but I made a complaint about all the life situations I could think of where unfair effects can be caused if this can happen without warning and you don't know how to prevent it.

Anything at all that counts as "unusual", even just for you personally, can trigger a security block, so if you can think of anything unusual you intend to do with your card you are now advised to inform the bank first. This you only learn after having your first experience of a problem. Foreign travel is always one of the "unusual" items that you should notify.

Now - pair this with how this security includes profiling that makes assumptions about the customer, which means, about their character, and RBS itself says it does not know all the details of how the system it is using makes its assumptions! Apply this to travel to the United States. The Western superpower's immigration control system is in massive violation of the basic human rights standards the West says it stands for. It asks foreign visitors, as one question, "Have you ever been arrested or convicted" for any crime. It requires innocent people who have been arrested to declare the details just like a criminal record, it does not treat them as spotlessly innocent, burt as carrying a likelihood to be guilty that the US will pass its own opinion on regardless of the person not being found guilty in court. They may never even have gone to court.

The US has not signed up to the International Convention on Civil + Political Rights, but on any reckoning of international law and the standards that coutnries with uncorrupted law must show to each other's citizens, the US's entry control system is illegal. My complaint about the bank card problem gave RBS, which does business in the US too, an opportunity to lay claim to have the US's system abolished! because it is causing card security here in Britain to be undermined by an illegal human rights violation affecting customers here. This follows because if an RBS customer plans a visit to the US, known to the bank, then is refused entry on grounds of character tarring by an arrest, and by any other event the card security system discovers that the customer is not in the US when they should be, it can make assumptions about what has happened and about the customer's character. This is clearly a violation of the customer, on the human rights count of judicial propriety and on data protection. So RBS commits such a violation, upon its cardholders here in Britain, by leaving it possible for this to happen, by refusing to take the formal legal position I described towards the United States and all its business there. By taking this position, RBS could have forced the US to stop operating this outrageous system that most of the Western public are quite unaware of unless they have travelled there.

Now - by speaking out about RBS's failiure, you can force an end to this system. The ethical impact on the working of banks still stands despite RBS's silence on it. Others, reform campaigns, can publicise the fact instead. This is an actual case, an actual bank customer complaint, around actual practices in bank card security. To speak out what RBS should have done is to cite the same illegal violation by the US upon folks here, to make it known to be that - and so to actually force its abolition. All cooperation of law and police and business between the US and here will now collapse into illegality unless the US's use of a question about arrests is terminated forthwith, abolished not even as a policy shift but specifically as illegal. A major democratic reform, that affects folks' lives and character records here. You [meaning any reform campaign group I write this to] can force it to happen, just by exposing this bank issue. So please do!!

So will they?

Maurice Frank

further to the library

2009-09-10T16:58:00.013+01:00

Sep 10: Further to my item in April, it's still current and I want folks to dig it out and remain aware of it coz this is important !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

- on the library internet system being changed for a worse system, with a built-in time cut-off that can make you lose your work if you hit any technical problems over the net running slow when you are trying to save. Which is provenly bad for us if we are trying to use the web to communicate to organise to meet up with researchers and the like.

The change is going badly. At Newington library, computer users are being told that the one they have converted to the "Netloan" system that it's not working very well, and advise against choosing to use it.

Same as nobody uses it in the downstairs room at Central, where the first conversion to it was made. This is because the new system is a bad system, so bad it's not worth introducing - and the libraries trying it out are now finding that in practice.

Oct 28: The system's piecemeal further extension is a total shambles, and the system's own faults are visibly why, to every annoyed library user who is struggling with it. Timers are going wrong, starting their count with 2 minutes already missing that have not passed, just like in Fife. Sometimes computers are taking 6 minutes to log in, and the solution to slowness, available under the old system, of telling the previous user not to log out, is no longer available in this system. The system for staff to set bookings is working too slowly, so that you are frantic if they are racing against the timer to set an extended booking. Mostly the staff don't know how to work the extension system, either. There are blocks in the system that are meant to force a minimum time gap between users' sessions, the staff are struggling to override these in order to do extensions. These blocks shut you out of the system half the tmem and refute the chicken-and-egg idea that you are supposed to log in to the system just to book when you are going to log in!! I mean, what the ... At central reference where it used to be you could see exactly how long the queue was, you no longer have any idea when you will get a vacancy. Unless you stare over all the users' shoulders to see their timers, which is unlikely to be allowed or popular, so you have to bother the staff more than before and with a question it takes them a long time to answer, so the new system is not saving them work at all, and the answer is supposed to be that you have made prebookings that are difficult or impossible to get a chance to make for much of the time. Staff in every library where I have observed, which is many, are frustrated and stuck and apologetic the whole time.

Everyone can see none of this should be happening. Everyone can see only the old system worked. Everyone can see this is a disability injustice that was totally preventable.

Maurice Frank

TALENTS

2009-07-20T23:09:00.000+01:00

I am aged 41 now. For all but the last decade I led a normal life. Or at least I thought I did. I had no reason to think otherwise.

I had no option other than to think I was normal. It was what society expected of me. Even if I thought deep down I might not be.

As I reached the age of 31, I was at my wit's end, at the end of my tether wondering why - although I thought I was normal, I was not getting along very well in the trappings of "normal" life. Especially meeting, and making relationships, with women. I wondered why I was only getting anywhere with women at Sainsbury's. Surely that wasn't "normal".

Desperate for solutions, I went to my GP. I was willing to look anywhere for assistance. Why was the life of someone apparently "normal" not turning out in a "normal" way?

It was from that consultation with my GP that my life changed. I was diagnosed with a syndrome. A syndrome that makes me extremely talented. That was why I wasn't really normal. I thought, "Wow". This news gave me a new "oomph", a new vibrancy. It was like winning the FA Cup. I knew it paid off not to be normal.

This syndrome has features such as being good at communication, due to my vocabulary, and my phenomenal memory, and general knowledge, and my prowess in pursuits such as Scrabble. The syndrome also causes me to be able to make sparkling conversation and connect well with others due to admittedly obsessive interests (the Sainsbury's thing was discussed at length with my GP). It is what causes me to be very academically bright, meaning there's no limit to how far I can go in life, as doors are open in any field I wish and I can get a job anywhere due to academic performance.

Anxiety can be a side effect of the syndrome. But that’s a talent in itself when it occurs, as it shows me where people with my syndrome can be better supported, and helps me in stating the case for fairness and understanding. Other powers the syndrome gives me are useful sensory skills like detecting temperature, sounds, smells and details such as correct language usage better than typical people.

Speaking of which, here’s a little story. When I was 35 I did have a girlfriend, named Kathryn. Kathryn was a doctor, so she was super smart. With my eye for correct and proper language I noticed, as smart as she was, she didn’t seem able to use capitals when typing, including when typing her own name. To cut a long story short, my curiosity about this led to a bust-up. A case of my super powers getting the better of me.

Greater self-awareness and knowledge of my extreme talent would later enable me to become chief executive of Sainsbury's, and World Scrabble Champion.

But back to the present, I just told a friend Jessie that I've just been diagnosed with a syndrome which gives me all the super-powers I've just mentioned. How I have the special power to focus so well on things, helping me do anything I want to do. How my GP told me that some guy on the continent, who lived during the early 20th century, his name sounded something like Mr Asperger, had powers just like mine. How I'm so impressed with that.

My friend had a special admission to make too. She has the powers a famous person was known to have, in this case another continental chap Mr Bleuler. These powers include prediction of the future, being able to read people’s minds, and the insight to see and hear stuff no-one else can. It really helps Jessie to think very well outside the box and have a lot of unique ideas, perceptions and takes on life. I thought, "Wow, that's just as amazing as my powers" and wished I had them.

To prove that like typical people, I don’t get things right all the time, I once said to Jessie, “Are you delusional or something?”

“I’m delusional? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I’m thinking that it’s probably better if you don’t talk to me any more.”

That was that, but there’s no doubt I have done extremely well due to my powers.

Stigma

2009-07-06T10:52:00.003+01:00

This is an account written by a man with Asperger's, prior to his diagnosis of AS. He has requested the following article to be published on the blog to illustrate the difficulties that people with AS can have without adequate or appropriate support.

I am presenting a brutally frank account of my lifelong struggle to overcome a stigma which has so scarred me that I have been unable to hold down a job or find a wife. I am sure that my account will offend some dogmatic religious fanatics such as my late father who was primarily responsible for the stigma in the first place.

I am aged 61 now and I was born of fairly well to do people from North Devon. I lived at Bideford until 1947 and then moved to the railway rolling stock town of Lancing in Sussex. There I attended primary school until 1952.

On the very first day I remember running towards a grassy enclosure with humps – air raid shelters – and being grabbed by a teacher in front of the other children. I did well at primary school but I was called LOONY by many other children. My devoutly Christian parents made an inordinate fuss about religious observance, excretion and swearwords. I was acutely aware of CLASS DISTINCTIONS at age 7 when told NOT TO PLAY with COMMON LITTLE BOYS.

I was stigmatized by pupils and staff at different schools because I could not perform in the gymnasium or on the sports field. I was totally overwhelmed by the “input overload” of children singing hymns at school assembly and to this day I get a flashback of the disgrace I was in whenever I hear certain hymn tunes.

I passed the Eleven Plus a year early and was sent to Steyning Grammar School as a boarder when my father moved up the coast to Seaford some 40 kms away. In those days Seaford was a town full of social fossils, wealthy cranks who aped the extravagances of Edwardian aristocrats. Just as the incessant gales stunted trees, so in the all pervading social atmosphere, children grew up there with severe cognitive distortions that they were entirely unaware of until pitched into other social milieu where they had to be confronted with the wide world but a short busride away. I was SO DESPERATELY HOMESICK that I tried to suffocate myself. So began my lifelong mental distress in earnest. I was NOT ALLOWED to visit my family at weekends though it was about an hour’s journey by bus with a change at Brighton (Indeed I was to travel appreciably further to work every day at my first job). In that autumn I was taken ill and sent to hospital. In March 1953 I began attending Lewes Grammar School a short trainride from Seaford. There, fellow pupils took blatant advantage of my naivety and I committed pranks which had a sexual content. I was just a normal boy with a healthy curiosity about everything. I was rapidly lapping up the principles of flight and indeed a short while later DESIGNED AND BUILT a model plane with swept back wings that actually flew. My curiosity extended to the workings of the human body and the other boys who ran off with my satchel and fountain pens all plied me with smutty talk. I remember for instance when asked what a prostitute was I SAID THAT IT’S A HUGE BUILDING in London and they all roared with laughter.

I have coined the word MINDQUAKE to denote and event that induces mental instability in an otherwise normal person. Such as for example being falsely accused of a crime. Now what happened to me in May 1953 was a Mindquake of such severity that I have never in fact recovered from it. I was flung into permanent disgrace for simply using SWEAR WORDS! It immediately set off a florid personality disorder which of itself brought about further stigmatization. That personality disorder included a conviction that at age ELEVEN I was a LUNATIC and a SEX MANIAC. People especially woman were “land mines”. The only safe path in life was self banishment.

I was too ashamed of myself to make friends. For nearly a year I was absent from school and never as a boy recovered lost ground in maths, I retreated into myself and then I was sent to a prep school in Seaford. I feared that I might swear accidentally. This grew in my mind to be a hideous mental cancer and it was as late as 1992 that I realized I had OCD and in fact I was one of many people thinly scattered round the world who had delusions that we were mad – funny thing to say that! Yes DELUSIONS THAT WE WERE MAD but in fact we are saner than the common run of people. Such insights had to wait until I found Frederick Toates’ book in Cumbernauld Library in 1992 decades after any action could be taken to extirpate this mental ulcer.

FEAR OF SWEARING BY ACCIDENT persisted well into adult life and even now I am smitten with a subconscious fear when I use swear words as INVOLUNTARY CRIES OF PAIN that come from my lips as inevitably as blood flows from a wound. I am SO SCARED OF GIVING OFFENCE to Christian people that my relationship is poisoned whenever I get to know that anybody has strong religious views.

In 1955 I was sent to Red Hill Residential School “For Maladjusted Boys” near Maidstone. At first I thought that it was a “Broadmoor for Boys” but I soon ceased to be homesick. There the eccentric headmaster Otto Shaw administered his version of psychoanalysis. I dutifully disclosed absolutely everything I could remember about my life down to my parents’ obsessions with excretion. I was required to write down my dreams and Shaw made interpretations. This I took as GOSPEL TRUTH and soon after I was reading psychology books to become au fait with Freudian theories by the time I had left school, I was happy and my intellect blossomed there amongst fellow pupils who valued me as a friend – I was secure and I treasure the memories of my Red Hill days.

However strife broke out during holidays and I told Shaw all about it including a theatrical row where I was spanked with a section of model railway track. My father never took any interest in my schoolwork and kicked up a fuss about model aircraft (which smelt of glue and trespassed into neighbours’ gardens) and model railways – I was constantly picked upon for alleged rudeness. I was NEVER TOLD ABOUT MY INTELLECTUAL POTENTIAL but it was regarded as a DARK SECRET LIKE A SEXUAL PERVERSION.

When in early 1958 my father told me that we were all going abroad I promptly TAUGHT MYSELF GERMAN in a dormitory where by barrack room democracy MY RADIO blared out mindless pop music. I would be mastering German grammar rule by rule and so was the ONLY member of the family to speak German. In 1959 we went abroad again and I taught myself MORE GERMAN as well as doing similar exercises from a grammar book of 1910 with obsolete words like “Droschke” for taxi. On that visit I bought a train ticket from Uberlingen Ost to Uberlingen Stadt all of a man for my 17 years and melted into the town like any lad from a station up the line. My father NEVER FORGAVE ME for that affirmation of my ability, or as my RK teacher Canon Norwood always maintained, the Presence of God manifest in me as I persisted with German grammar.

NOBODY told me about Universities so I was FROGMARCHED into the Civil Service on leaving school. I entered the Civil Service National Open Competitions and was NINTH out of 1776 candidates for the Clerical Class and in the top hundred in the Executive Class. Shaw was cock a hoop at this result. He crowed to my father that I had the brains to become a Cabinet Minister and my father was very offended indeed.

My first job was the Sisyphean adding up of salaries in £.s.d. 8 months later I was sacked for being too slow. So Permanent Disgrace resumed for nigh on a year and with it recurred all the symptoms of the post expulsion personality disorder. Feelings ran high at home when I retreated into myself, avoided my peers and felt that I was essentially a parasite. I had NO RIGHT TO ENJOY ANYTHING when unemployed. I was then sent to a Ministry of Labour Industrial Rehabilitation Unit where I amazed fellow inmates by BUILDING MODEL RAILWAY TRUCKS from working drawings. This hobby also impressed the staff I was given the Eysenckian personality and aptitude tests administered to conscripts. These showed that I was head and shoulders above the rest of the inmates in intellect and somehow the sight of those model railway trucks gave the staff the impression that I would do well as a laboratory technician.. a monumental non sequitur (Not that my father would understand that Latinism – he REPRIMANDED me for using Latinisms right up to the very last meeting some years before he died.

I had vainly sought a job as a railway clerk but was deemed unfit for unspecified medical reasons. Eventually I got a job as a lab technician at a London comprehensive school. There I was used as a pawn in a sordid game played by two science teachers to discredit one another. 8 months later I got the sack and again I was pitched into permanent disgrace.

During the spells of unemployment I became very anxious and jittery in the presence of authority. This was to become a conditioned reflex later in life after harassment by the police and what happened to me in Stirling in 1997 (q.v. below).

In 1967 I got a job in a London museum and a fortnight later I had an accident which seemed to be a spill in Sevenoaks and I was unable to go to work the following day (I have fragmentary memories of coming off my scooter in Sevenoaks and without knowing how, finding myself in my lodgings in London). When I went to work I was summoned to the boss, a Dr Claringbull, and accused of either breaking or stealing a mineral specimen and offending Italians and other matters like allegedly being rude to my immediate superiors. I was sacked on the spot and told that the Museum would not be able to provide references. I was “taken onto the staff against their better judgment”. This Mindquake nearly pitched me head first into the Thames. I was only held back because I had university applications in the pipeline. Were I to have been told that I was rejected, at that time, I really think that I would have ended my life.

I was briefly in a Day Hospital until I got another job which lasted until I went to university. Yet I had to put this down on job applications when I graduated and this was a heinous as admission of a criminal record.

I plummeted into the same state of despair as before as I wearily trudged round London looking for jobs. On my 21^st birthday I had to “sign on” at dingy Battersea labour exchange and that was supremely hurtful. My father as ever was hostile towards any efforts of mine to improve myself such as the smattering of Russian I had taught myself on train journeys to work. He was particularly scornful of my model railways and held me to BLAME for NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH to master maths at Red Hill School YET I was lapping up applied geometry when I built model lineside structures from cardboard got from cartons! And indeed built a model engine from plywood and card!

How I was mortified, absolutely mortified by disgrace, shame, an abiding conviction of flawedness when unemployed! How it poisoned my already fragile capacity to make friends! I was badgered to take part in social events within my father’s circle and was exceedingly on edge with strangers. I was absolutely certain that they would know already about my dark secrets. My father even said to neighbours within my earshot that I was mentally unstable.

When at Glasgow University I was in my element but during vacations I got the sack after struggling to satisfy employers and it was then that I felt suicidal and TOLD MY FATHER ABOUT IT. He rubbed salt into ancient wounds by the content and style of his reprimands. I would feel my manhood drain out of me whenever I had to go to Sussex for a vacation and the train entered Sussex. I would feel like a guilty schoolboy in my father’s presence until 1981 when I was maimed and from Christmas 1984 when family strife resumed with full ferocity till the last ever visit in 1996 when there was a flaming row.

Graduation joy was very ephemeral and soon afterwards I was plucked off the Glasgow streets by plain clothes police and dumped in the Woodilee Mental Hospital. I was waiting for a Glencoe bound bus with impedimental for a weekend’s climbing and dressed in shabby climbing attire and had on my person such necessities as a COMPASS a MAP and a CAMERA. This was at the time the severest mindquake of all and upon my release it became known to me that my devoutly Catholic landlady had lied to the police that I was a drugtaker. There had been much friction with her and another Catholic landlady over such matters as my model trains and daftest of all my “obscene pin ups” of OLD STEAM LOCOMOTIVES and ENLARGEMENTS OF MY VERY OWN MODELS!

I had been stopped by the police on other occasions such as when carrying wet enlargements; a mysterious object with arch shaped cutouts which is a MODEL OF THE MORAR VIADUCT and most ludicrous of all MY MODEL OF A SOUTHWOLD RAILWAY COACH (scrapped in 1929) which were all the subjects of lengthy cross examinations within earshot of bystanders.

I had a succession of motor scooters wont to break down and TWICE in Stirling I was harassed by the police when a machine malfunctioned and could only start by bumpstarting. On another occasion it broke down on the Rest and Be Thankful pass during a gale and the police were called and they accused me of blocking the road.

Father would get at me all the time during my frantic futile search for a job or post graduate course. He was exceedingly hostile towards my ambition to do a Ph D. Eventually I was badgered to accept a place at Stafford Polytechnic to study computer science. Within a week of starting I was hopelessly out of my depth. Then followed acrimonies and both father and brother accused me of not trying hard enough. I dropped out and my Stigma fell on top of me. Again I was vainly seeking work and again my father was nagging me “SET YOUR SIGHTS LOWER”, he always insisted and he had bizarre ideas that I MUST BECOME A POSTMAN! If ever I demonstrated my intellect in his company he was quick to denigrate me such as a memorable row about photographs I had taken of the newly created Ballachulish Bridge which gave me boundless joy.

What a crime it was for me to express JOY in his company! And how presumptuous it was of me to aspire to share my knowledge of photography, of the Highlands, of the subjects I had graduated in! What offence caused by the Latinisms which flowed from my lips and the jargon of psychology, of aviation, of photography!

The late seventies dragged on with brief spells of temporary work chiefly fruitpicking and occasional expensive train journeys to fruitless interviews. My morale sank ever lower with each rejection. The Ministry of Labour Officials decided that I needed treatment in the PERSONALITY DISORDER UNIT of the local mental hospital which shared extensive grounds with another hospital. I went to the WRONG HOSPITAL and so never attended the Personality Disorder Unit which took in people sent from the Courts.

During those years unemployment soared and so I gradually lost a feeling of disgrace especially when in the company of people in the protest movements. An important latent function of CND and suchlike movements was to alleviate my loneliness and draw me out of my reclusivism. I formed friendships with laid-back rebels and critics of the Thatcher regime.

In 1981 I was hit by a drunken driver near Stafford and had my right leg amputated below the knee. This had a supremely paradoxical impact in that I immediately SHED MY STIGMA and for about a decade I was free of it when living in Stafford during the halcyon years of my life. I moved to Cumbernauld in 1991 in the belief that I could create a role for myself as a tutor in the demanding intellectual pursuits which made my life meaningful but my hopes were soon dashed when I was snubbed by every voluntary organization that I had approached. Then followed intimidation and religious strife and RESTIGMATISATION.

I moved to a fine house at Banknock at the end of the M80 from Stirling. My parents had coerced me into buying it and it had a big garden for an outdoor model railway which I was never to start. I was burgled days after moving in and the scar of that event abides. Soon afterwards I was intimidated by Catholic mobs and suffered unremitting harassment. I was charged with a BREACH OF THE PEACE namely a sarcastic remark about the Catholic religion after neighbours flatly refused to turn off a tap during a flood in my home and then accused me of BREACH OF DECORUM namely being seen in my garden with false leg detached. These very neighbours who paraded their piety went on to SMASH MY WINDOWS BURN DOWN MY GARAGE and SMEAR EXCREMENT ON MY WALLS so the house was sold at a massive loss and I retreated to Cumbernauld.

There the intimidation was even worse than at Banknock. I had NINE Honda C90 scooters stolen one after another from 1992 to 2000. Windows were repeatedly smashed at both Cumbernauld and Banknock. I was regularly molested BY gangs of children wherever I went and my glasses got smashed and drying clothes got pilfered. CATHOLIC social workers in Cumbernauld had the cheek to insist that I was to blame for my plight because I wear RIDING ATTIRE to hold my false leg on securely and because of the way I speak I was unacceptable because I did not conform to the “values” of my neighbours and indeed DESPICABLY ODD because I HATED FOOTBALL and neither knew nor cared about football teams. I was in their eyes also despicable because I “play with toy trains” (anything BUT toys! As fragile as Dresden china figurines and all of them manifestations of my drive to self-mastery!)

On Sept 11^th 1997 I went to photograph a pageant in Stirling and was dressed in smart homemade Gripperbreeks and immaculate white shirt and TIE and equally immaculate jacket and shoes. I had on me five 35mm cameras and spare films and a screw in auxiliary wide angle lens and a CHANGING BAG with which to rewind a film in my Zenith which cannot be accomplished in daylight due to some unexpected malfunction. There I was assaulted THRICE by the police and later accused of MASTURBATION IN PUBLIC namely rewinding the film in the Zenith with its back opened inside the bag. My explanation cut no ice and I suffered agonies for two years indeed the very act of disclosure elicits a sharp replay of what happened to such an extent that as I type I relive all the agony. It is so hurtful that whenever I see the name STIRLING on a signpost I have s sharp jab of mental sciatica as I do whenever I see the apparatus that was confiscated for two years which I now rarely use. This is by far so far the most hurtful experience of my life and I have to declare that in the light of my experiences in Scotland since 1993 I simply cannot stick the SCOTS except perhaps UNIVERSITY GRADUATES who alone amongst the Scots behave as mature adults.

CATHOLICS have always been quick to jump on me for the most trivial of reasons. I can recall numerous incidents since boyhood where I clashed with Catholics. They got at me for developing films, one Catholic man made off with a precious hand made model engine later recovered in pieces from a dustbin, and I have referred to the Catholic landladies. During my stay at Banknock I made discreet investigations and my findings confirmed all my worst fears that Catholics are “the Enemy within Britain’s gates” who pick upon non-believers and get people into trouble so that for instance Banknock should stay one hundred per cent Catholic. They would go to any depths to discredit non-believers who in their eyes “steal people from Christ”.

An embittered ex-Catholic lady of my generation disclosed that she had her MIND RAPED by Catholic dogma and Catholics insist that there is a distinctly Catholic way of doing everything in life from tying one’s shoelaces to running a Government department. Even a distinctly Catholic typeface in the textbooks in Catholic schools because it is held that Catholic children will be CORRUPTED by textbooks written by non-Catholics, she added.

I find other religious fanatics just as odious such as the cranks from the Outer Hebrides who insist on Sabbath observance and who forbid modern equipment such as WORD PROCESSORS! I have at times suffered religious cranks who proselytize and yet like my mother could NOT understand the everyday English of the “Daily Telegraph” and would jump on me particularly for such matters as my need to wear riding-attire.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF STIGMATIZATION

I graduated in sociology and was later to read A CRITICAL CONDITION a Sociology of Disability written by Paul Hunt who had muscular dystrophy and lived in a Cheshire Home. He was a towering intellect who ought to be remembered as the Socrates of Odiham his home town in Hampshire.

I therefore present a Huntean perspective on Stigmatisation. It is sure to disturb and offend.

Stigmatisation is most rife in people from subcultures at odds with the mainstream values of society. There is a need amongst such embattled minorities to parade a bogus superiority and maintain a mythology sustained by symbolism. Prowess in FOOTBALL is one of the desiderata expected of adult males in such subcultures as is a kind of bodily perfection which is entirely divorced from practical considerations. Innate and morally neutral attributes are held to be moral failings even though they may confer practical advantages. Most decidedly any boys who fall short of the stereotype will be picked upon my classmates and at an early age be burdened with a stigma which will progressively warp their personalities.

No matter how virtuous the victim may be, indeed precisely because he may have giftedness which should lead to qualifications and so to a fulfilling life, he will be singled out for ill treatment. Unless the victim is transplanted to a social “vicinia sana” where he can discover his true value, the pressures of his peers will lead him to becoming mad, bad, and ultimately dead (of self-abuse readily to hand). The stigmatized boy is submerged in his sub-culture (such as one finds in Northern Ireland) and has NO WAY of escaping from it. For it permeates his waking existence and it stifles awareness of the world beyond. In such subcultures GIRLS who deviate are somewhat concealed as it is generally held that women have a subordinate role in the world – strikingly at odds with the role of women in sophisticated metropolitan societies. There are unwritten laws which are unwittingly broken by outsiders; and jargon meant only to be understood by members of the sub-groups.

Whilst the most florid examples of tribalism are to be seen in Northern Ireland the stigmatization of subcultures is observable in towns full of social fossils like Seaford where my father lived for most of his life. Wealthy cranks set the standards in Seaford. Children are merely fashion accessories, hardly more than intelligent pets. Daughters have a tacit obligation to look after elderly parents till they die. All too often an elderly mother claims a right to break up her daughter’s friendship with a young man who may leave the district to better himself. I had often speculated whether I would have been punished far less harshly for stealing or for energetically retaliating when Lewes Grammar School boys made off with my belongings. Most definitely I was never ever forgiven for what I did at Lewes Grammar School whilst all the time in school assemblies we had to SING HYMNS about Jesus Christ FORGIVING SINNERS.

So I was stained for life and there was no way I could expunge the stain by academic prowess still less by demanding feats in disciplines frowned upon by my father (such as building sheet metal model locomotives!) His very handwriting would induce mental sciatica and I feared his PRAISE more than his REPRIMANDS. If ever I had done something that pleased him I had somehow SURRENDERED MY SOUL TO HIM.

LOVE came to mean abject submission to my mother’s will; having to behave as a compliant servant and indeed regress to a cuddly little pet. LOVE was therefore denial of all those attributes which gave me my fragile self-respect 40 years ago. It was indeed a form of self-annihilation. I can no more understand “love” in the popular sense of the word than a deaf man appreciate music. (But in my story “Offence was most definitely given” I define the Highest Kind of Love, hopefully define a “Highest Possible State”. I term DELPHILATION in a dialogue of Socratic adduction between my leading character and a man who is really MYSELF).

I share with Jean Genet and a number of other psychically maimed people, a kind of split personality. For all my intellectual growth, whenever I am disturbed I feel like a baby rabbit frightened out of its wits and never more so than on 11.9.97 at Stirling where I had the presence of mind to tell the police that I suffer from a lifelong affliction called PHOBOGENY which I said, is Greek for “BORN WITH FEAR” yet this is MY neologism yet to appear in any dictionary. So whenever harassed by the police I become a quivering wreck and display such florid symptoms of fright that are readily mistaken for symptoms of insanity. These are autonomous reactions of the lower brain which were induced in me by my father in the mists of time and as much a part of me as my myopia. Here in Dunfermline Library I struggle to define what overwhelmed me throughout my life, which will be with me till my dying day – simmering below my relaxedness here, ready to erupt in anxiety and mental sciatica that is far more hurtful than any physical pain. A glare, a cutting remark, from a bystander. A trivial gaffe made, and I go over a figurative precipice into suicidal depression accompanied by such irrational guilt as to compel me to cut myself off from other people in the delusion that I am a social bull-in-a-china-shop, or a sex pervert or so incompetent at running my everyday affairs that I must dispose of myself hygienically. This is how I have felt all my adult life and no matter how hard I struggle to cast it aside by prowess in demanding pursuits, it persists. Though I know that this entirely a delusion I am overwhelmed by it and when in a state of self-disownment I ruminate about ways of dispatching myself and what will happen to me in the Hereafter.

SO FAR I HAVE RESTRAINED MYSELF and instead I have projected all these suicidal thoughts into my characters. Sometimes I create a character who is suicidal. In one instance I wrote a suicide story after meeting a man with florid schizophrenia who was given a copy and knows exactly how I have altered his particulars. My “internal monologue” THROW YOURSELF OFF THE SOLWAY BRIDGE! Was constructed in order to convey my agony on my 61^st birthday and also to make a trenchant point about a man who fell from grace in 1942 (when I was a baby).

RELIGION as the primary cause of Stigmatization?

I can only observe from my experience that people with strong religious views justify cruelty by quoting from the Bible, the Koran and other ancient religious “revelations of the Word of God”. Highly educated cosmopolitan people are the least likely to stigmatise their children. People of low intelligence are more likely to be cruel than university graduates. Low intelligence goes hand in hand with adherence to religious dogmas and inability to cope with changes of any kind. We now have a far greater understanding of the nature of Intelligence than in 1953 but even then it was widely understood how creative people differ from the common herd.

Religious indoctrination cramps and cripples people’s minds, and causes them to justify the most abominable cruelties imaginable such as the perversion that led Ben Atta to crash the hijacked airliner into the WTC in the manifest DELUSION that he would go straight to heaven. At the personal level in Northern Ireland so reliable sources insist there is an entirely perverted popular delusion about bodily perfection which smacks of those hotbeds of homosexuality which are reported all too often as commonplace in that benighted country. So if any Northern Irish BOY has a noticeable peculiarity such as hair colour or myopia or a stammer or a deformed limb or even a FORENAME with derogatory connotations he becomes stigmatized and that stigma will burden him until he quits Northern Ireland forever for a cosmopolitan social milieu where he can discover his infinite value as a Vessel of God.

STIGMATISATION will therefore burden children for as long as there is organized religion and as long as church schools impose social apartheid.

It would be understandable if a well to do parent was bitterly disappointed when his son showed no signs of the qualities that he admired most. It might be a matter of personal pride to declare that his son was a “chip off the family block” and took an interest in demanding pursuits. I had told my father that were I to have become a fornicating merchant seaman who sired bastards at every port of call his attitude towards me might be justified. Whilst he always insisted that he LOVED ME he was quick to heap scorn upon me that I understandably rejected this “love”. He was quite cock-a-hoop when I gained a place at Glasgow University but I DO remember his scornful remarks when I gave him some university essays to read and indeed his REPRIMANDS for those very passages which demonstrated my knowledge of the subjects being studied.

He was to crow to his friends that he had TWO SONS AT UNVERSITY yet never have any inkling of what drove me to my achievements indeed be basically hostile towards my self-improving drives.

DESTIGMATIZATION

Precisely because of all the woes I describe above I have written copiously about a fictitious former schoolmate named Alan Moelwyn-Wright my leading character and title role player in my ongoing epic THE SOCRATES OF CHARFORD. I describe a humane alternative value system called CONTRIBUTIONISM which by incorporating the Reincarnationist Strict Consequentialism of Masefield’s poem A CREED collides absolutely head on with Christian dogma.

Alan’s clients with many social problems redefine themselves by their contributions to the common good of their fellows. They insist that the God in themselves is manifest in their deeds and none more so than the 1.20m tall cathedral organist and master tailor Trevor Mansell in my short story SIX FEET TALL IN THE EYES OF GOD which I shall gladly provide to ram home my essential thesis that we can only be what we create for our fellows to enjoy. Bodily peculiarities are irrelevant unlike the absurd Catholic obsession with bodily perfection which smacks of narcissism and indeed sexual perversion. I have offered my services to all manner of voluntary bodies and made the point that I CREATED MYSELF through persistence at demanding hobbies and I CONQUERED FEAR through climbing precipitous mountains. I have undergone a succession of convulsive paradigm shifts in life to the extent that I am NO LONGER HUMAN but like my Mansell I have grown into another lifeform. Or as I say in my poem BEN SGULAIRD “Seed of the Almighty! Here dissolving into a greater Totality! (WHAT OFFENCE is given in that assertion!)

I observe what can be called the decay of connectedness in everything. At a very obvious level the public transport system is being fragmented and disconnected with privatization. 40 years ago one could take a train from Peebles to Forfar – both COUNTY TOWNS! And carry a bicycle without any hindrance. NOW the only way between the two towns is by CAR! And a relatively short journey such as Dunfermline to Kirkintilloch can ONLY JUST BE ACCOMPLISHED with time enough for the business in hand. At another level NO CONNECTIONS ARE MADE by our administrators between juvenile crime and lack of facilities for challenging sports. Indeed of anybody proposes that public funds should be spent on adventure sports like hillwalking they are dismissed. WASTAGE is rampant in our society because lateral thinkers like myself are dismissed as cranks.

I even fear that we are all suffering from brain damage caused by inhaling motor fumes. This is why the people in power act so stupidly. Were they to have to CYCLE TO WORK along streets empty of motor vehicles their brains would be irrigated with oxygen as they pedalled along.

Scotland is fast ossifying into a post-civilised battleground between hardened bigots and all too many Scots behave like primary school children. I am simply appalled by what I observe. I have no chance at all of influencing people so lacking in intelligence that they don’t even know the elementary arithmetic which I mastered at primary schools. Many Scots whom I suffer define themselves by who they hate. In the days of petrol rationing and when I was nine years old I was familiar enough with the Sussex coastal plain and my native North Devon but I encounter Glaswegians who hardly ever venture out of Glasgow let alone climb those mountains visible from a Cumbernauld bound bus.

I can provide graphic illustrations of the cruelty I have suffered since 1991 and never more so than in my short story THE ONLY JEW IN SKARAVAIG. Goldstucker the leading character is erudite, Jewish and has a physical deformity. His neighbours reject his cornucopia of all those fruits of his lifelong learning which he seeks to bestow upon them. This is a sorry reflection of my own thwarted philanthropy since 1991.

I have no hope whatsoever of passing on my 40 years’ knowledge of model railways, photography and hillwalking. I feel very embittered now at age 61 unable to create a role for myself and still burdened with all the hang-ups I have described.

Indeed the Scots have imposed upon me a BIZARRE KIND OF STIGMA that of being a supremely gifted man who has achieved so much in the face of adversity. As I feel that no matter what I achieve in life I shall be rejected out of hand for my Classical English, my erudition and the necessity of wearing RIDING ATTIRE to hold on my false leg I now appraise how I may yet move to Devon to find kindred spirits and frantically devote my last years to creating the society I describe in “The Socrates of Charford”.

Effort to contribute our issues to another good cause

2009-05-21T12:35:00.006+01:00

Is the society around us seriously registering aspie issues? and the beneficial impact they make upon many other fairness issues too? Or are they just saying what the socially minded say too often: Oh dear, will we be understood if we say anything new, let's just keep saying what we find familiar? When a local project starts up for a good cause, does it do its own thing, oblivious to us?

On May 9 the No Borders campaign held a dayschool here, as part of a tour, on the oppression of asylum seekers. Part of its purpose was to assemble such folks as might want to take part in starting a local project for practical solidarity with asylum seekers, similar to one already functioning in Newcastle. There was a predictable way that the prevalence of local faces who are already regular in the left wing or anarchist scenes reduced the likelihood that anyone not of those scenes could be involved and feel comfortable or included. The rigidity of attitude those folks have about most topics, really thwarts the wider growth of projects they would like to see wider growth of.

Some of what they are about was sensible practical sharing of material goods with asylum seekers who can't obtain them, either who are paid in food vouchers of tightly limited usability instead of cash, or who have had all income cut off completely at the same time as not being allowed to get jobs. Solidarity in the face of the unviability of life the asylum system is intentionally designed to cause. Naturally also they are interested in raising public support for our guests, for making the true situation wider known about how folks already come out of desperately dangerous situations are getting treated, and if need arises, for having the means to create campaigns of the community's eagerness to keep someone, around blatantly corrupt refusals of asylum or attempts to deport. There has in fact already been a past campaign in Edinburgh preventing a spiteful deportation of a care worker whose life was totally established here and formed part of the care of learning disabled folks too. These campaigns are brilliant in their impact aginst racism, because they pinpoint how immigration barriers trample over the practical common sense of daily life.

Here is the problem. Folks doing these campaigns, if they seriously and genuinely care and want sheer reasoning decency to win against racsim, then they must want every possible contribution to victory for asylum seekers to be seized on and made maximum use of. This is an automatic duty. In the dayschool, in the session devoted to gathering ideas, I contributed an idea arising from autism. Think about this one:

Disability discrimination is now an established principle, itself owed to a history of struggle too. Among asylum seekers, just as among any other group, there are bound to be some aspies, some dyspraxics, and some attention deficits. To treat them in any way they will have a disadvantage with because of their conditions, is disability discrimination hence must be illegal. This is arguable by 2 separate routes, nationally on grounds of disability discrimination law, and internationally on human rights grounds applying to medically real minorities. But is there a screening system that is diagnosing all the autistic spectrumites among asylum seekers, and doing it straightaway without a wait, and being generous about diagnosing in uncertain cases? Of course not. As there is not even such a system fior the ordinary settled population, even less possible is it for asylum seekers. This proves - the system handles asylum seekers completely blind to which ones are on our spectrum. Hence, any way that all asylum seekers are treated, that would be disadvantageous to the spectrumite ones, is a disability discrimination and is invalid to continue. Where there is an impairment of concentration or attention, there is a greater chance, innocently and without blame, of losing physical objects, especially small or flimsy ones. Like - identity papers and cards. It is visibly disability discrimination to make any autistic spectrumite verify their status by carrying documents. Because of not knowing which asylum seekers are spectrumites, disability discrimination is committed by making any asylum seekers at all depend on carrying documents, in any way at all !

This gets rid of the identity cards being introduced for asylum seekers, and it wipes out the validity of ever penalising them for lacking papers or passports on their arrival here.

So we wait to hear that No Borders or any other asylum solidarity project makes some use of an item of this whopping magnitude. How long will the wait be? At the dayschool, my point was just put in the list, with a murmur of uncertainty of how much gain it would be possible to make from it in practice. One more voice, speaking from lack of knowledge of disabilities, voiced the sense of unsure ground hence of need to pass this item on to any folks with more secure disabled knowledge who might pop up in the local project in future. This is all that happened. Indeed from experience this is about all I expected would happen. The item was not focussed on again in the ending. It's obvious what this means: no commitment that the item will be used at all. The project will start with local radicals just saying the familiar things they are already used to saying, that don't force any big shift in the system's nature.

We have never yet had an asylum seeker in Elas. In theory we could, if there was an aspie one living in Edinburgh. Then we would be involved at the real personal level of experiencing the oppression, the global apartheid, splitting friends and vandalising lives. We will all as a community, not only the asylum seeker, have been medically wronged and violated by any functioning local asylum solidarity project, if it claims to have even in theory a choice not to make use of the item I raised. Same goes for all the national projects. If the local project does get going, then any asylum seekers reading this will know whether the project honestly cares a damn and wants to win your cause, by whether it takes up my disability discrimination argument and cites it publicly against the identity rules in the asylum system. It is a simple clear argument.

How many other good causes are there, where the opportunity for autism to force positive advances in civil liberties gets received only with uncertainty and doing nothing, just because it is unfamiliar? This makes all the difference to whether aspies are marginalised, or campaigners for other causes are seen to care at all about the biological needs they raise. The issue about losable documents does not only affect asylum seekers, they are only the most extremely and urgently affected group. For all the settled population too, the issue has the potential to stop identity cards and to force the democratic world to abolish passports and tickets on public transport. Which brings a whole lot more issue campaigns under the same clear test:

EITHER to commit medical betrayal cheating the entire ordinary population out of a great gain, OR to have no psychological barriers ever to immediate takeup of new information heard for the first time.

Maurice Frank

Thoughtful culture

2009-04-05T14:53:00.006+01:00

Popular culture at mob level has never exactly been famous for its civilised tolerance. So it can hardly be a priority of life to become a winner in a minefield of unreliable friendships and cliques. That is not the place to look for deep acceptance, it is the place where our survival advantage is the ability to go without deep acceptance and follow our own consciences. Above all, it's never worth being submissive in search of acceptance. How miserable is that? You won't know what directions it will push you in, which innocent folks the social leaders will force you to exclude and pick on, which bigotries they will force you to pretend to believe in? You could be alone in the world and still none of that will be worthwhile.

In family, in political or religious or hobby social life, at work, at volunteer days, basically at anywhere normal, there is no formula beyond personal chance that determines how much acceptance and fitting in is possible. Living within reach of as many options as possible, for the sake of adaptability, must be one sensible tip. Then it just becomes a question of trying to observe, in each person you associate with, whether they are just a closed mind, then it would be damaging to mention AS, or they have any spark of thoughtfulness and civility. If they have, I find, then a casual mention of AS, not a deep sermon about it, is good because it helps to secure that the person stays a nice way. It gives them a reason not to drift towards being on more dumbed-down and ribald terms with you just from thinking you want that normality, which is exactly what we don't want. From chances grabbed as they arise here and there, with the right folks, ground can be gained for awareness and acceptance on decent terms. Slowly it builds up, to all our benefit.

Thoughtful folks have always aspired to find or own congenial community outside the conformist horror world of the type of normal thickos who booze and gamble and iron and believe what the tabloids tell them about foreigners. That type of popular culture is a starkly treacherous place to get by in, even to win a place in at all. It does not operate rationally or thinkingly. So the point of describing it so grimly is not snobbery, it's to illustrate that culture's own choice of enmity towards us. How it is not designed for anyone guided more by reasoning and logic than by gang following, to survive or thrive in. Thoughtful folks of all types need to defend ourselves from having to belong in social conditions like those. We have always needed an alternative and been in search of one.

What better justification can there be, for needing our own scene, our own space, than an impairment to communication? But even in thoughtful activities, groups become ruined by the normal cultures' influence and the resulting fear of ribaldry and derision that comes to enslave the socially minded to take the rougher and more dumbed down life attitudes. I have watched an astronomy society die in this way. As the traumatic nature of science education has driven away from enjoyment of science the potential keen new blood the society could have kept attracting and formerly had, firstly the more practically minded strongman types came to stand out as the leaders. Then that meant all abstract chat about the subject's wonders petered out and stopped being expected or thought comfortable. Then that left the shrunken society's core life reduced wholly to happening among a few normal hard-edged cynical sneery impatient men, further alienating the non-core membership. To a comment on the virtues of serving ethical coffee the vice-president could say, "Don't let's bring ethics into it, this is the astronomical society not the ethical society, I'll get some more Nescafe." Any time you are thinking of joining an astronomy society, quote that and ask them if it could happen.

Casual evil like this, and like the pointless cliquiness we all know can pop up out of the blue in the personal boundaries of workplace social life when least expected even in health-conscious workplaces, are why the struggle for a secure thoughtful counterculture to belong to has repeatedly been defeated and savaged all through the history of semi-civilisation. Before AS was known, I had already seen, and been dismayed by, the failiure of such scenes to last permanently, in 2 settings: around children with unusually intellectual interests, and around folks going through emotionally intense problem youths.

Aspies are another grouping who could deliver a parallel culture for nice thoughtful non-ribald characters totally opted out of the majority hard soul-dead culture. We need each other's acceptance as a higher priority than to dream about finding it with any consitency outside the caring circles. Trouble is, aspies are no more immune from having nasty ways than any other grouping are. It's only as an overall tendency that our society is made nicer than average by our willingness to think critically. There are still some aspies who don't think much at all, who just want a quiet life, or who feel clever by having sarcastic uncaring characters. So the quest depends on willingness go be combative about the aspie scene's standards of personal fairness whenever they wobble, and never just passively take what the big organisations deign to give us. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The work the Scottish Autism Services Network is doing with us, putting our own voice into the info produced about us for all sorts of health or other service providers, is part of this vigilance. That won't be delivered to us by submissively trusting the big organisations who speak without consulting us, to "choose their priorities."

All organisations who don't speak out about how school homework destroys some aspies' chance to be child authors like the 2 well-known ones, commit a crime of child cruelty and endangerment. All organisations who ignore the case that because aspie clumsiness and gaps of attention give us a greater than equal likelihood to lose small objects, public transport can no longer require any passengers to carry losable tickets or passes, commit an endangerment of our safety. Yet one director of a lobby group for us just wrote to me, "I note what you say", a well-known bureaucrats' answer that says utterly nothing. If they lobby employers about us without mentioning the biological entitlement to dress freely, that is proved from our sensitivity and metabolism issues, they have lied about us while gambling with our life opportunities. Which all makes it important to keep local groups self-run, not provided by the big organisations, and independent of any urge to keep in their favour. There must be no divisive attitude of one generation against another, because that's not friendly, and there must be a declared automatic right for all members to count each other as equal in social worth and wantedness.

No group, big or small, local or national, is ethical unless it declares that in every conflict between personal fairness and the group's wider interests, personal fairness shall always automatically win. Our web communities too have good and bad among their number. It would be so much easier on emotionally stressed aspie reasoning if our scene was all good, it's not, but a dedication to keep the good parts of it going is our best strategy to belong and keep some part of society even half-reliably worthwhile.

Maurice Frank

Library internet

2009-04-05T14:15:00.011+01:00

What is the point of making known the particular needs or medical interests of a minority, unless it is to ensure those needs are never abused? Malpractice is usually reckoned the right word to describe decisions made in disregard of any group's biologically real needs, and made without even giving any committal answers to aspects of need that will be overridden. The type of politician you know to run a mile from, is the type who leaves any point about harm, that you have put to them, utterly not acknowledged by so much as a word. Your disgust is invited at the smug ruthlessness of our local politicians, who are treating in this way a problem put to them on these terms. It concerns an idiotic change being threatened to the library internet service.

It should not be down to 50-50 luck, as it is, whether each county's library internet uses a system with automated timers, that cut you off when your time is up, or not. It makes a big practical difference. Timers are unfriendly, they force you to rush to save work for fear of losing it, instead of completing it, in case your time runs out seconds before you can complete your task. As you know, in all internet work there is always the chance of making a bad connection, and being stuck fuming while you wait for the screen only slowly to show any result, which even then might be a failed connection. That can happen when your time is close to running out, and it means, however careful you are about remembering to save your work, you are always at risk of losing it. Bad connections can result in you failing to save before the timeout happens. Then, all your work and a big chunk of your time have been wasted. That possibility is an abuse.

If there is no timer, you can make sure your task is safely completed before you hand over to the next user. That way, everyone is happier and less stressed. The occasional problem of a user encroaching seriously upon the next user's time and having to be pushed out, and from experience in Edinburgh that is rare, costs you far less user time than the danger of losing all your work because of a timer, and than the way a timer deprives you of effective use at all of your slot's closing minutes because of the risks in starting any new task. Timers don't protect library staff from a difficult user, either, for they provide no physical means to make that user leave their seat and instead they can make it worse by giving the difficult user justified anger over lost work.

They obstinately persist in having timers in Fife, and the difference between their library internet and Edinburgh's, in neighbouring regions, is extraordinary. I belong to both. The line taken by Fife, and by Galloway which shares its system, towards cases of lost work, is: we sympathise but tough. Yet the problems suffered in Fife have discredited timers utterly.

The timeout often does not happen exactly when it should, it can happen up to 2 minutes early or late. You can have less time left than the clock on the screen says you have. You know what that means: work is lost or not accomplished. As for when you log in, sometimes you get connected within a half minute yet the timer appears showing only 57 minutes left. Several staff at Duloch library in Dunfermline told me some most insightful info - the timeout drifts out of sync with the clock, this problem increases over time, until periodically they have to reset the system. Where does that leave the users?!

When printing is done, it is more work for the staff to worry about not letting the timeout happen during the printing. The system does not freely let you log out and back in if the computer gets clogged up, which in Edinburgh's you can do perfectly easily. At 5 minutes and at 50 seconds before timeout, a reminder appears, that locks the screen until you acknowledge it, so further interrupting any writing you are doing and costing time and adding to the stress. Yes you can ask for extra time if it is available, but the act of going to the counter and asking for it consumes some of the time you already have, and you are panicking to get served in time as well as to save your work. Those 2 needs are in conflict.

Then, as recently as within the last year, Fife's system sprang a fault where the timer can jump to zero and cut you off, just spontanously at any moment during your whole session. They had to stick up notices, and they only bothered in some libraries, warning users to keep saving their work very frequently for fear of losing it: all through your session. Which disrupts flow of work and takes up time, and is always subject to the danger of bad connections. This is a system that does not work.

It is not practical for anyone to rely on at all, a system that can function as chaotically as this. Timers' unreliability impacts on the communication needs of those autistics who can express themselves with less difficulty by words composed on screen than by conversation or phone. Timers are easily discriminatory to our friends in the dyspraxic community, for the demands they make on dexterity both mental and physical. Mental because it takes quick thinking and a build-up of multitasking, especially if you have to panic what to do about a slow connection. Physical to get mice clicked and keys pressed quickly to beat the clock, or even worse, to beat an unreliable timer that may malfunction.

Last summer, some of us took part in an AS research project by an Edinburgh University student, but done through NHS Fife and so with sessions held in Fife. I suffered disruption to organising my participation, when a bad internet connection was overtaken by a timeout on a Dunfermline library computer and resulted in loss of a message. For this, I got the fact recorded in the project, that the computer system with timers had disrupted medical research by frustrating participation in it, thus working against our interests as a minoirty group, and has added unnecessary coping stress to the whole process, for the participant to deal with. This would not have happened in a system without timers, like Edinburgh's, hence it proved the timer system is both medically harmful and an obstruction of science. This was recorded as a real fact experienced in practice.

This should be a basis for me to get timers abolished and banned everywhere, as discriminatory and a medical abuse of us. Discriminatory also upon all the populations of counties with them, compared to without them. Edinburgh's present system stands proved the ideal model for introducing everywhere. Our friends in Fife need the case proved for this change. Edinburgh owes them that. Imagine then the inconceivable looking-glass horror, of instead catching early word of a plan for the head-on opposite to happen, for Edinburgh to change to using timers too? In the face of the harmful mess they have made in Fife?

This is what I was lobbying my 3 local councillors for help to prevent, on grounds that it would be knowingly a medical abuse and intrusion upon our needs. My council ward is called "Almond" because there is a river called that. Its 3 councillors all belong to different parties, you would expect them to be keen to score against each other's ethical failings. I put that to them all at once. Norman Work, SNP, Kate Mackenzie, Conservative, and of particular interest because he is actually the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, George Grubb, Lib-Dem. These councillors are public figures, elected to keep all the health needs in their community remembered by the planners, right? There is a pressing public interest in revealing them falling short of that.

At first the only response to me came from the first named. He said he had gone to speak to the staff of 2 of the outlying and less busy libraries, not saying if he had mentioned my point about the medical research record. Nor the point about timers being bad for library staff's safety. He wrote not a word about that to me either, made no acknowledgement of its existence at all, as he wrote: "As the staff I spoke to were in favour of a timing system I am not going to go against their wishes". He then argued ridiculously that the time extension system, problems of already discussed, should be a reassurance!

The second named has never said a word. The third named declares these councillors all work together and answer on each other's behalf - and remember he is Lib-Dem, the party with the longest history of keenness for the electoral reform that gave us multi-member seats. "Thank you for drawing this to my attention. The 3 Almond Ward councillors are working together on most community issues." That is not the choice that multi-member council seats were created for. They all belong to different parties, yet the voter struggling to stop medical abuses is presented with a single line of brush-off from them all jointly, that is not even an answer to the problem. On what basis is there any party contest?

So you can put to them a point of medical harm and they are capable of completely ignoring it without mention, as one gives you the wrong answer and the others back him. Where does this leave you if you are a parent fighting a more serious issue over children's illnesses? Looks what it shows: that they don't have the first shred of an ethic to hold their answers accountable to whether they knowingly approve medical harm whose nature is on scientific record. Whose health is ever safe in hands like these?

"If he had acted supposedly for all 3 councillors and not just for himself", I asked, then the only way for the other 2 councillors not to be seen by name to choose culpably in favour of doing medical harm and hurting vulnerable groups, was "if they are committal not noncommittal in disagreeing with" his line. That is logical. Answer: "I have been following your emails about the libraries situation and I will ask Head of Libraries for an update on the situation". This resulted only in getting a copy of a report on the plan.

No position taken against the plan, by any of them. NO ANSWER, from any of them, to the medical harm point, or on the needs of groups affected adversely by the change. Does that sound at all committal to you?

Any answer directly from libraries management, to justify the change, is still awaited, since Feb 3. So in conclusion: Here is the state of democracy and of disability rights, going on all around you. Councillors across party are allowing a disability wrong to be done without taking any position against it, and he is ignoring how local scientific research already records that the proposed change will abuse us. The Lord Provost of our capital is going along with this and not a word of committality on it can be extracted from his office. If you are a visitor here in the Year of Homecoming, these are the standards you are homecoming to.

Maurice Frank

PS - added Jul 28. The library has now taken its first step, introduced the timer system in one department of Central library, the "Learning Centre" where the computers were already unstaffed. The result? Nobody uses them! Previously this section of computers was always full, now it is often empty and you never see more than the occasional user. The library users have voted with their feet, between the merits of the 2 systems. They have all totally chosen the old system without timers, as easier and friendlier to use. Observing this, the library now has no other honest choice than to find that the timers system is a total failiure, to cancel all further extension of it, and to share this practical test result with the rest of the country to force banning of the timers system wherever it is used.

endemic bus malpractices

2009-03-30T16:59:00.009+01:00

Here is an action towards a public office, citing disability discrimination on our behalf, that consequently they have a duty to act on, and they are not doing. Now, what is the point of having a disability discrimination law if we are not supplied with the means to pin down any public office to give answers according to it???!!

These 2 emails were to the "Bus Passenger's Platform", the complaints department of an entity called Passenger View which advises the Scottish government on what bus passengers need without at all having to ask bus passengers what we want it to say! When you complain to BPP about malpractices by bus drivers, usually it is on the bus companies' side and completely in their pocket. BPP will scrape the gutter for any excuse to find that the bus company couldn't have taken an absolute line on preventing the malpractice.

BPP is one of those bodies that exists to make it look like something is being done. In reality, even if you have been blatantly bullied by a bus driver and the advertised bus sevice blatantly not honoured at all, as long as BPP's decisions are discretionary it is utterly pointless to lodge a complaint to BPP. The only thing there is any point in doing, is to extract from each bus malpractice any aspect you can of distinct ill-treatment of a minority needs group, and lobby BPP about it, telling BPP it is acting illegally concerning discrimination unless it admits that its duty to make findings in favour of the minority need is automatic, not discretionary. You need to ask BPP to confirm this to you before you file an actual case to them. This is what I sought to do in the following emails:

Mar 5: I belong to [mentioned Elas and Sasn].

The vulnerablilities caused by Asperger Syndrome include a reliance on literal information, and lack of facility to make contextual guesses that information is not meant literally. This would include, that we more than other passengers can't be expected to guess, by cultural norm, that some information given in a bus timetable is less true than other parts of the timetable and may routinely not be honoured by the bus operator. It would be illegal disability discrimination to expect any such thing of us.

A consequence of this, is that it would be illegal disability discrimination against us, ever not to find against the operator, in a case where a particular service frequently jumps one of the stops it is advertised to observe, and the operator has ignored or evaded all efforts to pin them down committally to do anything about it. A case where there is always a 50-50 chance that the bus you want will sweep past the stop in the central dual carriageway lanes that block it from observing the stop, instead of taking the side lanes to observe the stop, and this is on a long distance service so that total wreckage of a day's travel plan is inflicted by it.

In any case of this nature, it needs only be established that the company is allowing the offence to happen, by its lack of committal answers, and that makes it a simple 100% certainty that the complaint would be upheld. Hence, it would be illegal disability discrimination to a recognised medical group who have public speaking outlets, for you not to agree that this is the case, to this enquiry in advance of an actual case being brought, or to be noncommittal about it.

It would be disability discrimination to insist that the actual case is brought before you take any position, because by so insisting, you would be keeping in existence a visibly provenly illegal margin of discretion against the position being an automatic certainty. You would be forcing the case to be a gamble instead of a routine upholding of a literal principle. You would be saying that in a case where the factual finding was that yes the events concerned have happened, it could ever be at all possible even in theory to find against a complaint of the nature described and to allow a bus operator to behave in this way.

Past experience proves the need to put the case's committal medical principle to you before being forced into taking any gambles on which way you might go if it is left to arbitrary discretion.

Mar 12 BPP's answer: [first an unnecessary para explaining what BPP is]

Unfortunately you have not indicated whether or not the bus company has had an opportunity to address your complaint. I would be grateful if you would advise this office accordingly. If the operator has responded to your complaint and you are unhappy with the response, you must sens a copy of all relevant correspondence to this office.

If the complaint has not been taken up with the bus operator in the first instance, I regret that BPP is unable to consider your complaint at this stage.

Mar 14: Yes, we are talking about a case here the bus company has had this problem repeatedly put to it over a year and a half, and has only gone from explaining each incident as an isolated driver error, to not answering at all.

I know the rules about sending correspondence with an actual complaint - I have experienced the process before. But I have not made any actual complaint to you yet. I was enquiring about BPP's attitude to a principle: the committally automatic wrongness in every case ever, of a bus service being allowed to persist in often jumping one of the stops it is advertised to observe, by passing it in the wrong traffic lane for stopping.

I pointed out the disability discrimination to a whole population group, that would be done if BPP refuses to take a position on this principle that would be known in advance to apply to any specific case of it that is brought to you. So that cases are not forced to be brought to you with the discretionary possibility of BPP choosing not to uphold the principle even if the facts are found to be as described.

Thank you,

- To which there has been no further answer. You can see that BPP is meticulously evading making any comment at all on the question asked of it. Does a complaint of this particular malpractice by buses have to be upheld automatically if it is established the malpractice happened? BPP is blatantly committing disability discrimination and acting corruptly to the oppression of bus users, by ignoring this question and seeking to hold onto a discretionary power to reject such a complaint.

Let me tell you where this bus malpractice has been happening - it is on an important trunk route. It is on Citylink's M91 stopping service from Edinburgh to Perth, some coaches continuing to Inverness. One of the advertised stops on the more frequently stopping coaches is at the south side of the Forth Bridge, the former tolls, which is still stubbornly being called "tolls" in bus timetables long after the tolls have been abolished. Quite often these coaches just charge past in the central lane of the dual carriageway and ignore this stop. It can happen in both directions, but mostly in the northward direction where the stop is located on an entry sliplane, so that if the coach fails to take an exit from the main carriageway it is then barricaded into the central lanes and can't access the stop.

For a year and a half I have had repeated cause to make complaints to Citylink about this, and the only answer they ever give is a one-off apology for the driver error in forgetting the stop. The first time they said they would remind drivers about it, but this changed nothing. They will never say anything committal specifying how they will force all their staff to observe the stop. Twice I have enquired on behalf of both Elas and our equivalent in Fife, telling them that aspies have no instincts to guess in some cultural way that their service's published details should not be taken literally! and formally asking which coaches they will guarantee for certain will observe the stop, if we should organise some group travel starting at that point. CITYLINK HAS IGNORED AND NEVER ANSWERED THOSE ENQUIRIES. THIS ITSELF IS DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION, THAT THE BPP's ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED TO STOP, YET WE LIVE IN A STATE WHERE THE BPP ITSELF CAN GET AWAY WITH BEING EQUALLY CORRUPT. If you are a visitor in the Year of Homecoming, this is the state of the state here. If you are an aspie as well, and if you are trying to head north of the Forth, you have cause to complain that you are left in unclarity how the hell you are supposed to plan travel in a state where nobody enforces the honouring of published transport services in reality. If you tell Year of Homecoming about this, do you find them committal or noncommittal about caring? - for that will tell you whether it's just a con.

Some other bus malpractices that BPP's attitude also encourages to happen, are these.
* A driver on Stagecoach who drives away from the present diversionary stops in central Edinburgh, with their long queues, before passengers who were well back in the queue can reach him, and visibly laughs about it.
* First refusing to give any committal answer that their buses can be hailed from the wrong side of the road, even when they know this evasion is an offence against road safety because it meant you had to run in front of a very late bus that suddenly appeared in Galashiels' one way system, and which still drove past you anyway,
* or even when you are walking from East Linton to Haddington in the evening because 3 successive of their buses have not turned up, ("mechanical failiure!") and then one passes you on the road some way short of Haddington just when it's starting to rain.
* Drivers on First who refuse to believe that the fare you want exists, in First's preposterously muddled zonal system.
* Who insist that a day ticket is just an ordinary return, or
* who take a £20 note from you then refuse to give it back or to sell you anything but the fare they think you should want instead of the fare you do want. NB - I got signed for a free bus pass as a direct result of that experience, actually on grounds of the burden of coping with communication with bus drivers! and this establishes every aspie should get one. But that is no get-out from the need to enforce proper trading standards upon First too, is it? including sacking that driver?

The Green Party, which always insults our intelligence by saying please use public transport and save carbon, never takes any position on any specific transport malpractice. I asked their council candidate in 2007, for a position against First because of the Sunday morning trains that had repeatedly been leaving early from Dalmeny station, that I had twice in 6 weeks seen ruin the travel plan of a mother trying to take 2 small infants to Glasgow visiting family. I got, "If you will forgive me, I can only respond to your general query about public transport and accountability, rather than your ongoing problems with First." DON'T FORGIVE THEM - this is the worst offence that democracy's entire effectiveness is still abused by, it is NONCOMMITTALITY. If the Greens keep this up in the coming Euro election, they are committing a specific minority uncaringness upon the autistic spectrum, because we can't be expected to communicate successfully with corrupt bus or train staff or to observe corrupt unstated principles of how to get by despite them.

Maurice Frank

Asperger Syndrome and neighbourhood living

2009-03-22T14:50:00.000Z

It's recognised that people with Asperger's are a lot less likely to live independently than the general population, once they have reached adulthood. I would like to write though, much of it from personal experience as an independent adult Aspie, about the situations that can be faced by Aspies who do make it to independent living.

Chances are if you live alone (most independent Aspies are just that, independent and won't be with a partner) you'll be living in a flat, and in turn it'll probably be in a communal stair, with anything from 6 to 12, or more, flats. The independent Aspie can be seriously stretched in such an arrangement. Many people living independently have problems with the antisocial behaviour of other residents, such as noise, groups of people loitering, vandalism etc. This can expose the independent Aspie to distressing situations from neighbourhood living. Sensitivity from stimuli such as noise do not help. Neither does it help when neighbours or locals notice your social and communication challenges and so pick up what they feel is a "differentness" in you.

I think that living in a stair or block of flats in close proximity with a number of neighbours takes a lot of social skill to cope. This particularly challenges Aspies. It's all very well if you keep yourself to yourself, but you wouldn't have space all to yourself but instead are sharing communal space with other people. Affordability becomes an issue especially with the problems many Aspies have with unemployment and underemployment. This can have a knock-on effect on where you can obtain housing. In turn that would increase one's chances of antisocial behaviour, as would the number of properties within any one stair.

I am an advocate of housing that is more specific to the independent adult Aspie where one way or another they may be protected from antisocial or nuisance neighbours, and will push for this to happen. One way to achieve this, perhaps, is for housing associations to allocate blocks for people with AS or autism, with support as appropriate, once need for the amount of housing is identified. It wouldn't necessarily have to be sheltered, but certainly out of the mainstream private or council housing, where you never know who is next door. But this way the independent adult Aspie could have a better go at a settled life.

By: An Edinburgh Aspie

Dragon's wings - by David Seagrave

2009-03-22T14:46:00.000Z

GROW YOUR DRAGON S WINGS !

I weite this to explain what we do and how I can help adults with high functioning autism .I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome in 2004, 50 years too late to avoid a blighted life when my troubles began in 1952 and it is a long and harrowing story .

I attended Red Hill Remedial School in Kent which so decisively moulded my character that my most important achievement in life is my burgeoning literary collection called The Socrates Of Charford It is about a fictional Welsh classmate Alan Wright from Charford in Avalonshire a fictional county between Glos and Gwent.Alan acquires that soubriquet because he invents a life affirming Standard to Live By called Contributionism and lives according to its teachings to become the headmaster of a similar school in my storyline.

Aristotle declared “An exemplary life is the ultimate beauty “.I struggle to emulate Alan but I am thwarted at every turn.I have offered a portfolio of edifying pursuits which I have practiced since my schooldays but I am in severe difficulties.I am bound to declare that I am simply appalled by attitudes in Scottish society that were absent in my days at Glasgow University in the late sixties.Leading contributors to the Scotsman and Herald all concur about the social evils that have grown in recent years .I am not I trust being a SNOB when I put across Alan Wright s Contributionism as a way forwards and quote a couplet “Moelwyn-Wright,our Leader –Guide/His Code of Conduct doth provide/A path to grace up mountains steep/Our way of life I vow to keep” allegorising Alan s middle name MOELWYN a 720m high mountain near Portmadoc his birthplace borne as his long deceased uncle s forename .MOELWYNHOOD is the state of maturity which all adults should grow into- as Socrates and Plato explained – the development of all the virtues – diligence, honesty,patience,imagination,.tolerance, good humour, single mindedness, ignoring adversity,thrift, foresightedness,lateral thinking, loyal service freely given,and steadfast adherence to Higher Principles in the face of evil

I have coined the expression “Growing Dragon s Wings” to denote a frame of mind where someone has reached such a mastery of worthwhile pursuits that distressing peculiarities shrink to insignificance and figuratively aloft on those dragon s wings he is beyond the reach of scorn.When I climbed Cader Idris 6 months after being maimed I had in spirit soared a thousand metres above the mindless common herd and small-minded .people like my late and devoutly Christian father.He practiced “Thomas-the –Tank-Engine-Christianity “ –that is Christian dogma at the reading age of 7 –and so did my mother whose intellectual level was that of tiddley-winks .She could not understand the everyday English of London quality papers let alone the contents of my university essays !

The shy sensitive ASD young adult needs what I call Moral Armament to cope with the evil people he must collide with on leaving school.My mentors at Red Hill School taught me about charlatans and crooks and the many deceptions practiced even in the 1950s .Today every high street is full of premises who se real purpose is to extract MONEY from gullible people such as gambling-machine arcades I was taught the mathematical proof how gamblers always lose their money and took it to heart along with much else I had assimilated at that school.During civil disturbances in 1981 when I was maimed I wrote playlets about a young man who got into trouble and the Court sent him to Alan Wright for treatment They illustrated the predicament facing young men today ,then too ASD adults are picked upon at work and by relatives so they end up isolated and embittered

I am simply appalled by the attitudes of some people in the corridors of power.Without naming them influential religious factions hold that involuntary peculiarities and mental illness is a sign of SIN in the individual and thus justifies unspeakable cruelty.The victims spiral into severe mental illness and alcoholism and crime and come before the courts as people so severely damaged that even my fictional Welshman might fail to heal the scars in their minds.Funding for mental health services is being cut and with that comes closure of facilities for ASD people.

I have been IN TROUBLE for disclosing my hurtful past in autobiographies which I will gladly share AND for explaining the principles behind Alan Wright s Contributionism which clash with religious authoritarianisms- who would all execrate me for being a threat to their moth-eaten dogmas that have no relevance at all in 21st Century society I am saying this in the expectation that I will again be in trouble even for presenting you with inspiring stories about ASD people like “Red Haired Roderick “ Now look out of the windows dear citizens and identify the bumps on the northern skyline Within an hour s hike along the Devon Valley Way you reach such places as Mill Glen Tillicoultry where I would like to take you to discover dare I say the God Within You And All About as you reach the Rough Confluence and sit high above it to listen to the tumbling waters and the wind s melody and behold the cloud-armadas floating high overhead, enjoy the moor-birds and the wild grandeur .Then I can show you how to make marvellous model buildings from timber found fly –tipped and on me I have a pair of Gripperbreeks that holds my false leg on -made from cloth dumped in a skip –and if permission is granted behold my photographs exposed chiefly in reloaded throwaway cameras – see views of Scotland and overseas – that illustrate what I do.

So give me half a chance and I will teach you my brethren how to rise beyond the reach of scorn as with unremitting effort as you master demanding pursuits you grow your Dragon s Wings

David Seagrave

Dignified roles - by David Seagrave

2009-03-22T14:42:00.000Z

Will I ever be allowed to play a dignified role ?

Dignified roles have eluded me for most of the years since I moved to Scotland in 1991.I feel very acute loss of dignity unless I am “pulling my weight in society” This has arisen because of what happened as a boy and whenever I was unemployed.My father rubbed into me that I was innately flawed because I had no GOOD MANNERS and had forgotten things like christmas carols.A state of grace was conditional on holding down a job,and also by extension conforming to Christian values that meant REGULAR WORSHIP and Christian marriage and siring offspring.I was in permanent disgrace after a school expulsion in 1953 for preposterously trivial pranks where I was dared to misbehave by smutty minded classmates. I was convinced that I was a dangerous lunatic.I would be LOCKED UP FOR LIFE at Red Hill Remedial School which in fact was NO “Broadmoor for Boys” but an intellectual hothouse that has decisively moulded my character. In my father s eyes I had besetting moral failings for getting sacked because for instance I could NOT ADD UP salaries in the old money fast enough or accurately enough at the Inland Revenue .When I was sacked from a job at a London museum I was told to my face that I had been taken on against their better judgment and I would not get references from them. I threatened to end my life.I did not go head first into the Thames because I had a university application in the pipeline .I was then admitted to a mental hospital where I was fortunately allowed to attend A level classes and do Past Papers .Yet that short spell in a mental hospital was to debar me ever after from graduate level employment as I had to disclose it on every job application.It blotted my copybook as surely as a prison sentence for something really bad

It is a strange paradox that just before the sacking I had deliberately chosen to miss that 7.43 train from Hastings to London which piled up at Hither Green with the loss of many lives.I might have perished in the crash but a row with my father about that event has prompted me to write about my fictional classmate Alan Wright who dares to invent a better code of behaviour than Christian morality

After graduation the Permanent Disgrace of unemployment resumed and did not end until I was maimed in 1981 I wore my heart on my sleeve at interviews I soon realised that I could never become a university lecturer and my self esteem collapsed as a Catholic landlady made gratuitously offensive remarks that I was sponging off the State.The paradox of a triumphant recovery from the maiming led to a decade of halcyon years in Stafford but I hankered to climb every Scottish peak so moved to Cumbernauld in 1991.Apart from my roles in now defunct arts organisations and environmental pressure groups I have had NO dignified roles and my life has imploded into abject egocentric futility. Every time I offered to share all the lifelong fruits of my self-createdness I elicited humiliating rebuffs

My essentially fragile self esteem is rooted in my prowess at intellectually demanding pursuits which are frowned upon in Scotland precisely because they expand brainpower. I have been made to feel deeply ashamed of my interest in model railways yet I am the ONLY MAN in Dunfermline who builds railway models (as opposed to playing with Hornby or similar glorified toy trains) .When I die will all these models be DUMPED? . As I grow too infirm to climb lofty mountains I cannot contain my grief since so much of my self esteem is tied up with my role as the veteran amputee climber YET I am rejected by outdoor fraternities who call me a LIABILITY because I have a false leg !.This morning I received quite an insulting rebuff from an organisation because I had sent them “Grow Your Dragon s Wings “ and “Red Haired Roderick” which explicitly illustrate how we Aspies can rise beyond the reach of scorn by prowess at demanding pursuits of every kind The more I probe into the workings of organisations purportedly dedicated to the well being of people with medical conditions the more I discover that their real function is to aggrandise churchpeople with denominational axes to grind who enjoy lording over their clients and ramming their dogmas down their clients throats.Any display of personal initiative on the part of anybody with a distressing medical condition is seen as INSOLENCE .and a threat to the inflated egoes of the Christian people in charge of the organisation..therefore that person must be put down,belittled,ignored,and if he persists,be besmirched so badly that he is silenced as surely as if he was locked up as a certified lunatic.

Everybody needs to feel valued .I was jackbooted as a boy by authority for such preposterous reasons as looking up swear words in a dictionary ! (and how could I have possibly imagined then that far into the future I would be pursued by gangs of Scottish children who smashed the windows of my home, and stole NINE scooters,and how I was in trouble for mentioning the religion of my tormentors! ) Even though I feel proud of all my achievements I am forever plummeting into deep depression every Sunday because I am alone with nobody to talk to and reminded that it is the LORD S DAY ! as in my mind s ear I hear my fathers reprimands and feel that my very name STINKS of ignominy because I have failed to hold down a job.

Dignified roles are as necessary to our well-being as..a proper diet.We define ourselves primarily by our occupational roles.Mental illness supervenes as surely as night follows day if our self esteem is confiscated.We cannot exist in solitude ; and self-banishment only exacerbates our distress..Yet we collide head-on with dysfunctional Society as we think differently.We are as lost,in crowds of self-destruction-intent people,as surely as we are in pathless forests.As we have figurative periscopes that enable us to see far beyond the mindless mobs,we instinctively act in ways that preserve the environment .
Our habits elicit scorn,reprimands, , ridicule .yet we should expect congratulations .

Some of us have taken to heart the teachings of great thinkers down the ages.I am adamant that Socrates,Plato and Aristotle provided Mankind with a better Code of Behaviour than dogma-encrusted Christian morality. Plato declared that spiritually advanced people are those who have left the cave of ignorance for the sunlight of personal growth.He also explained the workings of the emotions ; three dark horses of Greed and Fear and Aggression and one white horse called Reason; and the Charioteer has to bridle the dark horses and allow the white horse of Reason to keep the Personality on the road of life long self-improvement Long before I studied Plato
in depth I had absorbed his teachings…at Religious Knowledge lessons led by a vicar!

So I created Alan Wright,the Socrates of Charford,as a role-model who lives his exemplary life by applying his exacting Code of Behaviour to everyday affairs.IF Alan was a real person I would right now be his loyal disciple –colliding head-on with small minded Christian people by seeking to lead trainloads of deserving people up mountains every fine Sunday and teaching them all my demanding hobbies on dark winter evenings.As everybody surely knows I was forbidden to emulate Plato and set up a one-man university for Aspies in Edinburgh ..because I live “in a foreign country “! the Kingdom of Fife ! yet it would not have cost the management a single brass cent as I can travel for free !.. they would still have objected because of imagined risks to Aspies on hikes in Holyrood Park ! and with soldering-irons etc.

“No man is an island” and those of us singled out for derogatory labelling still have to come to terms with Society which rejects us .I have been officially and indelibly besmirched on a Government disclosure form by Cumbernauld people (I must not mention their religion or that WILL land me in real trouble) There is a catch line in Sartre s HUIS CLOS “ I am the skylarks mirror,my darling “ ( uttered by the lesbian Ines Serrano that got the play BANNED till 1967 !) A skylarks mirror is someone who so frequently belittles anybody that the victim believes it and takes it to heart . Everybody sees themselves reflected in their neighbours.A well adjusted person can safely ignore the few who try to besmirch him. I have Alan Wright say “I see myself reflected in 5,000 windows.Does it matter if a few are dirty ?” The windows are the people of Charford , his neighbours. We with our social impairments do not find enough clean mirrors to be reflected in as we rightly distance ourselves from the moronised common herd .Yet this is the intractable heart of our collision with Society where all our talents count for nothing when we encounter the ingrained prejudices of people far less capable than ourselves in those disciplines where we shine. In Scottish society anybody with a morally neutral attribute is STILL a target for malicious besmirchment.as my experience proves. No matter how gifted the victim may be or what he might contribute to the common good he is judged for the peculiarity rather than all that is good about him.This is explicit in the very title “Red- haired Roderick”. Whereas when at Glasgow University I was accepted as a typical classic English eccentric .in Cumbernauld I felt like a Jew in Nazi Germany and that culminated in my own personal Kristallnacht in 2000 when mobs smashed my windows and I lived from hour to hour in fear of being SLAIN by gangs of children.

For all the beauty of the Scottish scenery I am desperate to quit Scotland I felt good yesterday as while walking I appreciated the whin in bloom by the roadside and reflected that if Mankind continues to wreck Earth quite soon there will be NOBODY ALIVE to thank God for the whin in bloom on a fine May evening I worked on a model viaduct and felt that it was utterly pointless to continue with that or anything else that I used to enjoy doing since I had NOBODY to share it with.I had offered those wanton fruits of my Asperger mind and was ignored or rebuffed with dark hints that anybody who dares to dissent from the motheaten Christian dogmas of our masters will be banished from society yet what DOES society offer me? Only FOOTBALL and SOAP OPERA and BINGE DRINKING ! No wonder I feel as I did in Cumbernauld that I am the ONLY JEW IN DUNFERMLINE so I dream of Stafford as my home town where I was valued as a hero ( who went on all night vigils in November watching for nuclear weapons convoys !) I wake in Dunfermline feeling that I am as bad as a paedophile.

Even if someone was a university professor he deserves to forfeit a dignified role in Society if he behaved like Josef Fritzl But myself ! the worst I can ever do to anybody is swear at them !

…then I have nightmares which are re-runs of the assault in my bedroom in 2005 with children ransacking my home and a boy holding my craft knife to my throat ,or equally scary re-enactments of events in Cumbernauld- glasses smashed by small girls and helpless as a bus bears down on me …I wake in terror far from Stafford and weep .

…and were I to try to teach my specialist interests would potential pupils land me in court because THOU SHALT NOT : use soldering irons; superglue; hammers,,saws,files,let alone a modelmaking lathe .THOU SHALT NOT develop colour films (still assuming I can buy colour developer ) and THOU SHALT NOT defile the sanctity of the LORDS DAY by taking parties of hikers to the Highlands ….this is Scotland in the 21st century fast regressing to Independence days when everybody pried into one another s affairs and made moral judgments about one another for such matters as their BEDTIMES!

Will I ever be allowed to play a dignified role?

David Seagrave

Social Dread

2009-03-20T22:07:00.000Z

One thing that puzzles and annoys me is a feeling of dread for social situations were I'm expected to appear as a confident and sociable person.

I vividly recall, particularly in my teens, sitting around or staring out of windows, trying to muster up the will to go to a disco, party or even a prize giving event were I was expected to receive a prize. A part of me wanted to go - and felt I ought to go - but another part had doubts and these doubts quickly grew into an overwhelming dread. While in this state I couldn't do much except wait for the time of the event to pass by. Strangely, even now, sometimes, when someone asks me out for a personal social event, often someone I like and would like to meet, the dread comes back and I have to let the opportunity slip by.

Even, recently, I painfully recall not be able to participate in a work colleague's birthday presentation. I was friendly with the handful of people involved but participating in this social occasion was impossible at that moment. I had to leave my office and wander about the streets killing time until the event had passed. I felt very bad because I knew my colleagues would think I was behaving in a very unfriendly manner and it might sour subsequent relations.

I think part of the social dread comes from negative experiences from past social encounters. I'm now thinking about an occasion when I willed myself to go to the house party of a friend. I was determined to try and work out a way to enjoy myself. I was thinking that if I turned up then maybe it could happen by accident. It didn't work out - but still I tried to keep up appearances and hoped no one noticed my struggle.

It was obvious to me that there was a lot of hidden social language happening that did not register on my social radar. I'm particularly referring to looks, eye contact, facial expressions, body language and tone of voice. I would like to have tried to attract some women I liked the look of and thought might have some interest in me if they just got to know me - but I really didn't have the knack or knowledge to make this happen.

I also now know that these situations caused me sensory overload. I mean, my mind and senses were overwhelmed by a combination of dim lighting, assorted noises, music, talking, smells and close body encounters. I quickly got tired and focused my mind on the best exit plan. I find leaving particularly difficult and it could take me some time to execute my plan. I was very happy to get away.

I hope to gain a better understanding and do a bit better in these situations in the future.

Paul

Perceptions

2009-03-20T22:06:00.000Z

No social flow or instinct naturally connects between you and the folk you talk to. That's the essential thing that makes AS. It shows in 2 key ways. You lack the feel to relate at a casual level, with this not being out of shyness but having no instinct for the other person's angle on your best way to relate to them. Your speech connects instead with the content of a meaningful subject, and you understand the exact content of messages, what is said. You have no learned feel for guessing unsaid details or social rules that alter the meaning.

So, say, a magazine website host asked me to write something, changed her mind what types of details she wanted, and took a huff because I hadn't guessed by social instinct more about what she wanted than she told me. You can't do that with aspies. Every part of communication must be worked on consciously. I'm the quieter type, for whom this means only communicating as necessary: I get quite lost at any conversation and just go quiet if surrounded by unfocussed chat. You ask me to do errands but only tell me half of what they are and expect me to guess the rest, then I get stuck. It's nice now to have an explanation for that. These limits on communication lead naturally into another classic trait, self-sufficient dedication to my interests. For a caring and politically intense soul like me it's a virtue to be criticised for my determination in banging on about an issue until it makes a difference. I get a feeling of knowing the world better, by putting things in comparative lists in their spatial or scale order. My teenage addiction was to transport timetables.

The further range of AS traits are non-essential extras. For instance, I don't have the trait of not understanding metaphors and taking them literally. This delayed me being sure of having AS at all because all books before 2003 used to assume this trait was always present. Then there's the fun of learning that other quirks to do with your body's sensitivity are part of your AS. My selection includes: arm fidgetiness, wearing shorts, using sleeping bags, and feeling jolted by sudden noises.

By: Maurice Frank

Asperger's in films

2009-03-20T22:03:00.000Z

Asperger's in Films

There are many films about autism but only a few specifically about Asperger's. Despite the fact that the term Asperger's was introduced into the English speaking world by Lorna Wing in the eighties, the first high profile film to describe the condition did not appear until 1994.

The film is 'Nell'. It's a film about the discovery of a woman who had been brought up with extremely limited social contact and speaks a language known only to herself. She appears to have a learning difficulty. She's an innocent woman who is fearful of people and somehow wired into a deeper and more spiritual reality. Though she is diagnosed with Asperger's during the course of the film, her extremely unusual upbringing and uniqueness means she does not make it into my Asperger's film list.

There are many films in the eighties and nineties - and in earlier decades - that have tendencies towards Asperger's or include characters with Asperger's personality traits. They can include geeks, nerds, absent-minded professors, shy naive people, eccentrics and many aliens. The list of films I have in mind are too long to detail here, but I would like to mention 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' (1976), 'Being There' (1979) and 'Edward Scissorhands' (1990).

Towards the end of 2005, the BBC showed several films and documentaries about autism as part of an Autism Awareness Week. In a documentary 'My Family and Autism', Luke Jackson decribes his experience of living with Asperger's. I was very struck by the film and it made me think I might have the condition too.

The first key film on my Asperger's film list came out the following year. It is called 'Snow Cake' starring Sigourney Weaver as a high functioning autistic adult. The film intends to inform the public about the condition and to this end Sigourney and the other film crew worked hard to ensure the depiction of HFA was accurate.

The film is about an ex-convict who ends up sharing a few days with a high functioning autistic woman. She does not make eye contact and speaks in an intelligent, intense but rather cold manner. She has a compulsion for neatness and order. She likes to be alone. She's very aware of her neurological condition and spends a lot of time explaining it.

However, another dimension to her personality is an uninhibited solitary pleasure at simple things such as flashing lights, dancing, rolling around in the snow and even eating snow. This aspect seems to suggest an ability to switch to more classic autistic state. This aspect of her personality greatly adds to her attractiveness as a character though personally I found it hard to reconcile the contradictory personality traits. Still, the film presents a positive and strong image of a disabled woman.

The second key film on my list is called 'Mozart and the Whale'. It was released in the UK a few months ago though it was actually made in USA in 2005. I have not seen the film but only read reviews and watched the trailer a few times.

The film is about the relationship between two people with Asperger's who meet at an Asperger's support group. They are intelligent, talented, articulate and attractive people. The film seems to be a fairly traditional romantic story but with rather eccentric people. The characters seem to be presented as neuro-diverse rather than disabled people. It's a shame the film has not been released and distributed earlier in the UK. I'm hoping to find it on DVD soon.

In America, the 'Snow Cake' and 'Mozart and the Whale' are much mentioned in online discussion though they're not so well known here.

A third film about to join my list is called Ben X. This Belgian film is just released and will be showing at the Edinburgh Filmhouse at the end of this month, from Friday 26 September to 2 October. The film is about a young man who is bullied at school and retreats from the harsh realities of everyday life into an online fantasy world involving role-play.

The film has received very good reviews. Because of the importance of victimisation to the storyline, I expect the film will be a much less pleasnt or inspiring expereince than the first two films but I still think it's a film worth seeing.

Another film worth mentioning - though I have not included it in my film list - is 'Somersault' (2005). This is a fine and sensitively made film about a young woman who has relationship problems. If it were not for a few very contrived references to Asperger's - from which the director intends to make us think the young woman may have the condition - the link would be impossible to make. However, the fact a film is made about a person with borderline Asperger's - or possibly not - is in itself socially significant.

Finally, a film which may or may not have an Asperger's connection is just released in the UK but not available to view yet. The film is called 'Her name is Sabine'. It's a documentary about an autistic woman filmed by her sister who is a well-known French actress. From what I have read and seen on the video clips, the film is the story of a dispirited autistic woman who appears to be an able, attractive, talented woman - possibly with Asperger's - a few decades earlier. Her story is about how she regressed and how the medical system is supporting her.

Film Reviewer

Edinburgh Transport

2009-03-20T21:55:00.000Z

EDINBURGH TRANSPORT

This article outlines some ideas for improving Edinburgh's public transport network, in particular the bus network.

Transport networks are a common interest among Asperger individuals, not least because they involve a lot of systemisation. I did a talk about the various types of transport in Edinburgh at a past ELAS meeting, and among other things the tram network and perceived missing links to Lothian Buses' network were discussed, especially a link to Haddington (currently served by FirstBus but not Lothian Buses).

I do not necessarily agree with the tram network, to start in Edinburgh in 2011, at least not in the form it will take. It will pretty much consist of one line (airport to Leith via city centre) and I feel that the cost of the network would have been better expended in high-quality bus corridors around the city. The routes that the trams will follow would be part of a bigger plan of such bus corridors throughout the city (not just one or two areas which the tram network will link).

This top level of high-quality bus routes, then, would be limited stop services, stopping only at certain well-used stops. Of course the existing network would exist as it is, but at certain selected 'designated points' spaced around the city would integrate with the limited stop services.

Some such limited stop services exist, mainly for commuters during morning and evening rush hours, but the idea would be extended to form a spider-web network in the city operating all day, with stops spaced more regularly than the typical limited stop network that exists. A good model of the type of service intended is the X48. Buses on this route are specially coloured in green, so perhaps a distinguishing colour like this could represent the top-level services.

Edinburgh has many radial bus routes, coming in and out of the city centre. Selected radial routes connecting to the designated points would be improved under the high-quality bus corridor plan. The radial routes would also, where practical, extend outside Edinburgh to nearby towns.

There are also routes connecting outer suburbs, evident from looking at a Lothian Buses map, but these are usually not well integrated into anything like coherent routes (there used to be full circular services such as the 32/52 but these were done away with a few years ago). Nor are these services always very frequent, including the 18 and 21 which are half circles around the outskirts of the city. But they are a key part of the plan for reasons including that Edinburgh's circular layout makes them practical, to avoid the city centre and its traffic, and because the designated nodal points such as the Royal Infirmary and Gyle/Edinburgh Park are areas visited by people from throughout the city.

I also envisage an inner circular route, something which Edinburgh lacks but would be useful given the density of inner Edinburgh in both population and services, and to integrate with the radial routes. Again, these could also act as a bypass of the very centre of Edinburgh (Princes Street/Old Town/New Town etc.). The idea is to connect points on the radial routes halfway between the city centre and the outer nodal points. I have made an attempt at defining such a route on the map.

The key nodal points would be:

North-east: Leith/Ocean Terminal
East: ASDA The Jewel/Fort Kinnaird
South-east: Alternating between Cameron Toll, a major bus interchange; and Edinburgh Royal Infirmary
South-west: Possibly Wester Hailes/Westside Plaza, which already acts as a major bus interchange.
West: Gyle/Edinburgh Park
North-west: Waterfront development

This would entail high-quality routes between the city centre and all of the above points. The nodal points would also be linked north-west to north-east, north-east to east etc. in a circular service. These routes could for instance be every 20 minutes. The east radial route would also extend to East Lothian towns like Musselburgh, Prestonpans, Tranent and Haddington (the last two could be served along the A1 alternating with a coastal route). The south-east route would extend to the towns of Midlothian, alternating in the different directions from the city. The west and north-west routes could re-open previously closed Lothian Buses routes, i.e. west to Livingston/Bathgate, northwest to South Queensferry.

Such a network is a good idea because of Edinburgh's very dense bus route network. This makes a top-level network a good idea, as a recognised, simple, well-spaced structure around the city would benefit travellers. Perhaps the buses could be similar to those used by Citylink, or Stagecoach Fife in whose network there is a similar idea of top-level routes around the county.

Map of suggested network lines

By: Mark

Red Haired Roderick

2009-03-20T21:41:00.000Z

RED HAIRED RODERICK

I take my place on the rostrum and gaze at the children assembled with their anxious parents.I begin ,feeling anxious

“Once upon a time,everybody ,there was a sad little boy called Roderick and he had red hair and he was the stationmasters son of Invergarvary on the railway line from Glasgow to Skye.in the district called Stordart .He began attending the village school and he was very bright as he could read at three ;he rapidly grasped the principles of arithmetic; the village dominie told him all about the history of that country of which it is said “Land of hope,a fair domain/served by the friendly Nor-western train,that leaves dour Glasgow at the rise of the sun, I know the landmarks every one, from Finnieston tunnel to the mountains of Skye,all that pleaseth a tormented eye.” And know those landmarks he did for at first whenever he travelled on the train he would rattle off everything his teachers had told him; about the Ice age and ancient volcanoes,of the first peoples ,the Picts, who left their mark as place names and of later men on horseback and indeed those who had built the railway ; and he knew of the world beyond s Scotland s shore through his stamp-collecting .But the other children bullied him because of his red hair and though he was attentive in class he stopped talking,.That made his parents very worried.After school and during holidays he refused to play with the other children.A relative found him wandering in the hills ,and gazing at the ever changing skies ,or listening to the melodies of wind and tumbling waters.On visits to the wild coast of Stordart he would be out of sight and later spotted paddling in the rock pools or simply gazing at the views of airds and skerries ; and the snow capped Cuillins sometimes visible on the horizon. The dominie told his parents that she had caught him reading her Herald and treatises on geography for high school children; He sat at the front and wrote page after page that showed that he had an intellect far beyond his tender years.She taught him to draw and so he would be away with a sketch pad and come to the school with drawings of those landmarks in that ballad I quoted ,which she instantly recognised .At the age of ten he was given a bicycle and rode it far during the Easter holiday and came back with dozens of sketches .then after he was waylaid by older children in the summer holiday he went missing…

He was found in a fisherman s hut on the Stordart coast with a sketchpad full of drawings that he had done and he was taken to Glasgow to see an eminent doctor and he sobbed,sobbed,sobbed throughout the journeys and he simply would not talk .So the doctor knew the man we know of as Lord Trefoelwyn ,the headmaster of Treheol College in that part of Wales called the Welsh Marches, children the country of hills formed before the earth had an atmosphere either side of the railway from Shrewsbury to Bristol .His parents made the long journey to Delormebury on that line and the boy sat gazing at the countryside and when they arrived the boy drew from memory,children a view of Shrewsbury seen from the train-remember, children ,those lines “High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam/Islanded in Severn stream” – that boy had but a fleeting glimpse of the town and there he had captured it,children, so the parents presented that sketch to the great Lord Trefoelwyn …

“So the great Lord Trefoelwyn said to the boy “When I was your age,young man I lived in my home town of Charford over the hill which has its own separate Welsh name ,Abercammaen .Then my father was promoted and we moved to Sussex where I began attending a grammar school. All the boys picked on me because I am Welsh so I ran away from school and even travelled without a ticket to my aunt in Romanbridge the cathedral city down the line.And I would not talk.Because of that I was sent to a remedial school near Maidstone that is the county town of Kent through which the Channel Tunnel railway runs.The headmaster unlocked my mind, young man so my ambition was to follow him …..Here I am to help you “

So the boy was enrolled at Treheol College where the great Lord Trefoelwyn taught him that his peculiarities were incidental and that all people ,that on earth do dwell ,now and forever were to accept,understand and master themselves.Lord Trefoelwyn was exceptionally tall and short sighted and went bald at age twenty eight so he is allegorised, as on a coat of arms as the Welsh Dragon.with glasses and bowler hat” (I display our famous emblem …)

…the boy met a classmate named Heidi from that flat part of Germany called Schleswig-Holstein that borders on the tideless,freshwater,Baltic Sea This girl had lost her parents in an appalling tragedy As she was enchanted with the mountainous scenery near the school they went out together and he taught her to draw,dear children; and he began writing poetry about his homeland,Stordart ,children so after lessons they cycled the byways of this district,Avalon ,which in Roman times was a kingdom under Roman suzerainty,children,because it paid taxes to Rome,children and known as Siluria ,children…..She taught him German and so they visited his parents and when they alighted his parents failed to recognise him! Smartly dressed and fluent in German he was explaining the scenery of Stordart in German to Heidi and neither parent could understand ! But they were so thankful for Lord Trefoelwyn who had correctly diagnosed what is called Aspergers Syndrome in their son. We have different kinds of brains,children.we who accept understand and thank God for it..Now Roderick and Heidi did so well at Treheol College that both went to Glasgow University and after graduating trained to be teachers.They joined the staff of Treheol College and all agreed that they like their classmates had grown dragon s wings . … I pull out a rubber dragon toy-with glasses and bowler hat ! and spread its wings I say that Lord Trefoelwyn taught all children with distressing peculiarities that they will be remembered,not for what they looked like or for habits like involuntary swearing ,but for the extent to which they struggled to master their infirmities of character and develop all their latent abilities by constant practice at demanding pursuits.He taught by the example he set ,even in his seventies leading his pupils up lofty mountains .So these children grew dragons wings so to speak by living according to the teachings of Socrates Plato and Aristotle notably to be inspired by the idea that an exemplary life is the ultimate beauty .Lord Trefoelwyn s life was that ultimate beauty dear children .He was no film star with his pebble lensed glasses ..I show the famous portrait of him on the summit of Moelwyn Mawr ….Roderick and Heidi got married ,dear children ,and are now jointly in charge of Bonavaig School for children like yourselves who are what is called high functioning autistics so let me present you with this memento of Roderick s own childhood –his anthology of poems and sketches produced in his days at Treheol College…”

I hand out a copy to every child in the hall and declare

“May this inspire you all to emulate my dear father .Red Haired Roderick “..

By: David Seagrave