physical document stolen, no holiday, and listening to us could have prevented it

In today's Metro I was overjoyed to find that someone else, not me, had written in supporting the view favoured by me and the education reformer John Holt, that there should be no age limit on the vote at all. That everyone can start voting when they personally feel ready. You see, whenever you are oppressed, there is always someone somewhere who sensibly realises it.

But never in this world does pleasure last, before pain takes it all away again. The same Metro also told of a couple who got burgled during their wedding, and the man's passport was stolen. Despite the personalised nature of passports the burglars obviously reckoned they could do some fraudulent changing of it, and nicked it, with the result that the couple can't go on their honeymoon to Iceland.

Think about that. They are no longer allowed to do something they have presumably already booked and paid to do, because by no fault of their own a physical object has been stolen from them. For being victims of crime, victims of theft, they personally cease to be allowed to do a thing.

Then remember what I have said here several times before, about how the fine coordination and dyspraxia and attention issues in autistic spectrum conditions increases the losability of small objects like tickets, so makes it disability discrimination for your status as you move around ever to depend on your possession of any small physical object like a ticket. Like a passport too. It is a form of ticket, and it is barbarously primitive to have its losability during your holiday to be able to get you into a frightening practical crisis. Very visibly it is a form of apartheid pass book too.

There is a disability equality duty to listen to all the impacts made by any disability. If there had been no blatant evading of the responsibility to listen to the autism scene concerning this, then the issue of losable documents would already have been forced, including at a brilliantly democratising international level because passports exist. If this had been done uncorruptly, following the medical facts as far as they go, then passports would no longer exist and this couple's experience could not have happened.

Maurice Frank

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

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.

Thoughtful culture

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