On Thursday I had one of my autistic meltdowns. These are generally caused when other people are panicking or situations are moving quickly. If my brain doesn’t time to process information it tends to close down.

The situation this week was caused by a water shutdown to fix a broken pipe and I was being told so many things all at once, I got very tense and flustered resulting in me being unable to do or say anything useful at all which is no good when you are on stage and have a room full of people watching you.

The next day my agent called

‘I have a question for you, a nosey question, you can tell me to go away and mind my own business but you remind me of a friend of mine. He plays the piano for hours every day, he is brilliant at it but when it goes out of tune, he really can’t cope. He is autistic, are you autistic too?’

‘Yes, I replied’ I had been waiting for this and been pondering for months if I should bring this up.

‘Well why didn’t you tell me?’

Now that is an interesting question, why didn’t I tell him?

Part of the reason is that I don’t really like talking about myself. It never occurs to me that anyone would be interested so unless it is a fun anecdote about something funny a guest said or what I saw in the street, I keep personal stuff to a minimum.

Then there is something in my head that isn’t sure how people will react. A few months back it felt like there was a series of very serious crimes committed by people with autism and the news always made a big story about them being autistic. Autistic is the new social bogey man, the people to be feared.

I don’t want people tip toeing around me, I don’t want people treating me differently and I don’t want to answer loads of questions about ‘my condition’.

Of course, he didn’t mind at all that I was autistic and went on to change the topic and the remainder of our conversation was spent talking about supplies and schedules.

One of the curious things about working anywhere in hospitality is the secret shopper… We already have plenty of guest feedback, internet reviews, regional manager visits but none of this is good enough so twice a year we must suffer the secret shopper.

Firstly, everybody knows when they are due to visit (generally somewhere else in the group will have just had one), everybody knows what they will be looking for (whatever was picked up last time) and within moments we all know who it is.

This last week I worked out who our secret shopper was by the way he walked past a window.

There are a number of giveaways

• They never get the dress code quite right (always slightly more formal than our regular guests)
• An unusual confidence / familiarity with the product
• They are never with anyone else
• Spending a strangely long time in the building, often involving touching a lot of surfaces
• Weirdly happily to chat (people on their own never want to chat) and they are generally more polite than our normal clients

To be frank, they might as well have a big neon sign saying ‘I am a secret shopper’. This then places us in a dilemma. We know they are a secret shopper but we can’t say that we know, then the games begin.

The Hollywood smiles come out, the ‘less useful’ staff are sent to the stock room and we provide an extraordinarily high level of customer service – often one-to-one.

A favourite thing for us is testing their story. ‘Have you had a good day?’ ‘What have you been doing today?’ ‘Have you been in the area long?’ ‘what do you think of (insert new thing that has just opened)?’

The stupid thing is, that they know, that we know. Yet the charade continues… We all pretend to be surprised when they ‘reveal themselves’

We were just visited by the same secret shopper that came in October… He was 6ft4 yet seemed really annoyed that people remembered him even though it had only been seven months (we still kept up the pretence) (and he knew it).

I wonder how much money is spent on the secret shopper program and how much is discovered that we didn’t already know.

Either way it livens up what would be ‘just another day’

This morning I read of another person I called a friend who had died before 35. This is the fourth time in the last couple of years a crew member I knew personally from the cruise ship has not made it to middle age.

Perhaps fortunately, I do not know the details of any of these deaths and maybe I am simply unlucky to have been affected by the deaths of all these young people I knew but it does make me wonder how well us ‘sailors’ look after ourselves and each other.

All of these people died at home but we did have crew member deaths at sea.

• A young lady who cut herself to pieces with her partner’s razer
• A young man who hung himself in his cabin
• A musician who overdosed on painkillers
• The buffet steward who drowned in the shower
• The engineer who ‘disappeared’ from the back of the ship

Were any of these people in crisis before they came to sea? Maybe there were existing problems they were running from. Or perhaps, is a 65 hour working week in cramped conditions part of the reason for all these young people dying?

I know from my own experience, the diagnosis of any kind of mental health problem will lead to an immediate ‘medical discharge’ which means a couple of weeks of sick pay and then no work for two years. For many people, it is not financially viable to be ill.

Oddly, being surrounded with an ever changing set of strangers is very lonely. The people at home move on without you. Missing family events like weddings, birthdays and funerals is part of the job so you end up not knowing anyone. Is this part of the reason?

Perhaps an unhealthy lifestyle is another part of the jigsaw. It is very hard to get hold of fresh vegetables but very easy to get hold of subsidised alcohol so drinking becomes a way of survival.

It would be lovely to see these cruise lines looking after crew members as people rather than interchangeable people who fill spaces but it feels like we have a long way to go yet.

I have always been very happy in my own company. Where as most kids wanted the approval of their classmates, I actively avoided it. I always found other people a complication in my life. It is much easier to do what I want, if nobody else is involved.

More recently, I have found out this is an autistic trait. Before this it was being a ‘loner’. A term is usually used negatively to describe somebody abnormal, somebody strange, somebody to be feared.

In my case, it is the exact opposite. I like being alone as I struggle with unpredictable behaviour. I actively avoid big groups, young children, animals, drunk people, street entertainers, birds or anyone who might do something I can’t predict.

Plus not having anyone else to please means I am free to do what I want, when I want. I don’t need to justify my decisions as I don’t really have anyone to justify them to.

It would be lovely if being a ‘loner’ was seen as a positive rather than something to be feared but until then, I am happy to embrace the term to describe myself, not as a negative but (like blonde or tall) a simple statement of fact.

One thing that has always terrified me is cooking. All the warnings we got at school about food poisoning ended up with me not cooking anything at all. Meat, fish, rice, eggs, anything frozen, things past sell by dates, rice, things that have touched meat, all of it has the potential to be deadly.

So my diet for 20 years was fresh, pre-made food. I have a wide depth of knowledge about supermarket sandwiches (the Christmas ones are especially good). Then things in tins, toast and satsumas (for vitamins) made up my diet.

Then six months ago, I got a cook book. It was aimed at students who had no utensils and explained simple things like how to boil an egg or do a baked potato. The dishes all have a difficulty rating out of five (anything three and over, I have dismissed as too complicated).

Since then I have had almost nightly disasters with things falling on the floor, burnt hands (I have oven gloves but worry about getting them dirty), melted Tupperware, missed ingredients, incorrect quantities and absolutely nothing that looks like the pictures.

Luckily, I am only cooking for me. I have also made the decision that tins & toast aren’t do bad after all…

On a holiday resort anywhere in the UK or on the Med there is ‘that guy’. The one who either

• You can pass annoying family members onto, so you get some peace
• or
• Keeps trying to give you quiz sheets and begging you to do stuff you hate

I am ‘that guy’

Some people think I am the best thing on planet earth, others look at me like I am a walking version of bird flu. Usually the amount of alcohol consumed depends into which group people fit.

It is best not to take the love/hate for simply existing too seriously as tomorrow they will have all checked out and the whole process will start again.

For months now my manager has been asking for my DBS record… I somehow misunderstood DBS to mean Digital Banking Service and that my boss was being weird and wanting to see how much I have in my account…

Turns out it is the ‘Disclosure and Barring Service’ which sounds very Peggy Mitchell (‘get out of my pub’) and I need one as I have chosen to work with people…

There is something terrifying about official procedures, not because I have anything to hide (I am really not that interesting) but trying to work out how to fill it in is extremely complicated.

The first bit is easy – addresses, contact details, payment details (of course they want payment details before anything else) – it is the second part that is difficult.

I need to

• Provide two pieces of ‘approved’ ID
• Take them to a post office to get another form
• Find a post office that is still open
• Pay for the post office (that must still exist somewhere) to do this
• Take the form they give me and ‘digitally attach’ this to the ID
• Work out what ‘digitally attach’ means, then how to do it

These are the bits I can find out of the process so far, it is no wonder they take the money first, they would never get paid if it was at the end.

Apparently I will get the results within 7 days of the application being entered although at this rate by the time I work out how to do that, the process will have changed again.

Bureaucracy is so much fun.

I have been writing for a few months now, taking classes and trying to work out what I can and can’t do..

Following a year of major change I decided I wanted to use my brain and learn something new. It could have been…

• Art
• Computers
• First Aid
• Child Care
• Dogs
• Looking into space
• TV programs with Des O’Conner
• Ways to chop a pepper

But having a day off on Tuesday and not really wanting an evening thing, it meant writing was the default choice as it was the only class on at a convenient time.

The first class was terrifying, I had to take the anxiety medication twice that morning, anything new is always difficult and a terrible phone call with the ‘Leisure and Pleasure’ department at adult services didn’t help. There were so many questions they wanted me to answer, it felt like a struggle even getting here. Plus Leisure and Pleasure seems to be a department simply because the name rhymes (but has too many syllables to be a pub name).

I never intended to become a ‘writer’, it would be very easy to argue that I am not one anyway.

The first class was about ‘the big why’. Why are we writing? A lot of my classmates wanted to leave stuff for their kids or to make money. I had no idea why (well, it was to pass the time but this is not the answer they were looking for).

Over time, it turned out to be me learning about me… How did it take 35 years for anyone to figure out I was autistic… Does it matter…