This week I travelled somewhere by car. This for most people would be a normal daily occurrence but a car journey for me is so rare I remember when they happen, the previous time was months ago and I haven’t been anywhere in a car since.
Now, this isn’t because I have some moral objection to cars but simply because I have no need to use them. I love busses, tolerate trains and am quite happy walking and this has always been the case. In fact, I am now officially middle aged and still have never had a driving lesson.
A lot of people find it unusual to find a person of my age who doesn’t drive and often assume it is because I have been banned following a terrible incident. Actually, it is because I find the idea of driving terrifying.
Firstly, there seems to be a lot of admin involved. Licences, registration details, tax, insurance. Plus, the commotion of actually buying the car in the first place. All this seems overwhelmingly complicated and I would rather not bother.
Secondly, the process of learning to drive is (I am led to understand) expensive, lengthy and difficult. Multiple lessons followed by exams. I haven’t taken an exam in twenty years and the idea of failing multiple times and retaking over and over again in a spiral of humiliation is horrible.
Then there is the actual driving bit. Being a pedestrian can be unpredictable. Other people, weather, birds and dogs all present hazards while walking around but it is unlikely any of these will result in hospitalisation.
That is not true in a car, so many drivers are crazy. Having vehicles flying around corners, from every direction, at any moment together with all the pedestrians, weather, birds and dogs make the idea of being in charge of a potentially deadly heavy object unbearable. Plus, if anything did happen there would be yet more admin.
I think I will stick to walking, it’s just easier.
The day had started off with a phone call from my boss.
‘Have you left yet’, he asked.
‘Yes, I am on the train’ I replied.
‘How far away are you?’
‘Far enough’.
Family occasions are never something I look forward to, I would quite happily miss every marriage, christening and funeral that comes my way. The noise and the crowds don’t suit me well, so I try and keep out of sight. Luckily, living in a rural part of the country away from the rest of the family makes this easier, however as I was forcefully told by my mother ‘it’s not every day, your brother gets married’.
I have managed to avoid many of these relatives for years. ‘Why do you never bring anyone along’ they ask as I squirm. ‘You need to get married to carry on the family name’ like their entire gene pool rests on my shoulders.
The ceremony was to be held in a converted barn, high in the hills, up a narrow lane which featured around thirty cows who just starred at us throughout the proceedings. The journey was marred by an argument over what the word is for the party after a wedding. After a lot of shouting it was decided the word was ‘wake’. I gave up and put my headphones back on.
The night before all this had been full of drama as the rings had gone missing. Furious text messages went back and forth amongst the various members of the wedding party to try and establish when they were last seen and whose fault this was. Dad stepped into the fray and volunteered his ring as a replacement which was a great idea except it was stuck on his finger. A lot of tugging began; washing up liquid, margarine and vegetable oil were slathered everywhere, in the end an elderly auntie ended up tearing it off with such force that Dad’s finger was broken alongside most of the crockery on the draining board. I was despatched to find the address of the minor injury’s unit and to top it all off, the ring didn’t actually fit. The rings turned up magically overnight in a box of kid’s crisps nestled between the Monster Munch and the Quavers.
Our family has previous in this respect, last summer my cousin lost his wedding rings between leaving the house and arriving at the church. They had to order new ones from Amazon Prime which arrived directly at the church with less than an hour to spare. The delivery driver received a round of applause. Nobody told the bride her ring cost £15 until their reception was in full flow. I am waiting to read an article in a local newspaper that the rings were found with a carrot having grown through them.
The ceremony itself was best described as eccentric. It was presided over by a celebrant who spent a great deal of time describing what a celebrant actually was (I was none the wiser). They walked down the aisle together, the bride fell over her shoes and the song they chose for us all to sing was ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley. A choice that had an accompanying dance routine which the already drunk bridesmaids interrupted proceedings to teach us, sadly they couldn’t really remember most of it.
Our chief bridesmaid, Hannah, is the 16-month-old daughter of the happy couple and had been put through intensive walking training. She was one of those babies who is very happy crawling and has no interest in being on two feet, however a chief bridesmaid crawling down the aisle is no good for the photos so for the previous three weeks, every time she crawled she was picked up and put on her feet. You Tube videos entitled ‘how to get a baby to walk’ were closely examined and even the nursery staff were recruited into the mission. Sadly, this was all too much for Hannah herself who when the big moment came, fell asleep and had to be carried into the ceremony.
Fast forward a couple of hours and the reception was in full flow. Much like the rest, it was non-traditional and had a sports day theme with bean bag throwing, a three-legged race and the bride tore her dress doing a tug-of-war. The hog roast caterers finally arrived, two hours late and Hannah decided this was the perfect moment to take her first unaided steps. Of course, the photographer missed it.
Before I finally left Dad announced he had lost his nutcrackers. Quite why he brought nutcrackers to a wedding is unclear, but they had gone missing. We all had to go looking for them, like an odd treasure hunt. He even got the DJ to make an announcement to see if anyone had found them. I am sure some of the guests thought it was another party game. Around 20 mins later, he realized they were in the hotel after all. This was the last straw for me and I left to go to bed for the night.
In the taxi back, I realised that perhaps I should have told the boss the truth, which was that I was still at home when he called and could have gone back to work after all.
The old saying goes ‘school days are the best days of your life’. I think this is about as true as carrots helping with night vision or crusts making hair curl. I hated school.
I think I had already figured out that most of the things we were learning would have no practical application in real life. Knowing the symbols for elements on the periodic table, the cause of an oxbow lake or the relationship between Hermia and Helena in Midsummer Night’s Dream were all pointless. This took all my interest away from whatever the government decided that we were being taught.
My last day at high school was an odd one. We had a big assembly and all the students I expected to stand up and read their own poetry did exactly that, lots of people (including the drama teacher) cried and I just couldn’t get it. What were they all upset about? Are they really going to miss hours of essay writing, trigonometry or hockey in the rain?
My walk home that day was possibly the happiest I had ever been. I knew I had exams coming up but didn’t care, the worst was over. The exams themselves didn’t seem to make any lasting impact on my memory, other than a fire evacuation part way through. We all left the exam hall part way through and were forbidden from speaking to each other on the playing field. A ban on birds eating worms may have been more successful.
Exam results day also seemed unnecessary. I left it most of the day before working up the effort to go back to school to collect the envelope, it just didn’t seem important. It was only when I started getting phone calls from concerned family members that I finally went but by then I had heard the usual news reports about exams were getting easier and so our achievements were worthless, and I think I agreed.
I did fine in my exams and since then nobody has ever asked what grade I got in my religious studies GCSE, which is good as I really don’t remember anyway. I believe that since then, teachers have tried much harder to make education more relevant and engaging which can only be a good thing. I wonder if the teenagers today still know what an oxbow lake is? I don’t think it would be a negative if they had no idea.
I had to leave Cardiff suddenly in 2005 when I was fired from my dream job. They were right to dismiss me, my performance had been terrible. I’d have fired me too. The weekend after it all went wrong, I applied for everything and the first people that said yes were a holiday company offering a summer season in Tenerife. I packed up and left immediately. But what happened to Cardiff since I’ve been gone?
The apartment I had booked overlooked the river. It was a new development that I couldn’t work out. I had to ask a security guard in a supermarket where it was, then I felt duty bound to go and buy something. Perhaps it was the sunflower lanyard & ear defenders or maybe he was just not used to people asking him questions, but he followed me round the shop. Under pressure, I got a load of things I didn’t want to buy including three varieties of sausage roll.
Cardiff Bay has expanded yet the difference between what I remember and what I saw is how quiet is has become. Even though it was a weekend in early June, it felt like there were more places to eat than people who wanted to eat in them. I chose a takeaway from a noodle restaurant, I had about 10% of it, then a seagull swooped and scattered the rest across the pavement. Within about three seconds, I found myself in something similar to a remake of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ and promptly moved along.
I had a lovely tour around the Wales Millenium Centre where we got to watch the technical staff setting up for a performance of an opera I was unfamiliar with. All the extremely heavy sets are still raised onto the stage by ropes operated by stagehands. I asked why it wasn’t operated by computer and that question went down about as well as if I had asked why it was not operated by alcohol fuelled puppies.
Following that, I took the water taxi into the city centre to see how it had changed. It turned out that I had no memory at all of how it used to be so nothing to compare it to. I just wandered round a generic shopping district that could have been anywhere. The only thing of note is that on three separate occasions, I was stopped by somebody from the Hare Krishna movement, all of whom asked me what music I was listening to. None of them seemed to understand that I was just wearing ear defenders and not listening to anything. In the end I gave up trying to explain and just said Celine Dion.
The following day I took a walk along the barrage, something that hadn’t been built when I was last there. It was a lovely, if windy day, and an inflatable obstacle course had been set up in the water, populated entirely by excitable children struggling not to be blown into the water. I decided to leave them to it.
The final stop on my trip was a bus ride to Barry Island. This is one of those places where I have heard a lot about but never actually visited. Imagine a much smaller version of the Blackpool Pleasure Beach where everything is on a tight budget and you wouldn’t be far wrong. I wanted to go on the big wheel so I could get a view of the harbour but it was operated by tokens and the machine only sold awkward amounts so I had to get £10 worth of the stupid things. The big wheel was nice, giving me a good view across the bay.
But I still had eight tokens left. I tried to use them to buy a burger but no, food didn’t count, a terrifying woman boomed at me. So, I went on a rollercoaster ride, a really small rollercoaster. I was the only person on it and I was only there to use up the tokens. Honestly, it was rubbish and I have never felt so tragic as a middle aged man going on an empty rollercoaster alone. Out of sheer embarrassment, I gave my remaining tokens to a passing woman and her pre-school child (people the rollercoaster may have been more suitable for).
Before I left Cardiff, I had a quick look at the place I got fired from 19 years ago. It was exactly the same, the desks hadn’t moved, I am sure the chairs were the same too. The only thing that had changed was me and I am fine with that.
It had been a good week… That was until the ‘Unfortunate Train Incident’…
I have enjoyed creativity and being around creative people for as long as I can remember. There is something very pleasurable about watching somebody rehearse or making something. Anyone who can do this has my admiration, mainly because I am utterly unable to do this myself mainly due to a failure of memory, attention or patience (sometimes a mix of all three).
Visiting a gallery, looking at the sculptures or pictures is a lovely day out, but my own attempts ended with finger painting, while using stencils seems to result in a multi-coloured smudge and lots of mess to clear up.
I would love to be able to cook anything that tastes better than bland. No matter how carefully I study the recipe, I always seem to get distracted and miss things out. Most noticeably was the day I tried creamy chicken and omitted the chicken. I won’t be troubling MasterChef anytime soon.
Dancing is another area where I have tried and failed. While at sea I managed to get certified as a Zumba instructor having agreed to the training the night before, being persuaded with the description ‘its like line dancing but more tropical’. This was completely wrong, and I was terrible. I couldn’t manage most of the steps, the ones I could do I kept forgetting (having to stop and look at the notes) and I never really was fit enough to do it anyway.
DIY is simply terrifying. Luckily, I usually live in places where there is somebody who can change lightbulbs for me. Flat pack furniture usually ends in disaster when I give up before the end of the instructions. Nothing I have made has the back attached (I just push things against the wall) and consequently it all wobbles about till it collapses inevitably at 3am waking up the whole household.
This shortage of patience is also the reason behind my lack of musical skills. As a child, I had clarinet lessons, but I couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm and managed to distract my teacher with chat about Eastenders until time was up. It just seemed easier that way.
Acting was thwarted by my inability to take direction (rather than doing what I wanted) and also the exact opposite scenario, my total terror of improvisation (rather than being told what to do).
My creative breakthrough was with poster design. I can knock up something half-decent very quickly and people are impressed with how eye-catching they are. I don’t tell anyone it’s all automatically generated by the ‘design ideas’ section in PowerPoint which make it for me. I always choose the second one down and then hope I can work out how to use the printer, even filling it with paper is a challenge.
I suppose all of these things follow my life motto – if at first you don’t succeed, give up and do something else.
It has taken me a while to pluck up the courage to go on another ferry since I got stuck in Belfast a few years ago thanks to a trio of storms – Dudley, Eunice and Franklyn. Quite why I remember the names of these storms but not my phone number is an unsolved mystery.
Anyway, I had to use up the last few days of my annual leave, I don’t drive and the trains were on strike (again) so I decided to be brave and take the bus to the ferry terminal. As it was a Thursday in early March, it was very quiet. I upgraded the ticket to get myself a soundproof cabin (more than three times the cost of the very cheap ticket but it meant I could take a nap) and we arrived in the Isle of Man a couple of hours later.
Perhaps it was a result of being groggy from the nap or just a general lack of concentration, but I managed to get confused in the terminal building and went to departures instead of arrivals. Eventually I got collected from the car park by a minibus and taken back to security who were concerned I had bypassed their check point altogether. My ear defenders and sunflower lanyard came to the rescue when they decided to book me a taxi to the hotel (following a passport check) rather than send me to prison.
I only saw one other person in the hotel that night on the way up to my enormous room. A huge empty room with enough space to hold a ballroom dance competition in the centre. Imagine a converted sports hall with a bed at one side, sofa against a wall and bathroom right at the other end, so far from the bed I considered getting there by bicycle.
Next morning the receptionist seemed genuinely surprised to see anyone at all. I don’t think she had seen another human being in months and gave me a very long (and enthusiastic) talk about different things to do on the island, many of which were illustrated with dusty leaflets with the previous year’s opening times on.
This was a sign of things to come. I went to the ferry terminal to get a three-day bus ticket – this time without an intervention from a security guard – and hopped on the first bus to Peel Castle but it was closed. Oh well, I thought, there is a large museum in Peel, I will go there instead. No luck with that either. I had a look around a beautiful port town (Port Erin) strolling down the deserted beach. It was so quiet, I wondered if the whole place had been wiped out by some kind of zombie apocalypse.
That night at the hotel, I asked the enthusiastic receptionist about the steam trains, apparently the entire network was finished for the winter. I asked if she had any suggestions for anything at all that would be open. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that the entire island would be closed. She recommended the wildlife park, she knew it was open as she went there at the weekend. However, upon arrival, the sign read ‘closed Mon-Wed’ and guess what…
Having said all that, the island was beautiful. The sun shone almost the entire time and I had a great time plodding around exploring. It’s just fortunate I am happy in my own company.
It’s clearly not her job to look after people who can’t remember where they are supposed to be going but perhaps it was the sight of my sunflower lanyard and ear defenders that made the woman in the town hall take pity on me.
I got to the front of the queue and explained I was looking for the radio station, but I was late, I don’t have my phone and I have forgotten where I am going. It wasn’t a great set of circumstances. She went onto her computer and found a phone number. She then found a side room with a landline and let me call the station manager who was (understandably) confused as to why I was calling an hour late from the council offices. When I explained I was lost, he just said “right, I see”.
The problem, he explained, was the man who was dispatched to train me had left as I was so late and hadn’t made contact. Instead, if I was happy to wait another hour, I could ‘sit in’ with another lady who was on her way. Of course, I was happy to wait an hour, I had already waited 16 years. The issue was the lady wouldn’t be expecting me.
I waited on the doorstep for her to arrive. Her gut reaction when I asked if she was with the radio station was to clutch her handbag closer to her. I think my presence knocked her off course, as rather than switching the monitor on in the studio, she turned the entire computer off, managing to knock the whole station off air in the process. It took about 45 minutes to restart. She filled the time by reading me poems from her phone. It wasn’t how I imagined my first day would be.
By the time she finally got on air, she was so frazzled that she had almost entirely lost the power of independent thought and spent the rest of the program stumbling over words and pressing the wrong buttons, cutting songs off part way through or playing several things at the same time. I have since learned that this is fairly normal for her.
At the end of the program, the station manager was on the phone asking if I could meet him tomorrow morning, presumably wanting to know if I am stable enough to be trusted. So the following day, I came back and to make up for yesterday I was more than three hours early. I got the 7am bus to be on the safe side, this had the predictable consequence of me being very tired. Once again, I was waiting on the doorstep. The station manager brought his deputy, and they were ready to see what I could do.
I was surprised to notice that the mixing desk had barely changed from what I remembered but of course the computer was entirely different. The mini disks I worked with before had been put in a skip years earlier and I am always suspicious when people say any computer system is idiot proof. However, in this case it was fine. The speech content came back to me and before I knew what was happening, I was live on air, even though I had nothing prepared and no music.
My return to live radio came as a surprise, the station manager and his deputy went to a café and left me to it. When they returned, it was announced that I had passed my audition and would start next week.
I bought myself some headphones and books I could use for material. Over the next few weeks the show started to come together. I started doing the traffic news, weather forecasts, reporting on local events and it felt like I was back in the action.
Then after a few months, I got a message from the station manager. “I need somebody to broadcast from the foyer of a conference centre for a major event, do you fancy it?”
When I was a child, our advent calendar came out each year. The doors were stuck down with blue tack, ready to be reused the following year, this went on through my entire childhood.
Now I am an adult, there are many things about Christmas that I would like to see the end of.
Christmas crackers – you pull them, they go bang, a load of junk falls out, it all goes in the bin.
Endless discussion about a white Christmas – No, it won’t happen (it never does).
The Christmas Radio Times – Now costs the same as a university degree and is so heavy it needs a crane to lift it up from the shelf.
Secret Santa – everyone spends money on someone they don’t know and gets something they don’t like.
Wham/Slade/Mariah/Wizard – That’s enough.
More seriously, my autistic brain also doesn’t like flashing lights, crowds and disruption to routine. Christmas is full of this. In short, I am always glad when it is over.
This year, I had managed to book some time off from the half-finished hotel in the run up to Christmas and decided to escape and have some family time. This involved a journey on the west coast mainline. Apparently, 32% of services have been ‘severely disrupted’ this month. I am surprised that it is so low. I don’t think I have ever travelled through Lancashire’s trio of doom (Wigan, Preston & Lancaster) without a wait of at least half an hour – usually unscheduled. The three of them are designed in a way that nobody can ever make their connections or find any glimmer of joy at all. Like a wetter version of Hotel California, you can check out but never leave.
This time we were treated to a “senior conductor” who made several announcements but was never actually spotted. Even when an elderly man fainted due to the overcrowding and heat being stuck on, the senior conductor remained elusive, possibly working from home. We were advised that as people were standing in the entrances, hot drinks were not available from the café. Obviously, the decision to blame the passengers for daring to stand on an overcrowded train is something nobody will have any problem with.
The reason the train was so late was a little variable. Over the course of the journey, the senior conductor informed us that it was speed restrictions in Milton Keynes, trespassers in the West Midlands, a lack of platform availability in Litchfield and also a fault on an unspecified other train. I got the feeling the senior conductor had started malfunctioning.
Once all that was over, the holiday came and went without any severe incident. I went to see the film Maestro at the cinema. I enjoy going in the middle of the day with the retired people, often I get a free biscuit with my ticket. This time, I managed to miss the start, I also left for the toilet and fell asleep missing 20 minutes in the middle. The bits I actually saw were very pleasant but I got the feeling that nothing much happened, but I couldn’t be sure, I might have just missed them.
On my way back from the cinema, I got my family a multipack of cheese from a Christmas market as a gift for the big day. Any seven cheeses for £25. Again, maybe an autistic thing but the choosing seemed a bit overwhelming, so I asked the man behind the counter to do it for me. He said he didn’t know what the cheeses were and was only covering the stall for his brother. In the end I asked for the whole of the top row, much like a Countdown contestant.
The Christmas market itself has started selling tika masala, sushi, tacos and spring rolls. All festive family favourites, what I couldn’t see was mince pies. I heard a five-star hotel in Scotland has given up selling mince pies as 70% of them are thrown away, maybe saying more about the stock control and food quality than anything else. Perhaps that wouldn’t be something that I would have announced in a press release.
Anyway, the holiday is over and back to the half-finished hotel I go. I will go into battle with the train stations of Lancashire trying to avoid breaking my foot on a falling copy of the Christmas Radio Times.
During the next five weeks, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I kept thinking about going back to Bradford and that dental surgery. What made it more complicated is that by now, I had moved house (again) and the trains were on strike (again).
Because of these complications, my appointment meant I had to book three days holiday and pay for three nights in a hotel. The hotel was on special offer, presumably there was not a great number of people who wanted to spend time in Bradford, in October, during train strikes. To be honest, neither did I. It was one of those hotels with no reception, so they keep the keys in little safes attached to the wall and just email the code. Miraculously, I got in with no problem.
Then I went out in the rain, got lost and retreated to a depressing chicken shop, where I was the only customer. The woman behind the counter said I would have to have takeaway as they were about to close, when I pointed out the sign that said ‘open till late’ she just sighed and said I would have to eat quickly. By the time I finished, other customers had arrived meaning her plans for an early night were scuppered.
The following afternoon was dental D-day. I researched the busses and found a direct route, but the bus didn’t arrive and neither did the next one. So, it was back to the taxi rank. Except in the intervening five weeks, it had moved due to roadworks. By now my brain was starting to frazzle and it occurred to me that the problem with using a taxi, is that I would have to explain to the driver where I wanted to go. Yet I couldn’t remember the name of the surgery or which road it was on and, of course, I had failed to write it down.
I went to the tourist information centre to try and find someone who could help. But it was shut “due to a function”. Instead, I went round the corner to the very grand City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council and queued up at reception there. It’s fair to say their clientele are varied, the lady in front of me only spoke a few words in English and was communicating using a book of pictures, the man behind me was under police escort. In the middle was me, with my ear defenders and sunflower lanyard, who couldn’t remember where the dentist was. How the people working there get through the day without losing their minds remains a mystery.
I explained to the lady that I had an appointment at a dental clinic which I thought began with the letter C, I was also fairly sure the first part of the road name was High. Without so much as a raised eyebrow, this superhero went to the computer and within a few moments had not only correctly identified the surgery in question but had also booked me a taxi, without me asking.
Despite all this kerfuffle, I was still early to my appointment. The receptionist I encountered on my last visit was not there. Perhaps she has found more suitable employment in the meantime, maybe working on her own in a little cabin, 150 miles from the nearest human being. Perhaps her absence also explained the change in mood of the dentist, who was much more patient than during our previous encounter. He explained what was going to happen, let his extremely nervous patient take a moment to breathe and then the procedure began.
I was so convinced that it was going to be one of the worst experiences of my life that the fact it was only moderately horrible came as a wonderful surprise. The drill was quieter than I expected (thank-you ear defenders) and the whole thing was over in less than ten minutes. I was given a lump of cotton wool to keep over the socket for twenty minutes though I lost track of time and had it in over an hour.
I needed four separate trains to get home and because of the strikes, I left it an extra day to make sure everything would be ok and I wouldn’t have to spend 19 hours in the rail interchange at Preston or Blackburn or both. I spent the extra day pottering around the shops of Bradford. Highlights included a chat with a shopkeeper “are you looking for menswear” “yes” “we only do it in the spring, come back in April”.
Most of the rest of that day has faded in my memory due to the overwhelming sense of relief that the dental work is done and I will never again need to go to that surgery (which is good as I won’t be able to find it anyway).
Disabled. I was given a concession ticket for a disabled person. Why?
I have been visiting the Edinburgh Festival for years, I blogged about my experience last year which featured me getting overwhelmed and twisting my hip. It was also at Edinburgh I first decided to get a sunflower lanyard.
1 in 6 people globally are classed as disabled. Many disabilities are fairly apparent but sunflower lanyards are designed to be worn by people with less obvious needs who may require extra time or help in shops, on busses or just on the street.
I always fought the idea of buying one of these, I didn’t like the idea of wearing a symbol and I also don’t like thinking about my autism as a disability. I believe the clear thinking it gives me along with the ability to focus and research is really great and not in any way negative. However, it is also true that I have found interactions in busy environments such as large railway stations much easier while wearing it, people just seem kinder and more patient.
So it was in this context that I went to see a comedian called Joe Wells. He was performing a free show and I had an hour to fill. Joe is an autistic adult, and his show was about autistic life and really made me think about myself.
One piece of the puzzle that fell into place for me was about US TV show The Big Bang Theory. There was a phase about 10-15 years ago where I was regularly told I was like the character Sheldon. On a couple of occasions, I looked up photos of the actor playing him, and I guess there is a slight similarity between us, we have similar pointy jaws although our hair and eyes are different. It surprized me quite how often I was told about him, once even being stopped by a stranger who wanted to tell me about Sheldon. Joe Wells explained that although it was never explicitly stated, Sheldon was autistic.
It hit me that all that time, people were not telling me I looked like Sheldon, but I acted like him. I acted like I was autistic, years before it ever occurred to me, let alone got diagnosed. I suppose I should make an effort to look up an episode or two but to be honest, it is highly unlikely I will ever get round to it.
That night, me and my sunflower lanyard went to see a review of Burt Bacharach songs. The place was packed with people and a kindly steward noticed me and found me a quiet chair to sit on. I love the music of Bacharach and although I was probably not the target audience, I was looking forward to a lovely hour of Alfie and Walk On By. What I actually got was something so loud it would have overpowered a jumbo jet. The show was deafening and I had to leave after the second song and listen to the rest of the performance sitting on the floor of an emergency escape.
Empowered by the words of Joe Wells, I decided to get myself some ear defenders. I see many people walking with very large headphones, and these don’t look too different. So off to Screwfix I went. I had no idea how much these would cost and was pleasantly surprised to find that they were only £3.99. I am sure that most people going to Screwfix for ear defenders are construction workers who need them to dig up concreate rather than festival goers who want to drown out Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head but the shop assistant didn’t seem to mind.
The ear defenders were great, I couldn’t believe how much more pleasant Edinburgh was when I couldn’t hear the traffic, drilling, alarms sounding, dogs barking, drunk people shouting, bagpipes (so many bagpipes) or loud music from street entertainers.
So it was in this context that I went to the box office of another show that night with my sunflower lanyard and ear defenders only to get a ticket marked disabled. Not wanting to make a fuss or hold up the queue, I didn’t question it but did spend most of the show thinking about it (to the extent I can’t even remember what the show was).
Is autism a disability? Does that mean I am disabled? Clearly people have thought of me as autistic/disabled for years… Perhaps my ear defenders make me look more disabled too…
As I write this days later, it occurs to me that none of it actually matters. Who cares what category I fall into? To quote a song “It’s my life that I want to have a little pride in, my life and it’s not a place I have to hide in, life’s not worth a damn till you can shout out, I am what I am”
Although maybe don’t shout out, just speaking at a normal volume will be fine.
Unseaworthy 