Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

 Awareness of autism has increased immensely in the last half-century, both within the psychological profession and amongst the public at large. The autistic were always there, but not many could label them appropriately. An unfortunate backfire of improved diagnostic rates has been medical charlatans causing harm by attributing an apparent rise in rates to false causes, but overall it has to be a good thing.

At its worst, autism can be a gross mental and physical handicap, and terribly life limiting. But it is called a spectrum because it comes in all levels of severity, from permanent invalidity needing lifelong nursing, to merely being an oddball nerd with a somewhat feline personality. At the milder end, there is a distinct sub-category, not officially recognised by American authorities, but real enough to be a useful diagnosis elsewhere, called Asperger's Syndrome. Public awareness of Asperger's has lagged behind the broader spectrum of autism, but it too has grown enormously in recent years. I don't suppose many of this blog's few readers will have paused and muttered "What?" when I mentioned it. I must have been in my twenties when I first heard of autism, in my forties before I heard of Asperger's, which piqued my interest, as the description the article gave perfectly described someone I had been in a band with, and past sixty by the time I came across a full enough description of Asperger's to bring me to the stunning and shocking realisation that I have had it myself all my life, and not known.

To be fair, my wife had been lightly suggesting for several years that I might have AS, since she started encountering AS children as a teacher, and remarked on how like me they were, but I smugly took it as a running joke. Maybe a decade ago, I did start wondering enough to take a shallow online DIY test for autism or autistic tendencies, but I happily accepted the false negative and dismissed the thought. Two years ago, though, I read a thorough description of the syndrome, which vividly depicted boyhood me and to a fair extent was adult me, too. Denial suddenly ceased to be an option.

In the 1970s, there was a much loved British TV comedy series called Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. It was brilliantly scripted and performed, but I personally sometimes found it rather uncomfortable viewing. With hindsight, I now know why: Frank Spencer, the protagonist, was a sharply observed and harshly lampooned stereotype of an Aspie, with the situational comedy mostly driven by his misunderstanding what he was told, and the slapstick arising from dyspraxia. (Although Michael Crawford, who portrayed Spencer, was a professional song and dance man in his physical prime, and was limber enough perform spectacular pratfalls without any joke-spoiling injuries, when real life Aspies just hurt themselves). I would tend to identify with him when I was meant to be laughing at him. It would be politically incorrect to remake the show today, now AS is better known, but what gave it its strength then was that everybody knew someone like Frank. They just categorised us as low-functioning normal rather than high-functioning autistic back in those days.

So, what about me amounts to Asperger's Syndrome? It was reading about how it presents in boys that really clinched it for me. Being at least blessed with a decent helping of general intelligence, I have learned coping strategies and workarounds and maskings and suppressions over the years, and just categorised them as growing up and behaving myself, not having had the insight into my condition at the time to define them in their proper context. But it is still with me to a significant extent. The embarrassing hand-flapping tic is mostly suppressed, and I seldom subject unfortunate listeners to monotonous monologues on things that happen to have caught my interest any more - two ears, one mouth is a simple rule to take on board, and in adult life I am usually laconic and slow spoken. Yet still the jabber-demon sits on my shoulder and I sporadically give thousand word answers to simple questions, compelled despite knowing better. The Frank Spencer problem of finding the wrong meaning in ambiguity hangs over me always. Emojis are handy little things to illustrate typed electronic messages. I use about six, and don't really know what to make of the rest. A classic AS symptom - diminished ability to read facial expressions. I have no time for those TV drama and movie scenes where the actor stares into the camera with a slightly twisted face, either. I think they are supposed to be full of meaning and emotion, but they are wasted on me and just go over my head. I can always pull my weight in a pub quiz team, from a life of hungrily gathering facts about whatever might catch my attention from time to time. Guess what avidly gathering facts on a subject without otherwise gaining any functional expertise is characteristic of. Bad handwriting is associated with Asperger's Syndrome. Nearly every teacher or boss I have had in the last 58 years has complained about my writing, so I'll have to make a mark in that box and call it a tick, too. The dyspraxia has certainly haunted me. Of course, I wasn't diagnosed as such, just dismissed as cack-handed, the poor balance and co-ordination attributed to being left handed. I had chronically scabby knees at primary school, was late mastering a bicycle, had numerous motorbike spills, wrecked a car only the other year by tangling my foot in the pedals, and just about always still have a cut or bruise somewhere, especially hands and shins. In adult life, I can learn fine motor skills, but it is a matter of substantial practice of specific tasks.

And then there is the whole big thorny question of relating to people. I am not so unsociable as to crave a hermit's life, but I am fully content with much narrower and shallower interactions than most of the other people I know. I love Facebook, because it keeps me in touch with hundreds of acquaintances without the slightest risk of any of them getting too much in my face. Almost all of them are friends through shared interests in politics or music, having been colleagues or having been in quiz teams. Without those starting points, I am not well equipped at all for befriending strangers; small talk is heavy going for me. Beyond that, people often don't warm to me anyway. I think others read the signs of AS more easily than I could in myself, and not many are friendly enough to want to bother with an oddball. At least it means the friends I do make are all nice people, so I am not overly bothered.

So, what does it mean for me? Almost two years on from finding out, I have come to terms with it, after a disconcerted period struggling to get my head round the realisation that I was not at all who I always thought I had been. For the most part, it has not meant any practical change in my life; as I said above, developing coping strategies was subsumed into growing up for me. The biggest change is that it has discouraged me from political activism. For many years, I saw myself as an ordinary man, different only in my willingness to stand up and be counted, and fancied myself qualified to speak as an everyman on behalf of the silent majority. Now I know I am actually viewing the world from a substantially different viewpoint through different filters compared to most of those around me. So, I can't speak for them. Of course I can still speak to them, but that is a little different; campaigning has value, but it is not representing and still less leading, and I doubt that I belong in politics enough to try again as I have in the past. I do have the example of Greta Thunberg, the openly AS climate campaigner to look at, but there is a mixed message to take from her. She has traded on her otherness to promote her views, which are right to the point of being bleeding obvious, but rather uncomfortable to those of us with lives under the current system, however, she is also a highly divisive and unpopular figure, not that she cares. I like her, but she raises the hackles of many of my friends. I don't suppose I would care much about being divisive and unpopular for pushing something I believed in either, but, being old enough to be Greta's grandad, I have enough worldly wisdom to doubt the value in being that man, when a warmer and more intuitive campaigner could do the job to better effect. David Attenborough is on the same page as Greta, yet probably the best-loved person in all of Britain, but he is a very different personality. I shall remain very interested in politics, but the idea of running for office when I retire from real work has very much faded in the harsh light of my new self-knowledge.

And what does it mean for you? Go gently on the handful of clumsy, nerdy people the Law Of Averages probably throws into your life, don't mock. They can't help it, but will be loyal friends if you are nice to them.