THE SPECTRUM 2016

It’s 2016, I am 68. Joy and I are planning our month. There were several TV programmes we wanted to watch; two exhibitions; a hospital appointment; a research trip for one of her projects and an AirBnB holiday – it was all getting a bit complex.

So I grabbed the back of an envelope (really) and a pen and drew a vertical line, with cross ticks marking off the days, divided off the months and numbered the days, and wrote in each activity in its day. This way you could see easily where they clustered, and how many days there were between them, and how they related to the weekends. Just a hand drawn appointments calendar as a long line – from my point of view a perfectly sensible thing to do; I am an architect and I think graphically. It was a thing I had done many times before when researching historical events such as biographies or the life of companies.

Joy took one look at it and said “I know what THAT is - I’VE SEEN IT BEFORE”, you’re on the SPECTRUM”. I was astonished, it seemed slightly sinister and where had she seen it before? From the vehemence it was said I presumed a previous boyfriend (“I’ve always chosen very intelligent boyfriends”). It seemed to me a perfectly obvious way of visualising it.

By ‘spectrum’ of course she meant the autistic spectrum. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a ‘spectrum’ condition, varying from hardly noticeable and not interfering to any extent in ones life (high functioning autism), to where it does impact to some degree, but sufferers can generally live independently (Asperger’s Syndrome), to severe autism which requires 24/7 care. Wikipedia defines it as ‘a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by repetitive, restricted, and inflexible patterns of behaviour, interests, and activities, as well as difficulties in social interaction and social communication . . . . there is an opinion which frames autistic traits as a healthy variation of the human condition’.

So, I wasn’t too pleased, but thinking about it in the following months I wondered if perhaps she might not be right – not very far down the spectrum, just a small amount. I certainly liked continuity, certainty, order, ritual, getting things right – we celebrated our first date every year by going to the ‘Farm Girl’ restaurant in Portobello Road on the anniversary, it was very meaningful to me, but I knew something was up when after 5 years she said she didn’t want to go.

Perhaps it contributed to some of the problems in my life which I had always attributed to my childhood? ‘How I discovered I was different’. Was it nurture or nature? I prefer to think nurture (but then I would wouldn’t I, in the words of Mandy Rice Davis)..

Anyway, I became interested in autism. Every Monday I went to the lunchtime concert in St Peter’s church, Kensington Park Road (which is where I met Joy), one of the other regulars was Janet Camp, whom I had seen around Kensington for many years in a full Goth outfit long after the fashion had faded. She was actually physically quite attractive, but clearly had severe Asperger’s (she had a heart rending Facebook site). I wondered if she had enough self knowledge to know she had Asperger’s, so I got 20 leaflets from the Asperger’s Society and left them in a prominent position in the church lobby. I hung back at the end of the concert watching if she picked one up – she didn’t, but when I checked all 20 were gone. Half the audience had picked every one up! So much for lunchtime concerts in churches.

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