Last week I gave a speech at the Spectrum Ball, which is the yearly fundraiser for the National Autistic Society. It was an excellent event: Simon Amstell threw grapes at the crowd; Jack Whitehall talked about s*****ing (interpret that as you wish); Francis Boulle offered up the most enormous diamond I've ever seen (well, I suppose that's not saying much, but still); Daisy Lewis glamorously held the hat for the tickets; Fred Page sang beautifully, and Geordie Naylor-Leyland sang (beautifully too) about dwarves, cheese and fat girls.
It's easy at these kinds of events to lose sight of what exactly they are for. The NAS asked me to contribute a piece to their programme, so since it's not available online I have decided to publish it here. Autism and Asperger's Syndrome are areas where not much is known, and raising awareness in the general public is of paramount importance.
Here's the piece, entitled Senses:
Humans have more than five senses. We can
balance. We can feel pain. We can touch our noses with our eyes closed (try it
now – you’ll see if you’ve drunk too much.) We can calibrate changes in
temperature. We can echolocate. (Well, maybe not the last one.)
All of this information hurls into our
brains – literally at the speed of light and sound. Most people can order it,
sort it, process it, and present a picture of the world around us which helps
us navigate. We package up all this data and, almost instinctively, deduce
things from it that seem obvious and – indeed – normal.
We can all say, objectively: we are in a
room with lots of people gathered to raise money for The National Autistic
Society. We can look at the person on our left, and judge if they are hungry,
tired, happy or bored.
As language and society evolved, humanity developed
these simple deductions into a whole, subtle code of signals and signs which
tell us about other people, and, more importantly, how to deal with other
people. When you catch the waiter’s eye and raise your eyebrows you’re telling
him a lot; when you shrug, or fold your arms, or make a face, you are
communicating without even trying.
But imagine if you couldn’t do those
things. Imagine if, somewhere along the line, the information that the universe
gives you got scrambled.
Imagine if the words that hit your ears
became long strings of meaningless sounds, and that you could only understand
one sentence in three.
Imagine if all the things you saw were so
bright and overwhelming that you could only make out one major piece of
information – and that that thing wasn’t even the right thing.
Imagine if everyone else in the room was
shouting at you because you’d got that information wrong, but you didn’t even
know why or how.
The world that we know suddenly becomes an
alien, frightening place. Everybody else seems to move to a different rhythm.
They know how to talk, how to race, how to win. They know how to catch a train,
drive a car, do the shopping. They seem to know how to live, how to be what we
call normal.
But you can’t. And what’s worse is that you
yourself don’t know why you can’t.
So in order to gain some sense of order in
your life, you begin to categorise what you can.
It might be the way your food is arranged.
It might be a pattern of cars, or a song that you heard at a certain time. It
might be a phrase that somebody said to you once, whose meaning you keep trying
to unpack and unpick.
It might be a comic you read when you were
4, or a sound that a radiator makes at night.
All of these things are anchors –
recognisable points in the rush of things which tell you who you are.
If these patterns become upset, then you
become upset, because you have no control. You hold on to the only part of your
senses that makes any sense at all.
And this doesn’t always make any sense to
other people. You feel trapped, anxious, scared, alone and frightened.
The autistic spectrum is a broad one, and
something that still isn’t fully understood. We have been making huge strides
in our understanding of the many conditions that lie along it, and how to care
for and aid those people that have it.
Really that’s what I would like you to
remember. That each person who has an autistic spectrum disorder is just that –
a person, like you or me, with emotions, feelings, and senses. Each case is
different: there is no easy solution or “cure”.
That is why we need as much help as we can
get to raise awareness and funds to help those who suffer from it.
Remember: people on the autistic spectrum
disorder aren’t making no sense. They’re trying to make sense. And that’s what
all of us, in this often bewildering world, are trying to do.
Chairete, (yes, I've just been to Greece): Here are the books reviewed in my summer round up of children's books for Literary Review. 
.JPG)
The year before last, I received an email headlined: "Hay Festival." Terribly excited that at last I had been invited to speak at Britain's best-known literary festival, I opened it, only to find it was from a PR company telling me what the line-up was. So when, this year, I received another email with the same headline, I ignored it for ages. Luckily I eventually opened it, as this time round it was an actual invitation. I couldn't have been more delighted.
A small announcement: I have signed up with a new agent, Philippa Milnes-Smith, at the LAW agency. To the left is my new author photograph: credit to Tatiana von Preussen. 
