Senses: For the National Autistic Society

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.

The Asocial Network

In an anti-social Saturday night mood (I have a lot of work on this week) I decided to watch The Social Network. As I consumed it on my laptop, I couldn't keep my Facebook page open (as many people increasingly seem to do). This was probably a good thing.

Zuckerberg, Prince of Geeks

According to the film, Facebook started out of a miasma of greed, spite, boorishness and awkwardness. Mark Zuckerberg, reeling from being dumped by a girl, sets up a site called Facemash which compares girls at Harvard in terms of hotness. It gets him into (ahem) hot water; it also receives thousands of hits in the first day it was set up. Zuckerberg was portrayed by geek idol Jesse Eisenberg as a sort of mechanical, sleep-walking droid who dreams of algorithms and of being socially accepted into one of Harvard's clubs (which seem, as far as I can see, to be far more exclusive than anything Oxford has to offer). His friend, Savarin (played with emotional heft by future Spiderman Andrew Garfield), is on his way to becoming part of those clubs, which sows the seeds for future revenge.

The Olympian Winkelvoss twins, who embody the patriarchal, moneyed system that Zuckerberg wants in on (I think I met one of the Winkelvoi [as Zuckerberg calls them], at Oxford: which one I can't remember, but it was definitely something to do with rowing and I seem to remember a vast expanse of lycra), note Zuckerberg's success with Facemash and tell him about a network that they want to set up between Harvard students. Zuckerberg plays them off, telling them he can't do it, whilst at the same time setting up exactly the same sort of thing - which will eventually become Facebook. The film is slick, dark, with a sinuous soundtrack (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose which loops and grinds and whirls in deep ambient beats), as gripping as a hawk's talons on a mouse.


Something that is meant to encourage us to become freer, to share, was born from the most negative human emotions: lying, cheating, oneupmanship. Zuckerberg's treatment of his friend Savarin is particularly poignant, diddling him out of his share of the business with the help of Sean Parker (a dotcom brat played as an empty, vain cokehead by Justin Timbersnake). The Facebook office moves, at Parker's advice, to California, where Zuckerberg and his pals lark around like stupid fratboys toking on bongs, diving into pools and getting 'wired in' to computers. It's not a pleasant sight, and it slightly worried me that that sort of empty hedonism might be anybody's idea of a good time.

A friend of mine with Asperger's syndrome told me once that, at his fortnightly meetings with the Asperger's group, they had decided that Facebook had been set up by someone with a similar syndrome. Watching this film has confirmed that point for me. Social interaction on Facebook is much, much easier for people who are unable to speak to each other face to face, who find the multitude of signals and ironies that people use in speech too confusing. It is not designed to be 'creative'. Zuckerberg seems to think that it is creative. In fact it is almost the opposite of 'creative', as it forces thoughts and feelings into trammelled paths. On a day that three or four friends announced their engagements, as a joke I put my status up as 'engaged'; within ten minutes I'd received congratulatory messages from people who surely must have known that I wasn't in the slightest about to get hitched. There is not much room for jokes or irony on Facebook.

A truly creative site would allow you as the user to make it what you wanted it to be. People talk a lot about Facebook's role in revolutions: I've also seen its role as a mobiliser of hate - there was a truly vile page about the woman who put a cat in a bin, for example. For every page promoting peace and love there's another promoting destruction.

I am uneasy about Facebook, I will admit. It sucks up my time. I like to pretend that it is a passing fad, that within ten years we'll all have moved on to something else. But it's been part of my life for six years now; many teenagers have grown up with it as a viable and normal form of communication. There is an image at the end of the film where Zuckerberg befriends his ex-girlfriend on the site; we see him pressing refresh, every few seconds, to see whether she has accepted him. Zuckerberg has succeeded, is my feeling, not in becoming part of those exclusive clubs; but in making the world his club, and turning us all into versions of himself.

And now I shall upload a link to this piece onto Facebook, and press refresh until somebody 'likes' it... The Social Network is a superlative piece of filmmaking - of last year's Oscar contenders, I think the best. And it is also the most worrying.

Equine Therapy: Horse Boy Camps

In May my brother Ashley and I went on an equine therapy camp inspired by Rupert Isaacson's Horse Boy adventures. It was a wonderful experience, and I wrote it up for the Daily Telegraph. Here is a link:

CLICK HERE

Did Achilles have Asperger's? And what's Marilyn Monroe got to do with it?

There is a simile in the Aeneid, in Book I, where the busy Carthaginians are seen by our hero (conveniently clad in a cloud spun by his mother Venus) building their new city. They rush here and there, laying out walls, marking out houses, all intent upon their business. Virgil compares them to bees, something I have always found slightly sinister - bees are, after all, relatively mindless. But that is how I have felt, over the last week or so: rather like a bee, perhaps not filling its cell with honey, but at least attempting to do so.

As I have buzzed through the city, I have had the discordant pleasure of my iPod throwing up first Ted Hughes' Prometheus, followed by 'Eurodisco', a song by the little known and much reviled band Bis. From the sublime to the ridiculous, and then to the fall and beyond: I saw Arthur Miller's play, 'After the Fall', a thinly disguised account of his life with Marilyn Monroe, a brittle, heroic, doomed character. In it Pandora McCormick particularly shone as Marilyn, or rather the Marilyn character, clothed in red and pouting on a bed. It is a hard play to pull off, but I think the Oxford Drama School did it well, with strong performances from all.

I've also been reading (after a marvellous review in the New Yorker by Daniel Mendelsohn, I was sent straight back to the source material) the Iliad, and a couple of things struck me: first, what was the actual shape of the Trojan horse? It can't have been anything more than a barrel, really, or perhaps an upturned skiff on a couple of logs. I would like to know more about this: if anyone can point me in the right direction, please do. And the second thing was, perhaps Achilles (another brittle, heroic, doomed character: the Marilyn of his day?) was suffering from some variant of Asperger's syndrome: selfish, ritualistic, and unable to see the views of anyone apart from himself. I wonder if this explains the wrath (menin) of Achilles: Sing, Muse, of the Autistic Spectrum Disorder of Achilles.

Which brings me, in a round-about way, to a film I saw recently advertised: 'Agora'! Now there's a name for a film. 'Meeting-place!' It is, apparently, about the mathematician Hypatia, who as far as I remember was ripped apart by an angry mob using seashells, for one reason or another, I think for attempting to explain calculus or some such. It stars Rachel Weisz. I know nothing more of this film. What next? 'Pythagoras!' We can but live in hope.