A Waitrose Red Admiral

After a horrible day yesterday where I did absolutely nothing apart from a 50 minute exercise bike session, I have been a bit more active today with a 2 hour walk in the damp up to our cricket ground and around the park.

Activity is ramping up at the club. Wickets are being cut and our first junior training session is on Friday. Matches I believe will start from a week on Saturday, and I'm excited and anxious at the same time. I want to play, but I'm very frightened still, despite all manner of precautions that will be taken.

Likewise when I go back to work. I've become very used to isolation and in my Autism Spectrum way have become conditioned to this routine. Which has become a very nocturnal one too.

Today, all the nature pictures are taken from one single buddleia bush at the entrance to Waitrose; because of the cool day the visiting buzzers and flutterers were being quite sluggish and easy to photograph for a change.

This enabled me to get my first red admiral shots of the year.

This red admiral is lucky. It can afford to shop at Waitrose, which is more than can be said for me.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 08.07.20

The Tourettes Cricketer Strikes

Hero to Zero in a day. After a good day yesterday, I got called today for some obscure back foot no-ball violation rule that really pissed me off.

I was already on a down after feeling really stiff and unable to open the bowling as I usually do, even though our skipper was late and technically I could have bowled myself if I wanted to. But a slightly picky umpire wound me up, and it completely threw me.

This led to one of my famous meltdown times, as not seen on a cricket field for a while. For about 45 minutes I had no idea what was going on out there! My body didn't help by being completely unable to obey the instructions my brain was giving it...one particularly hilarious uncoordinated dive ended up with me in a sprawl on my back, with the ball sailing over the rope behind me.

Grrrrr.

Luckily our skipper is a proper cricketer, and he took seven wickets while I pointed out oystercatchers to passers by and generally moved around in a chilly daze.

When we batted, we struggled against good bowling again, although our new Kiwi friend showed his power by hitting a few into the trees. I merely popped up a catch off a leg spinner for 1.

Really bad day for me.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 04.06.17

Tic and Stim Confusion

So, I've been having another outbreak of Tourette's and Asperger's confusion that has become a little bit of an odd obsession the last couple of days.

I'm trying to work out how much of each thing is inside me - is it  Tourette's 100-0? Or 0-100 Asperger's?

I really can't tell. Both TS and AS share similar co-morbid conditions - OCD, ADD and various other flavours of behaviour, but they are also different, and this is where I've been going a little crackers.

Tics are in the provenance of Tourette's. Stims are autistic behaviours. Stims are things like flapping of hands, rocking back and forth - I've just been rocking back and forth just now while thinking about rocking back and forth. Tics are uncontrollable, only they are not...they satisfy an urge, wait so do stims, sometimes, but in a different way...

The only really consistent thing I pick up is that tics tend to be more centrally located down the centreline of the body, while stims are more symmetrical and found at the extremes. But even then I'm not sure about that. I do tic vocally, usually quiet little names or phrases of interest quietly burbled and usually taking on slight different, clipped forms, but the real yelling, and the most convulsive, violent, flappy tics come when I'm extremely upset or stressed by something I read or think about.

Then, at other times I think stimulating thoughts and my hands begin to flap and do a sort of clapping without moving thing.

Then sometimes my left foot has been arching within the shoes, and my left leg likes to do a sort of strange stretching thing, like a slightly demented cat.

So today, everytime by body has done something, I've tried to classify it - stim, or tic?

I've tried to classify me. Tourette's, Asperger's, or both?

For some reason this became very important, and I'm not sure why. Knowing what percentage of my behaviours is caused by one or the other doesn't change very much, they are all still there and nothing will ever change that.

Even as I write this, a tense bit of "Silent Witness" comes on, and my right arm bends over the top of my head, hand towards my left ear. At the same time, my left side tenses and pulls my body over like an anti-stretch.

Incredible thing, the brain, and body. I don't know how the heck anyone ever works it out.

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 03.01.17

The Asperger Child

I was trying yet again to get rid of a load of horrific clutter in my horrifically cluttered flat, when I found various notebooks that I have kept haphazardly at various times in various places.

Most of them are comparitively recent and full of various scrawls; the book of holidays, which is red, and the book of moon-a-mucks, which is brown, and horror and prose and thankfully no bad poetry whatsoever.

What I also came across was a very 80s design A4 notebook, which I was using in about 1987.

This was the book of planetary geology and economics, of flying saucer sightings, interstellar space craft design and a navy belonging to a nation and history that never existed.

These are all my designs. My stories, the external expression of what went on in my head and what still does, endless design of aircraft and navies and cricket teams and all sorts.

I had no idea back then, but thanks to reading Oliver Sacks I have since discovered that this is very much a trait of Asperger Syndrome, as is the obsessive bowling of tennis balls against trees while commentating on it in Richie Benaud voices. Which I've greatly enjoyed doing since 1980 and never will stop doing.

Tourettes and Aspergers do often run together, their spectrums ribbon around each other like friendly snakes, and both share OCD and ADHD co-morbids. What I am, and which bit of all this does what, is very unclear to me and doesn't matter anyway.

So here it all is, the created universe of Si!

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 15.11.16

Pretentious, Moi?

As a couple of you noticed the other day, I hinted at how I often wonder how my writing stacks up from a literary point of view, especially compared to the great flood of "New" nature writing that is emerging at the moment; works like H is for Hawk and The Outrun.

The latter work I certainly intend to read in the near future, having followed author Amy Liptrot on twitter for a few years now, and I have seen many good reviews of Helen Macdonald's work as well. These are nature writers who are hugely admired and respected, and I wonder if I would ever have the ability to write anything not to match them, but to lose to heavily but in a plucky way.

There seems to be so many pitfalls to avoid. I've read various little articles on how NOT to write about the natural world, and believe me, I find it very hard to avoid using words like "majestic" too much. I have also caught myself writing about the wonder of something that frankly, is nothing much to wonder at and have erased these feeble passages in the nick of time.

I hope.

I also worry endlessly that this blog is merely a shallow account of what I see on my travels, rather than exploring the deep psyche of the Tourettic Aspergic writer; I worry that it doesn't mean anything...but then again, take this dunnock.

I could write about this dunnock in two ways, I guess.

1) "I opened the door, and saw a hungry dunnock on the hunt for crumbs under my feeders."

OR

2) "I opened the door, and my eye was caught by a tiny, frail dunnock, desperately seeking scraps of food from my empty feeder. As I looked into its eyes, it looked at me with an almost human recognition and between bird and man, we shared a moment and knew that we were both the same.  We were scrappers, fighters, permanently on the look out for any crumbs life could give us. After the death of my family, and my subsequent addiction to heroin, seeing this bird, as lost and starved as I was yet never giving up, gave me the strength to go on living, and face every day with a new and unbreakable perspective."

I worry that if I ever try to write anything too deep, I'll drown in the direness of that number 2.

But am I a good enough writer to avoid that?

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 21.05.16

"On the Move" with Oliver Sacks

The recent death of the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks made me more determined than ever to read his final work, his autobiography "On the Move". I owed it to him, for I owe him my sanity.

Once upon a time there was a university student prone to distressing bouts of obsessive thoughts, rages, and who's strange ticcing behaviours had been remarked upon, and made fun of, for years. By my final year at University, with finals approaching, I just didn't know what to do any more. I'd seen counsellors and psychiatrists throughout my studies, and none of them knew what was happening to me. I was really struggling to cope.

One mental health nurse suggested schizophrenia. That went down really well.

In the University bookshop, I idly picked up a copy of his anthology "An Anthropologist on Mars", opened it at random to a chapter on a surgeon with Tourette's Syndrome, and found myself reading standing up in the bookshop, beginning to end.

Reading about me.

A year later, I was given my formal diagnosis, and the improvement in my well being was immediate, simply because I knew it "wasn't my fault" any more, and I wasn't mad. Still been a rocky path, but I'm still here!

As for his book, there are many surprises to learn about the cuddly, bearded fellow, the one essentially played by Robin Williams in "Awakenings", the cinematic adaptation of his book of the same name. You can see from the picture that he was a leather clad biker, a neurological  Kerouac-ian hero, a traveller. A bear of a man.

He was also a drug addict for a large part of the 1960s who nearly killed himself with amphetamines, a Muscle Beach powerlifter and record holder, and a gay man who was celibate for 35 years at one point. Indeed the account of how he lost his virginity, which would be essentially rape in modern terminology, is shocking in his calm acceptance of the situation.

What he also makes clear that he was never a great researcher in neurology, rather his fame came from his sympathetic care of his patients combined with his deep observational skill. He has been criticised for exploiting his patients, but to me he stays on the right side of the ethical tightrope - bringing the study of the intricacies of the brain to mere mortals, without compromising his position as a carer. However, he does make it clear that he had to shelve a documentary on one of his Tourette patients after they made threats against him, and his use of terms like "idiots" to describe certain conditions is very jarring to the modern reader.

Indeed,  it is his accounts of his freewheeling early life and forays into writing case studies, that form the most readable section of the book. After the 1968-73 period where he describes his work with his "Awakenings" sleepy sickness patients, things begin to flag rather as has life settles down and he gives up his motorbike. A major section towards the end, where he describes a new theory of "neuronal evolution" will almost certainly blow the synapses of a non-expert reader. Fans of his case study writing may also be disappointed, but obviously those works are available to read in their own right.

But overall it is a fascinating account of a deeply human and important man, and I enjoyed it greatly.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 10.10.15

Mr Spock and the Joys of Non-Neurotypicality

Many better writers than me have already been pretty eloquent in expressing the impact Leonard Nimoy and his creation of Mr Spock had on their lives.

I'm not going to bandwagon jump, nor am I going to pretend that Spock was some kind of inspiration for my love of sci-fi, spaceships and astronomy.

I've written elsewhere of where that came from - the artist Donald Rudd  - but what was actually going through my mind on hearing of Nimoy's death was a piece by Oliver Sacks in his collection "An Anthropologist on Mars". Sacks writes of two autistic people in that anthology, the artist Stephen Wiltshire, and the animal behaviourist Temple Grandin. I think it's in the Grandin piece that Sacks talks of how autistic people often stated that their favourite character from TV was Spock, and his latter day successor Data.

Sacks, who incidentally himself has stated recently that he is not long for the world theorised that it was the portrayal of a person with very non-human emotional needs trying to make sense of a very human environment that appealed to folk with autism. I think also that the fact that the tremendous contribution these people to those around them, and the fact that their colleagues valued them and treated them warmly when they were perhaps not able to respond likewise, would also be influential in this.

Perhaps also the Aspergic love of knowledge and information too would be an attraction.

Seven of Nine, a character who would also would have had "AS Appeal" in addition to her other obvious charms, was not around when Sacks wrote the article. Certainly sat where I am upon my Tourette's spectrum, where it dances with that of Asperger's, I found all these characters fascinating, and enjoyed their relationship with the neurotypical world, although I was and still am very suspicious of how the terms "Neurotypical" and "NT" get thrown around sometimes.

There is a whiff of contempt about it, I occasionally find...albeit a rather understandle whiff.

Still these are terms that have entered common (ish) usage. And it is to Leonard Nimoy "and the character I created" that a huge amount of credit must go to for making not just autistic - or non-neurotypical - people perhaps feel more comfortable in their skins, but anyone who felt that maybe you know, "knowing stuff" was more important than having cool hair.

Si