Differently Wired: Articles by an Autistic Blogger

By James Christie

Differently Wired is an illustrated collection of around sixty articles and blogs written by James Christie for the Huffington Post UK, the Glasgow West End Guide, Autism Eye magazine - and even the Sherlock Holmes Journal. They cover subjects as diverse as Einstein’s brain, Scottish independence, American civil rights, libraries, adults with autism, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all with told with Christie’s characteristic fluency and barbed wit and all offering the unique perspective of an autistic writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chaplin Books
• Release date: Aug 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911105367

Book preview

Huffington Post UK

Selected blogs 2012-2016

Drunk? Demonic? Deranged? Be a Writer!

A BBC news article has confirmed what so many might suspect: writers are nuts, or to put it more politely:

creativity is part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible... Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found. They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.

(Michelle Roberts, health editor, BBC News online)

Great.

I have published my first book. So apparently all I can look forward to is going crazy, having my mood go up and down like a yo-yo, becoming delusional, snorting cocaine and dying young’ish.

The older I get the more it seems that those who excel in certain areas seem to make up for it by throwing themselves straight down the plughole in certain others. Jimmy Savile’s once-fine legacy of fundraising for Stoke Mandeville and making children’s dreams come true now seems like a smokescreen erected by a dirty old man, behind which he preyed on the young and the vulnerable. Lance Armstrong, who fought back from cancer to win the Tour de France seven times, should have been an icon of inspiration to others, but has instead been exposed as a serial cheat and a bully. He has been charged by the United States Anti-Doping Agency with doping and trafficking of drugs, and is likely to be stripped of his Tour titles.

Nor are the feet of our revered leaders free from clay.

Back in 1996, Lisa Marshall of Glasgow Caledonian University proved that psychopaths and politicians had many similar character traits, and her report was received with no great surprise by Parliament. Lewis Moonie, then Labour MP for Kirkcaldy, wryly commented that, nothing I have seen in the Commons contradicts these findings.

So it seems fundraisers are fiends, sportsmen are stoned on success and steroids, our current frontbenchful of MPs could be swapped for the inmates of Carstairs State Hospital without there being any discernable difference in the way Britain is run and writers are bouncing around gaily with bipolar disorders.

But wait a minute, amidst all these torrents of eccentricity and madness lies the fact that I wrote a story, found my muse, virtually got a vampire for a flatmate (long story!), got that mythic connection with a character writers dream of (that was the vampire) and made friends with a film star into the bargain.

Why am I not in Carstairs State Hospital, tied to a bed and gibbering away happily? Why, even in the midst of a torrent of creativity flowing like a river in spate, was I completely free of anxiety, schizophrenia, depression or the desire for death? Why was my vampire flatmate more like a good companion than a demon bent on sin?

I’ve never written while drunk in my life, I’ve never taken drugs and I’m reasonably certain I’ve never killed myself. On the other hand, I once heard that after writing In Cold Blood, the writer Truman Capote became a recluse, turned up drunk at talk shows and died in a pool of his own vomit.

There is a fine line between creativity and obsession, between fantasy and delusion, but I seem to be able to walk the line and turn out the work without any ill effect.

Could this be because of the atypical wiring of my autistic brain?

I have a theory that autistic brains may be better able than those of neuro-typicals (the majority of the population) to handle the ups and downs of the creative impulse. One of autism’s few universal symptoms is a tendency to be artistic and creative. It is possible that the design of the autistic brain’s wiring makes it more able than the mind of a neuro-typical (NT) to accommodate that vital spark which drives the artist to perform.

I’ve no easy answer with which to finish this article. I sit down to write and stuff happens. Afterwards I put my feet up and enjoy the sunset. Around me, in the streets of the city, I hear the sound of breaking glass as tormented neuro-typical writers hurl themselves to their doom.

I cannot understand them and they cannot understand me.

(8 November 2012)

The Black Man, the Asperger, the NHS and its Bigots...

In case you think the atrocious treatment of learning-disabled patients at Winterbourne View care home was a one-off blip, or if you think that organisations today would never cover up Jimmy Savile’s alleged activities the way they did thirty or forty years ago...

In 2008, the ‘Race Equality Services Review’, an analysis by the Health Service Journal of a report about the experiences of black and ethnic minorities (BME) in the National Health Service (South East Coast region) concluded there was institutionalised racism within the NHS as a whole.

In 2009, after the deaths of six learning-disabled patients, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s report ‘Six lives: the provision of public services to people with learning disabilities’ said (among other things) that fundamental principles were not being upheld... an underlying culture which values human rights was not in place. Regarding complaint handling, the Ombudsman stated that the families gave repeated examples of failures to understand their complaints... defensive explanations; a failure to address the heart of the complaint; and a reluctance to offer apologies. Our investigations generally confirmed this picture. The Ombudsman finished by saying, we are still left with an underlying concern that similar failures to those identified in the investigations will occur again.

In a Facebook debate in July 2010, David Forster, a director of the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, wrote that they had employed too many who are lazy, unproductive, obstinate, militant, aggressive at every turn and who couldn’t secure a job anywhere outside the bloated public sector where mediocrity is too often shielded by weak and unprincipled HR policies.

I saw people just like that. David Forster was right, and for his honesty he was disciplined by NHS management because, as NHS surgeon Sir Roy Calne stated in the Daily Mail in July 2007:

...as a result of the justified furore over nurses’ poor pay, the unions have become stronger. Management dare not offend them, which means that when they should be disciplining staff who cut corners on hygiene or who work ineffectively, they instead hide behind the tangle of employment law to avoid confrontation.

You might think this article is biased and derives from prejudice, but I am an Asperger, I worked in the NHS with a black man who’d come to the UK from Africa, and these public quotes exactly match our private experiences. I was driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown while my black colleague was pushed completely out of work and onto the dole for three years. The NHS even fobbed him off when he asked for a reference, which he has not received to this day.

We both worked in an office where the staff, as beautifully defined by Guardian writer Lynsey Hanley in her book Estates: an intimate history, were warm towards others who looked and acted exactly like them, but unforgiving, going on vicious, with anyone who didn’t.

For example, I witnessed the way a fellow staff-member talked to my black colleague when this officer thought he had made a mistake with the stationery.

First, some back story. My grandparents once lived in Africa themselves and they did have black servants. I neither condone this nor condemn it. It is simply history.

At the time, there was one cast-iron rule in any well-run household: never, ever humiliate a servant, because they could not answer back.

Unfortunately, some households were run by families who had emigrated from poor parts of Britain. In Africa, even poor households could afford black servants, and when people from the slums suddenly found themselves able to lord it over others they abused the privilege, ignored the cast-iron rule and treated their servants like slaves. Other whites looked down on them and I consider them the scum of the earth.

So this officer marched into the office, marched up to my colleague, accused him of making a mistake with the stationery (which he had not done), and as he tried to explain this, the officer talked over him, talked down to him and waggled a finger under his chin as if he was a dumb six-year-old. All this took place in front of several other people.

He was a man of 48, and far brighter than the officer. I was filing notes four feet away from them. I saw it all, and I’ve never been more ashamed of being British. These people were intolerant of anyone who was in any way unlike them, acted as if they had the God-given right to declaim loudly and endlessly about any subject under the sun, and were unforgiving of anyone who disagreed with them.

People with autism are usually unable to filter out extraneous noise, and my other colleagues insisted on playing a radio non-stop all day every day. After a while it became literal torture for me to listen to it, but despite bringing this matter to the attention of NHS management, nothing was ever done. I eventually referred myself to Occupational Health and was signed off for six months.

Regarding the behaviour of my fellow members-of-staff, my consultant stated that they have poor educational qualifications and they don’t know any better.

Never in the field of human history have so many pathetic excuses been made by so many (not so few) for so many. Jimmy Savile would have been very safe in today’s NHS.

Again, most people with autism need routines and a daily framework to function without suffering severe stress. I was left hanging for six months and did indeed come to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I was seconded to another post at the last minute.

People with autism also have much higher levels of fear and anxiety than most. In my case the effect was like brain damage.

I was left with a shaking right hand, a brain which worked even more slowly than it had before and, on occasion, slurred speech.

It took me eighteen months to recover.

Meanwhile my black colleague found another job in another part of the NHS and felt like he’d escaped the lousy situation he was in, but he’d only swapped the frying pan for the fire. Every single member of staff in his new office was (in his own words) a malicious bigot. After five gruesome months, he was in very bad condition and the unendurable strain was damaging him psychologically and spilling over into his family life. Despite several pleas to management, the NHS appeared unwilling to control its own staff and he finally resigned in desperation.

Without a reference.

He was unemployed for three years.

He and I have good reason to believe that the NHS is indeed institutionally racist, and not a fit and proper employer of either the learning-disabled or people from black or ethnic minority backgrounds.

The NHS is supposed to be the caring profession, but he and I no longer think they care.

Not long ago, my black friend said to me:

I have seen corruption, violence and injustice in Africa; but neither my wife nor myself had ever witnessed such utterly disgusting and xenophobic behaviour from people until I came to work for the NHS.

Such behaviour and such cover-ups are not a blip. O brave new world, that’s so very like the old one...

(20 November 2012)

My Flatmate, the Vampire

The final bell has tolled for the Twilight saga with Breaking Dawn Part 2, and Bell and Eddie will look no more into each other’s red-tinged eyes.

Burning glances mean little to the average Asperger; too many modern-day films (Argo and Silver Linings honourably excepted) seem to have sacrificed plot and character development for empty spectacle, and I was more than a little tempted to pull the old trick of writing the review without seeing the film.

But no, I dragged myself down to the Grosvenor in Glasgow’s Ashton Lane to watch a film of empty spectacle and burning glance, the plot of which seemed to fall mainly on the plain of a disagreement about a baby (?), came close to sinking under the weight of its own pretension and appeared to co-star a bunch of Prussian hussars who’d fallen off the set of Doctor Zhivago as well as pragmatically giving a placement plug to Volvo.

Now, though, the twist which Twilight so singularly lacked:

If you yourself had in real life taken a quest across the sea with a TV vampire as your guide and a human actress as your muse, could the ersatz emotions of made-up demons and long lingering pans on snowy mountain, ridge and valley capture even the faintest echo of the way it truly felt?

That’s why Twilight couldn’t do it for me. Because Bell and Eddie couldn’t hold a candle to Spike and Dru from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and James Marsters and Juliet Landau would act Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart off the screen any day of the week.

But of course, in real life such a quest would be impossible.

Wouldn’t it?

In the last Twilight, Taylor Lautner says something like:

The world’s not the way you think it is.

Some truths are stranger than fiction, some quests still there for the taking.

In brief and in recovery from the trauma I endured at the hands of the NHS, I took a casual interest in the character of Drusilla the soulless vampire (Dru for short), and funnily enough I found her kinder at heart than some of the so-called caring humans I’d met in the National Health Service.

For fun, I wrote a fan-fiction short story about Dru, and for no reason I knew at the time, found that strange connection some writers have with a character.

Fictional Dru came to life in my mind, and as people with autism can think in pictures (as Temple Grandin once said), it seemed I’d found myself with a virtual vampire flatmate.

Once written, I sent the story - ‘Drusilla’s Roses’ - to Juliet Rose Landau, the actress who’d portrayed Dru on Buffy, and I was more than a little surprised to hear tell from her that the tale had blown her away.

Even more surprisingly, she (the celebrity) and I (the man in the street) commenced an email correspondence, I broke away from the life of quiet desperation I’d led, crossed sea and land and plain and desert; and one Sunday morning in March I met my Hollywood star on a boulevard west of Sunset.

So if it seems I slag off Twilight out of cynicism or sarcasm, nothing could be further from the truth. The journey I took and the life I lived was stranger and greater than any work of fiction could ever be.

And no film can ever touch that.

(30 November 2012)

Five Values, Six Goals and Seven Strategic Priorities Mean as Much as a Partridge in a Pear Tree!

I went to a meeting about autism the other day, its aim basically to improve services for people with autism. It was a frustrating and demoralising experience, sitting with well-meaning people who wanted to bring live-wires to such meetings but who then made the electricity that sparkled along those selfsame wires fizzle out as it seemed, almost immediately, that no progress would be made and almost inevitable that the well-meaning idealism would fall straight into the same deathtrap of guidelines, PR about ‘great strides forward’ and ticks of boxes which in and of themselves sounded laudable but had (and this is the truly terrifying part) and have absolutely no relation to the reality on the ground.

At Winterbourne View care home, patients who had similar and/or more severe versions of my own learning disability were (according to Rebecca Cafe, BBC Bristol) slapped and restrained under chairs, held down and forcibly medicated, and in one case had mouthwash poured into their eyes.

In Parliament, Tom Clarke, MP for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, recently said:

We cannot undo the pain, the suffering and humiliating experience endured by people with learning disabilities, and we most certainly cannot leave it to the bureaucratic monolithic machine to ensure that such abuses never happen again.

The problem, Tom, is that you’re probably going to leave it to the monolith anyway and as a result such abuse will indeed happen again.

To take a historical example and to quote from Francis Wheen’s aptly titled tome How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World:

...an official inquiry into the semi-privatised British prison service, commissioned after two murderers and an arsonist escaped from Parkhurst jail in 1995 [said]: ‘Any organisation which boasts one Statement of Purpose, one Vision, five Values, six Goals, seven Strategic priorities and eight Key Performance Indicators without any clear correlation between them is producing a recipe for total confusion and exasperation’.

Mumbo-jumbo has indeed conquered the world to the point that too many of us do not realise that carefully worded arguments, bullet-pointed recommendations and guidelines pushed out ever so precisely by far too many pens mean absolutely nothing in practice. David Dimbleby recently defined BBC management’s jargon as bonkers and gobbledygook so I’m pyrrhically pleased to say that at the end of a report I myself wrote four years ago, I called a spade a spade and said:

In the end, bad people in your offices are doing bad things to other people.

Before I handed the report to the authorities, I took it to a friend in order to get his opinion. He considered that sentence too simplistic and suggested I modify it. I politely refused. I felt there was no sense in soft-pedaling on or softening my stance regarding the ugly treatment myself and others had endured.

A year or two later, the abuse at Winterbourne View was exposed. I met my friend for dinner not long after and said to him:

You remember I refused to modify that sentence? Now you know why.

(25 January 2013)

Just the Other Day, Met Joss Whedon Along the Way

Sometimes truth really is strange than fiction, and although I virtually cannot believe what I’m writing, a simple decision whether or not to answer a ‘lost’ email nearly four years ago made one possible future real and has led to a situation in which I find myself with a vampire flatmate, an online celebrity correspondent, the resolution of an unfinished story arc which - if published - could turn Buffy the vampire slayer’s fictional universe (the ‘Buffyverse’) upside down; as well as memories of the metaphorical theft of the USS Enterprise in search of my own personal Helen of Troy in a Los Angeles which for me, was Camelot.

No surprise, then, that a reviewer in Goodreads.com said of Dear Miss Landau that:

I read this constantly thinking ‘is this for real?’ An autistic Scottish man in his 40s has an obsession with a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and writes a [book] based on the character and ends up travelling to Hollywood and meeting the actress who plays her. You couldn’t make it up.

Sometimes I ask myself whether there really is a fate or destiny to things, and it’s hard to be sceptical when, three years later,