Now that full-time education is behind me (for now) my most pronounced dyspraxic difficulties are as follows:

1.) Impaired short-term memory. Of all my dyspraxic symptoms, this is the one that makes living independently the most difficult. This is partly because I struggle to ask for help with it, as a mention of weak short-term memory almost invariably brings on, “Oh, I know what you mean. My memory’s terrible, and it’s not getting any better with age! What I do is make a list…” And I’m left there thinking, “What happens when you forget that you’re going to make a list in between picking up the pen and picking up the paper? How about when you lose the list? Forget the list is right there in your pocket? Forget that you even made a list? And how do you remember what to put on the list in the first place?!”

It is a sign that people don’t understand what I mean by impaired short-term memory when the first thing they advise me on is how to plan out important tasks. They don’t seem to think about what it’s like to nearly cause a fire on multiple occasions by leaving your food in the oven all night, or to forget where you’re going as you’re on your way there. Or how about when you put down your house keys and, literally five seconds later, can’t remember where they are? You hunt madly for them, find them - and a few minutes later it happens again. And again. As a result, you are late in leaving the house - and then you have to turn back to collect something else that you’ve forgotten. The result is that you are late.

2.) Poor sense of time. I struggle to judge how long a particular task is going to take, which means that I don’t organise my time very well and lateness is a serious problem for me. (This is compounded by the memory difficulties described above.) I can’t gauge the passage of time, so I will often vanish into my study ‘just for thirty minutes’ and come out nearly three hours later. It works in reverse: I may drop into the bookshop on my way to a medical appointment and shoot out five minutes later, panicking that I’ve missed the doctor.

This is where people suggest helpfully, “Why don’t you wear a watch?” I would if I could fasten one. (Fine-motor co-ordination problems.) And how would that help me to work out what time actually means? I might be able to work out that I have ninety minutes until work (although I do have a tendency to misread clocks) but that doesn’t make it any easier for me to work out when I should set off or which household tasks I have time to accomplish in the interim.

3.) Difficulty with carrying out practical tasks. Cooking, cleaning, and tidying are all very hard for me because of my problems with co-ordination and balance. I move awkwardly. My body tires quickly. When mopping the kitchen, I trip over the mop (and the floor has to be redone because I have missed patches). I still can’t use tin openers (including electric ones - the occupational therapist tried me with one, and I couldn’t manage it). It takes me a very long time to peg my washing on the drying maiden because I struggle to use pegs. Result: exhaustion. Result: even poorer co-ordination. Result: nothing gets done. Result: parents appear to help.

These are my three main areas of difficulty as an adult, although there are others - managing money, using public transport, finding my way about, planning out tasks in a logical sequence. (I haven’t got in the shower half-dressed for quite a while, so I think I’m getting better at the last one.)

An interesting consequence of all this is the pronounced effect it has on my mental wellbeing. School had its problems, but I received a lot of support and understanding from staff. Now I find that a lot of people in the wider world haven’t even heard of dyspraxia, and think of their own difficulties with remembering to bring the washing in before it starts to rain when I mention my problems with memory. It is very unfortunate that the most obvious manifestations of my dyspraxia - disorganisation, forgetfulness, slowness with practical tasks, excessive tiredness - are popularly associated with laziness. And when people start telling me about how they overcome their memory problems, the unspoken criticism is, “Everybody else copes, so why can’t you?”

I am a perfectionist. I am very self-critical, and always have been. My head is all too ready to believe that if I just tried harder I would be able to accomplish the same things as everybody else. It doesn’t help when other people reinforce the belief.

This is perhaps the hardest thing for me to deal with.

Mondays are good. I have the day off, and I spend the earliest part of it in the bookshop. Today I came away with From the Holy Mountain (William Dalrymple), Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors (Lisa Appignanesi), The Book Thief (Markus Zusak), and a slim volume with a haunting photograph on its cover - the shape of a woman, her back to the camera, walking down a black-and-white street that fades away into an unknown grey. This is Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land by Eva Figes.

In one of her earlier books, Figes regrets sharing such intimate tales of her Holocaust childhood with her grandchildren. Her own aloof mother sent her alone to the local Odeon to watch newsreels from Bergen-Belsen at the age of twelve (”Go and see what they have done”), but her grandchildren were less resilient. Used to her mother’s ways, the young Eva accepted this grisly command as normal; it was only through the consternation of others that she discovered that there was something not quite right about it.

Journey to Nowhere is pervaded by this uneasy sense of not-quite-right, of painful secrets and truths best avoided. There is one starkly painted scene in which Edith the housemaid greets Eva, her mother, and her brother at a Berlin tram stop, looking characteristically grave:

She wore no coat, although it was winter, just her black-and-white uniform. I do not know how long she had been standing there, because she seemed to have turned to stone. If she heard the tram she gave no sign, just continued to stare straight ahead, at nothing in particular. The immobility of some sort of questioning obedience.

We got off the tram, spoke to her.

Take the children to their grandparents, she said, as though coming out of her trance. They must not come into the house.

When Figes and her brother returned home they simply found that their father had returned from his extended ‘business trip’. It was only later that Figes would connect his emaciated appearance and hair loss with the whispers that she had sometimes heard the nanny exchange with the housemaid, and realise that the story of the business trip had been designed to protect her and her brother from the truth - her father had been sent to Dachau in the wake of Kristellnacht, and on his release he was seriously ill with scarlet fever.

Figes is uncompromising in her search for the truth, something that caused serious tension between her and her mother. Once they had taken refuge in England, her mother would have preferred to blot out the past, including the line of figures who had waved goodbye at the edge of the airfield - relatives whom Eva would never see again. All of them Jews. “My need to know what had happened to my maternal grandparents was matched by my mother’s need not to know.”

Her determination to know led her into the sparsely furnished bedroom that her mother had set aside for Edith, who had written to the family after the war to request her old job back. Figes’s mother saw the return of the housemaid as a sign that the world was putting itself to rights; Figes herself realised that nothing could ever be the same again. She took to having long illicit conversations with Edith about Edith’s wartime experiences in Germany. Although once arrested by the Gestapo, Edith managed to melt away into the streets of Berlin and survive the war. Afterwards, when the lists of the dead and the missing were growing longer every day, she realised that there was nothing and no one left for her in Germany and was persuaded by a charismatic Zionist recruiter to move to Palestine. Figes tells the story of what happened to Edith there - and how she came to leave.

Figes’s critique of the manner in which Israel was established and the nascent state’s poor treatment of Holocaust survivors may be an eye-opener to people who have not read much on the subject, but I was already familiar with most of it. (New to me was the information that in the mid-1930s a special fund was set up by Zionist community leaders in Palestine to pay for the repatriation of incurably ill German Jewish refugees to Germany and death, on the grounds that they could make no worthwhile contribution to the Zionist project.) Figes concentrates on the role played by the Truman administration in the foundation of Israel, regarding the British Mandate with rather more sympathy. She is not a historian, and her brief account of Israel’s history is the weakest part of what is otherwise an extraordinary book - it lacks depth. Although centred around Edith, what emerges is a troubling and nuanced portrait of Figes herself: a young girl growing up in difficult times, unwilling inheritor of a stolen legacy. “I suddenly knew what to do with my anger. Tell the truth.”

Edith vanishes in the last page of the book, being admitted to the Samaritan Free Hospital for an operation and then, by some tacit agreement with Figes’s dissatisfied mother, disappearing from the family’s life. Figes visited her once, but never heard from her again:

Now that I have attempted to tell her story the lack of a proper ending troubles me profoundly. The word that springs to mind is verschollen, which so often appears by the names of Jews who died in the Holocaust. Disappeared, missing, lost. But not forgotten.

Other reviewers have expressed frustration at Edith’s disappearance, stating that it makes it difficult to care about her as a narrative figure, but I find it one of the most engaging and poignant aspects of the book. Edith’s abrupt departure not only brings home a sense of the Holocaust’s aftermath, but is a subtle reminder of the other hidden history that this book touches upon: that of 750,000 Palestinians who, like Edith, had no choice but to leave their homeland and vanish for good into other people’s largely unsympathetic memories. Interestingly enough, Edith the Holocaust survivor has come to share the fate of the Palestinians - more ardent supporters of Zionism have responded to Figes’s memoir by claiming that Edith could not have existed.

The same claim is made about the people who once lived in the area around Mount Carmel in Israel, which is now heavily forested. I have been there. If I had known about it at the time, a short walk into those strategically planted woods might have led me to the ruins of their houses. The realisation is painful, and it is because of Figes’s ability to make absence present in the reader’s mind and heart that Journey to Nowhere is such a remarkable achievement.

Aquila Way

Aquila Way is a small local charity that has managed to make a big impact on the Gateshead community in the twenty years since it was founded. Christian in ethos, the charity houses vulnerable and disadvantaged young people who have nowhere else to go. Danni and her sister Becca have both nearly ended up living in one of Aquila’s houses, which would be reason enough for me to choose this charity for my Friday post. But this week I heard Aquila’s name once again. They have offered to help somebody else I know, a pregnant girl who faces some serious challenges and who has been rejected by every other service that she approached.

From the website:

Aquila Way is about the way in which we serve. Our service is an expression of our faith and in time may earn us the right to say Jesus’ name. Our experience has been that as we serve Jesus’ way, as we remember a young woman’s name, we don’t swear at her when she returns drunk to the house, when we remember her birthday and care enough to bake a cake - its these things which express our faith and may be remembered one day.

Sowing seeds can be frustrating work as we can see very little harvest, but for what we see…the smiles…the laughter…the changed lives… for that and His pleasure…

I am in the Metrocentre’s Internet cafe, and I will be using it to access the Internet for the next few days as I haven’t got a telephone line in my new flat yet. What I do have is a very possessive cat who has taken to following me everywhere I go (even if I’m just moving between my armchair and my book-mountain). When I’m working at my desk he curls up at my feet. If I’m praying, he biffs me in the back with his head. If I’m on the toilet, he will twine himself jealously round my legs and nudge my hand into stroking position when I reach out for the loo roll. When I arrive home from work he is visible through the frosted glass of the door, and I start to hear the reproachful miaows before I have even reached my flat. Although he is generally a very placid creature (it comes of being approximately seventy years old in cat years) the move appears to have unsettled him. I suspect that his unhappiness arises from the fact that he can no longer spend the night in Danni’s clean laundry pile and wake her up at four o’clock in the morning, his preferred breakfasting time.

Or it could just be that the move has thrown his autistic symptoms into greater prominence. As you should know by now, all cats have Asperger’s Syndrome.

Anyway, the real reason why I sat down at this computer to blog is not to discuss the neurological configuration of my cat, but to conceal the enormous jagged rent in the front of my cotton trousers. It is several inches wide and my knickers are plainly visible as I walk. My knickers and a generous patch of thigh. It happened in Waterstone’s, where I stooped to examine a book by A.C. Grayling (bottom shelf of the Religion section, rubbing jackets with The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten and a Daily Mail-esque diatribe against political correctness). It was The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life. I thought that it might be about language, but I was mistaken. It is about ‘matters pertaining to the human condition’, and is divided into three sections - ‘Virtues and Attributes’, ‘Foes and Fallacies’, and ‘Amenities and Goods’. On closer inspection I discovered that several important aspects of my life are listed in the second section. Wondering whether the increase in Waterstone’s loyalty points would be worth the problems with self-esteem that might come with reading the book, I replaced it on the shelf, got up - and tore my trousers. It sounded as though I had just broken wind. One customer sniggered and another edged away. I don’t blame them. Holding my handbag in a strategic position, I edged over to the nearby Internet cafe to look for suitable replacement trousers online. You may ask why I am looking online when I am in the middle of one of England’s largest shopping centres. The answer is that I am going to identify the trousers I want and plan my route carefully to the requisite shop, so that I don’t have to walk too far in this undignified state.

I may go back and buy A.C. Grayling on another day. Then I will critically evaluate his mini-essay on Christianity as a punishment for his tearing my trousers.

Countries the FCO advises against all but essential travel to

As making choices is never easy for me, I have spent several weeks dithering over whether to go or not. I made up my mind several times (and then unmade it a few minutes later). This afternoon I begged Danni to choose for me.

“You’re going!”

“I’m going!” I told my parents on the telephone this evening.

“Err, have you seen the news about those expats who were kidnapped there yesterday?”

“No…” I replied cautiously.

It looks like an auspicious start.

Mary’s Meals is a small charity that provides over 360, 000 meals each day to children across the globe. In providing a daily meal for malnourished children from desperately poor areas, Mary’s Meals not only safeguards their physical health but ensures that they are able to go to school. The children’s families do not have to choose between the cost of food and the cost of an education, and the children themselves are getting enough nourishment to be able to learn.

Some interesting facts:

* Eight children will die of malnutrition in the few minutes that it takes for my students to make their suppertime toast.
* Mary’s Meals can provide a year’s worth of hot dinners to a child in Malawi for £6.15 a year.

Our Father,
give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us for the times when
we take more than our share
of the bread that belongs to all.
Let us help You fill the  starving
with good things
not with scraps from our table.
Teach us how to share what is not
ours to keep.
Clothes us with Your love
that we may complete each good
work You created us to do.
Place in our hearts Your
compassion for each starving child
and use our little acts of love so
that they starve no more.
Amen.

Limits

“The reason why we do not get anywhere is that we do not know our limits, and we are not patient in carrying out the work we have begun.”

- Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Artwork by Helen Hadala.

The National Autistic Society is urging us to contact our MPs in an effort to prevent the extradition of Gary McKinnon, who faces trial for hacking into US Defense computer systems. Mr McKinnon’s legal team have made a final bid to prevent his extradition, citing expert medical evidence that Mr McKinnon is at risk of developing psychosis as a result of his current anxiety about the extradition.

Mr McKinnon has Asperger Syndrome. He originally started hacking into the Pentagon’s systems to see if he could find evidence of UFOs, but he quickly became addicted to the game and left his job as a systems analyst so that he could spend more time absorbed in this intriguing new pastime. Obsessive interests are a characteristic of AS. If you are obsessed with something, it is rarely possible to prevent yourself from acting on the obsession. If you are obsessed with something, you think about it all the time and all you want to do is learn more and more about the object of your fascination. As a little girl I was fascinated with quarries. This obsession was precipitated by a school reading book about a goat that fell into a quarry. I borrowed the book again and again until my parents were sick of the sight of it. I insisted on being taken to walk round the quarries in our area. Several times. In a week. My mum heard me mention the lime kiln at the back of our house, and became terrified that I was planning to crawl about inside it to see what I could discover. (I was.) She impressed on me that I must never, ever do that, but the urge to do so was almost physical.

Gary McKinnon used his own e-mail address in his hacking operations and made no effort to cover his tracks. This naivety is also characteristic of AS. He did not understand that what he was doing was so wrong. The American administration has accused him of ‘cyber-terrorism’ and if convicted in the US he faces up to seventy years in a maximum security jail. His autism diagnosis was not taken into account during the early stages of the extradition proceedings. The Guardian writes:

There are major issues here. McKinnon is not accused of violence or drug trafficking or looting the financial system. The American criminal justice process is a roulette wheel and no one quite knows where it will spin in a case like this. His case has been barely covered in the US, and a jury there may well believe the outlandish claims that the prosecution will make about the damage done to national security. If convicted, he would find himself in a jail portrayed as a cyber-terrorist who damaged the US and in the company of prisoners who may not all be regular readers of the Guardian and may thus not know what a bogus and overstated case has been made against him. Guantánamo Bay taught the world a lesson that, when it comes to such cases in the US, justice and the rule of the law rank a poor second and third to notions of state security.

Anyone who knows all the details of McKinnon’s case is appalled that it has dragged on so long and that the ­British government has not ­intervened, at the very least, to ensure that he is ­guaranteed immediate bail, if ­extradited, and immediate return to the UK to serve any sentence.

He has attracted an impressive and eclectic list of supporters: Terry Waite, Lord Carlile, Boris Johnson, more than 100 MPs from all the major parties, the National Autistic Society, and a group of artists and musicians, including David Gilmour, Sting, the Proclaimers and Jane Asher, who have all called on the home secretary to act. Jacqui Smith could easily have intervened but failed to do so. Now it may be up to Alan Johnson, her successor.

Please do contact your MP in support of Mr McKinnon’s request to be tried in the UK. I would encourage my American readers to contact their own representatives on this issue as well. Mr McKinnon has already signed a statement admitting to committing an offence under the 1980 Computer Misuse Act. He knows now that what he did was unacceptable, and he was never trying to cause any harm to American security in the first place. If doctors believe that he is at risk of developing psychosis, he must be in an extremely fragile state - psychotic symptoms frequently appear in cases of acute anxiety. He needs appropriate support and care, not an American jail.

This is a photograph of the river near where I am going to live. I love coming down to the water’s edge, especially in the evenings and the early morning. I sit on the stonework at the foot of the bridge and dangle my feet in the water. Perhaps I have some kind of wallowing gene that is usually found in the hippopotamus population.

Unfortunately I have had to promise people that I will not do more than paddle, as they are concerned that I could drown. According to my most recent medical report, ‘Miss Biggs lacks a sense of danger’. Personally I think I have an excellent sense of danger. I have just forgotten where I’ve put it.

I have been renting a flat in this area since the end of May, and I have been transferring my possessions to the flat very gradually to help me adjust to the idea of living somewhere new. Past removals have resulted in me being ill, as I find change very difficult to cope with. This approach seems to be working. I will move in properly on 14th June.

My flat is not in the village itself. I am renting one-half of an old countryside lodge that stands on the edge of a field and is a thirty-minute walk away. If it weren’t for the sheep, who are really very vocal creatures, it would be almost totally quiet.

It’s a beautiful place.

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