I Give It a Year

 

Every dog has its day and after almost nine years of blogging, I feel that this one is slowly limping towards its inevitable end. Perhaps the tenth anniversary would be a good stopping point. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

This blog began as an idle experiment to relieve the tedium of being stuck in bed, while I was recovering from a particularly violent bout of food poisoning. It was called 'The Age of Uncertainty' because I had just entered my 40s and the job that I mostly loved had literally changed overnight into one I largely hated.

I wasn't planning to make a habit of it. However, when Ms Baroque kindly commented on my first post, generously refraining from pointing out how banal it was, I couldn't quite get over the novelty that a complete stranger had read my words, thought about them and bothered to write a reply. It seemed quite wonderful.

I think the blog really hit its stride when I worked for a company that provided me with a constant supply of old photograph albums, secondhand books and quirky ephemera from house clearances. I particularly enjoyed sifting through the fragments of lost lives, sharing the best of them. If the rest of the job had been as enjoyable, I might have stayed.

Four years after becoming self-employed, the photos and letters are thin on the ground and I seem to have fewer things to say, perhaps because my time is largely taken up with family concerns that wouldn't make very interesting reading. When I do have an idea for a post, it's often accompanied by an awful sense of déjà vu.

If I had more time, I might have written a post about the Roald Dahl Museum, which I visited a couple of weeks ago (the photo at the beginning of this post is of the wall of the church where Dahl's funeral took place), or of the discovery of an abandoned quarry in Lewes, hidden behind a thick undergrowth:

But most of my mental energy is going into getting my ASD son used to being outside again.

Last year his agoraphobia became so severe, he began to suffer from vitamin D deficiency. The lack of sunlight, exercise and human contact had a predictably debilitating effect and it had been a gargantuan task to reverse this decline, but at last, things are looking up:

This photo, which my younger son created on Instagram, was taken yesterday afternoon during a visit to the South Downs.

Recent trips out have followed a familiar pattern of a five minute walk, followed by a frantic request to go home. But yesterday we walked for over an hour and, to my amazement, were able to go for a pub lunch afterwards. Like a normal family!

All of this has been achieved over time with a lot of help from professionals. There are no easy fixes and we are not going to make the mistake of thinking that the problem has been solved. It will always be an ongoing battle and when winter comes, we will have to be careful not to let my son's world shrink again.

It's extraordinary how little we know about these conditions, except that there is a genetic factor. I have taken part in Simon Baron Cohen's autism test and I am less autistic than the average male, but I did suffer from what are now known as 'neurodevelopmental disorders' as a child, so when I heard that a team at Sussex University were looking for volunteers for a research project, I decided to volunteer.

It's a decision I began to regret when, last Tuesday, my head was place in a vice-like grip and my brain was bombarded with a high-powered electro-magnetic field for an uncomfortably long time, but they seemed suitably appreciative afterwards and perhaps it may turn out to be one of the most useful things I've done in my life.

And that's largely it. The days are spent going on short trips, usually taken between midday and three o'clock to ensure that my older son gets plenty of vitamin D. In the evenings, my wife and I enjoy our guilty pleasure - drinking Pimms and watching The Good Wife on Netflix.

If all that sounds a little dull, I would agree. But after the last few years, dull is good.