Country diary of an Edwardian Lady meets the 21st Century

I was trying to explain to my dad how the university system works in England, through the eyes of a mature and autistic student. Some knowledge of the names given to pre-decimal coinage would help. Here is an extract from the email I sent.

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Now for the lesson in how higher education works in 2010. Nobody, by the way, gives you a glossary of terms. They must either assume you know or you'll have to work it out for yourself.

Module: in old money is a subject or topic. Whilst my degree is BA (Hons) Journalism Studies, we have different modules to complete within it. Some are elective and others mandatory. (I don't think I have to explain the difference to you).

Semester: American (shudder) for academic term.

We have three modules (subjects) each semester (term). For me, at the moment, it is 1- applied project* or dissertation (I still don't know what one of those is) which is mandatory. 2- Journalism Professional Practices. Mandatory. 3- Sexuality and Culture. Elective.

*My applied project is you, dad.

The JPP is a horrible, autism hostile, module I would never have chosen because the unwritten rules are endless.

My one elective module is Sexuality and Culture. How this relates at all to journalistic anything escapes me but going to uni on Friday afternoons and talking about sex is actually quite a refreshing change. Just when you think you have been there and done that so many times you wish you had bought the t-shirt factory, rethink. Experience tells you to hide your hands in your armpits when you really want to throw at least one in the air and say, 'Miss? Miss? What's rimming, miss?' And dominatrix? Well, I used to love the double five. That was my favourite. Oh, sorry, I was thinking dominoes. Must be getting old. Do you think shove ha'penny means something rude these days? I mean, you can't say 'pussy' without setting a 13 year-old off laughing. As if anyone these days knows what an ha'penny is. I dread to think what they'd do with a tanner. Old money; old people; And there was this girl who said one of those deeply meaningful things that began with well, twenty years ago.... and I missed the rest of it because inside I was falling over laughing. How did we forget that sex was invented by teenagers and copulation is the number of policemen down at the local nick?

As for home study. You could call it research or homework that nobody sets but our written work is telling on how much we have done. In my case, not necessarily very much. There is something of an art to producing a piece of work which ticks all the boxes but is just outside of the experience of the marker. For instance, last year, I did a piece for the module called 'Investigation and Research Skills' and missed out loads of quite important information because our module leader (teacher) had never been to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It comes in handy, being old. You realise that grown-ups don't know everything and a lot of the others still look at the module and course leaders as grown-ups, somehow bigger than they are. They are like puppies, trying to sound profound, eager to please. My advantage is in being more mercenary now. I ask what gets marks and have taught the relevant few how to break down information into comprehensible bullet points. The dog has taught its master how to bark.

Plagiarism is something of a media panic. It is far harder to achieve than most people outside of univeristies think and has been going on since Adam were a lad. There are computer programs which essays can be run through that throw alerts up when something looks as though it has been copied and pasted from a website. There must have been youngsters copying, long hand, huge chunks of stuff they fished out of text books ever since Gutenberg created the printing press. Just as youth insists it invented sex, so its impudence assumes the ignorance of the old.

But I still laughed behind my hand when I read the word crap in a recent edition of The Oldie.

I'll get back to my essay now.

Image courtesy of www.cartoonstock.com

Personal reflection on my Final Year project piece

Dave, who I mention in the piece, is my supervisor and has been just brilliant. I had been at home, absorbed in learning an extract of the Kaddish in Hebrew when I received an email from our course leader, Sue, saying I had not submitted the personal reflection or a CV I needed for this module. Yet they gave me a chance to write one and get in by Monday. This was Friday lunchtime and I work all weekend. The task looked and felt impossible. I threw this together on the train from Long Eaton to Sheffield and back and got my best ever mark for it (78%). Here it is, in full.

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In his poem Buttercup Days, AAMilne wrote:

What has she got in that little brown head?
Wonderful thoughts which can never be said...

This is probably the best appraisal of an autistic mind I have come across. Succinct and unambiguous.

My original idea had been to write about aliens and autism and life on the periphery of society; to discover whether or not there could be anything to substantiate the belief of some people that aliens have visited earth and deposited various offspring among the human populace.

Following a much anxiety and procrastination, Dave and I decided my project would be on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Asperger’s syndrome. His suggestion was, in fact, Gary McKinnnon but we thought it a good idea to widen it. It was a traumatic personal journey which uncovered even more aspects of a difficult life to acknowledge.

My intention, in consultation with my supervisor, was to write a balance of first hand insights with other printed material, which I felt I achieved without becoming self indulgent. The outtakes were fairly epic in proportion to the submitted piece but there is an awful lot to filter in my ‘little brown head’.

Living in a foreign culture and speaking an alien tongue is pretty hard going but what I have most of all hoped for is that one, elusive, piece of work; that wonderful window through which everyone will suddenly be able to see and understand an autistic mind in all its rainbow glory.

Gary McKinnon epitomises everyone’s dread of being left stranded, abandoned and misunderstood. Up Shit Creek without a paddle, to use a vernacular expression. Simon Baron-Cohen threw a life line, recognising McKinnon’s autistic traits during a television interview and he has been doing his utmost to help this man since. So have many other people but those of us care about individuals and their right to be heard and understood can only sign petitions, write to Members of Parliament, and hope.

I tried to explain the reason behind autistic ‘strong interests’ and how they can become obsessive. This does not necessarily mean OCD, which I discovered during my research. It seems to be whatever is going on in little brown autistic heads that turns obsession into obsessive compulsive disorder. Egodystonic thoughts, as Tony Attwood called them. It hardly expresses the terror and rigid fear these not-so-wonderful thoughts bring with them. Even though my mentor quite liked what I’d written and a friend complimented it when I put it on my blog; even when I submitted a pitch to Communication, the magazine of the National Autistic Society and they expressed an interest in publishing it, I felt I had ‘bombed’. Nothing seemed to adequately capture and tame that wild firework display of thoughts and emotions.
Then to go through the trauma of checking, rechecking, sweating, crying and swearing over it, it was handed in. But I was so focused on the piece of work itself I either forgot or did not notice the personal reflection and CV, which also needed to be completed and handed in. Very fortunately, the teaching staff gave me the chance to write and submit it, which is where I am now, clutching at oars from the man in Shit Creek Paddle Store. Crying all over again at the two fighting factions in my head. One is the voice of my mother, whose blazing furnace of a mouth was telling me I’m no good and will never amount to anything. The other fights that furious, angry, fire with water, an ocean of affirmation that allows us to stuff up and yet be given a chance.

This is why I understand Gary McKinnon. His raging obsession burned so hard and furious he was incapable of seeing all those other really important issues surrounding his hunt for alien life and free energy.

Maybe Gary McKinnon’s mute shout will be heard and he will be freed.

One day, perhaps, those ‘wonderful thoughts’ of Buttercup Days, which are locked inside the glass wall of my mind, separating our worlds, will find a window and be adequately able to communicate.