Podcast 1 episode 1

Dr. John Wise introduces his memoir, "Getting My Head Around Me," where he reflects on his life as a GP in Norfolk, England, and his recent realization that he has Asperger's Syndrome. He discusses his struggles with social situations and relationships and hopes that his book will help neurotypical individuals understand what it's like to be neurodiverse. He emphasizes the importance of empathy and understanding different perspectives. He also shares some anecdotes from his childhood and family life. Hello, my name is Dr John Wise, and welcome to this, the first podcast of a series in which I shall be reading from a volume of my memoirs entitled Getting My Head Around Me. This is the first book in a planned series of three. I am a GP in the County of Norfolk in the East of England, and have been so for over 30 years. However, it is only in the last few years that it has become apparent that I suffer from Asperger's Syndrome, which is part of the autistic spectrum of neurodiversity orders. The book reflects on my life from that new perspective. I hope that you find it interesting, enlightening, and perhaps amusing in places, and I hope that it might help those of you who are, or believe yourselves to be, neurotypical, what it might be like for somebody else who is not. It might well be that within my words you recognise some elements of somebody that you know. It was one of those eureka moments that occasionally occur in life, one where suddenly everything falls into place, the scales fall from the eyes, and you say to yourself, of course! The problem that I have had never even been considered by anyone, least of all by me, throughout the 60 years that I have been around on the planet, although I cannot think why, given my life's experiences and general personality traits. But then I have spent a career looking at others and trying to determine what's been causing the problems that they have come to me with. I have never really taken the time to look at my own life and reflect upon issues there. Which of us does? Such self-reflection in my profession would have been considered as self-indulgent navel-gazing, and thus frowned upon until relatively recently. However, it turns out that I have had Asperger's all along, or rather, more properly, Autistic Spectrum Disorder. After a lifetime of wondering why I did not get what others got regarding social environments and friendships, of avoiding social situations where I felt overloaded and uncomfortable, of watching TV coverage of Glastonbury or passing a packed pub when the football is on, and thinking, why the hell would you ever go in there, now I had an answer. After a divorce and estrangement from my children, one of whom definitely followed in my footsteps with regard to my personality traits, and following a succession of difficult working environments and relationships, it all became clear. It's not just you, it's me too, of course it is, and it always was. I have never liked large groups or parties, or being the centre of attention. I was always self-reliant and did not seek comfort from others. I had always taken the view that a problem shared was a problem that two people now had, so where was the benefit in that approach? I was always a bit intense with what I wanted to do, and I liked to develop my own routines, never really being comfortable if these were derailed or other people attempted to change them. In short, I was never really fun to be around, but now I know why. There are so many things in the past that suddenly just make sense, and so many echoes of those past events that still resonate today. As with many such conditions, there are different levels of expression, and mind is at the mild end of the range. My experience is therefore going to be different to that of others who share that condition, but there may be others like me out there who similarly have never considered that this might apply to them too, as they are not severely affected. However, they may have recognisable traits that led them to similar or recognisable situations and patterns of behaviour to those of mine. So let's look back at my life journey thus far together, and try to understand in better detail just why I am where I am, and why I am who I am. Perhaps some of this will reflect your personality, or that of somebody that you know. In reading this book, please try to disengage judgement, and instead engage empathy. Just because I may have responded to situations differently to the way that you do, it makes neither of us right or wrong, just difference. Let me give an example unrelated to neurodiversity to try to illustrate this point. I am not a strong swimmer, having not learned to swim until relatively late in childhood. I can do a reasonable breaststroke, but cannot do a front crawl, because I've never mastered the breathing technique required, and I hate having my face in the water amongst the churning that accompanies the stroke. Now some people hearing this will say, oh you two, I can't do that either, whilst others will say, but the breathing's so easy, what's the problem? And there you have it in a nutshell, different people with different perspectives and ability. What is easy for one is difficult for another, and this is merely a mechanical action. Now transfer that difference in ability to one of perception and tolerance of the surrounding environment, and hopefully you can understand that not everyone sees and perceives and manages the world around them the way that you do. But also be aware that neither of you is the greater or the lesser for that. The fact that neurodiverse people are in the minority does not make them wrong, just different. I was the little child of three, and was born and raised in leafy south-east London. Of course it was not considered real London, it was North Kent, but the area was part of London's largest borough, and it had red buses and black cabs, so surely it counted. Bus travel was cheap and efficient, and us children got used to travelling around unaccompanied in our teenage years. My name, John, had been my mother's choice. My father's choice was to become my middle name, Edward, and I was pleased that I did not get that. It was bad enough when people found out my middle initial, and said, E for Ernie, is it Ernie-wise? as if this was either amusing or original. I soon got fed up with the feeble joke, but still tried to manage a smile each time, as these people clearly considered themselves to be the greatest wit imaginable, and this was the response required to get rid of the joker on that occasion, in the shortest possible time. If people crack what they believe is a funny, then they want laughter and applause, not a tumbleweed being slowly by. In my later career, those comments were being replaced by, Wise, what a good name for a doctor, which was only slightly better. The name John had been chosen as it could not be shortened, but it could be lengthened, which is typically a child's perverse response to being thwarted in one direction. It was therefore lengthened by my classmates to Johnny, causing much hilarity amongst other adolescent boys who felt that the subject of Johnny's was suitably naughty and forbidden to be sniggered over at every opportunity, even if they had never seen a prophylactic device and were only vaguely aware of what they were for. Eventually it was my surname that won out, and Wiz or Wizzy were the common names I went by. To this day, whenever I have an inner dialogue, especially over some embarrassing or ill-judged event, I reserve to myself as Wizzy, whether to chastise or to encourage. It is also what my wife most commonly calls me, at least to my face. Our family were financially secure but were not well off, though we never went out of the necessities, but there were not too many extras. However, this realisation is retrospective, and we felt no deprivation at the time, it's just how things were, and comparisons were never drawn with the apparent loss of others. I did experience, but cannot remember, the Great Freeze of 1963, when the roads froze for weeks on end and the milk was delivered by snitch, which was laboriously pulled by a muffled and behatted milkman up the slope to our estate from the gritted main road, several hundred yards down the hill. At the time we lived in a relatively modern bungalow, heated by a fire in the lounge, our own activity, and supplemented by woollen layers, hot water bottles and eiderdowns. It is interesting to reflect that the family nostalgia includes such things as the freezing winter in detail, but no mention was ever made of where we were or what we were doing during other momentous occurrences of that same year, such as the Great Train Robbery or the assassination of President Kennedy. It was the cold that made the greatest impact upon us, and our horizons were small. We had no central heating back then, as was testified by the ice on the inside of the windows on winter mornings, the condensation having not remained liquid for long enough to run down and accumulate on the windowsill. There were two of us boys. The other one, the youngest of the three children, was Kristen Stephen, but was forever known as just Steve. We used to chip off the frozen condensation and let it melt on our tongues. In fact, Steve and I were twins, non-identical and separated in birth by a mere ten minutes, but that still made me the older one. We were also quite different in appearance and character, such that people later would not have guessed that we were even related, let alone that we were twins. Between ourselves and our older sister Louise, there was a gap of almost four years, meaning that she always considered herself superior to Steve and me, and the three of us never spent any significant time together as a group. We had a single bath electric fire high up on the bathroom wall, which was operated by a long cord which dangled from the side of the cylindrical heater, and which ended in a plastic acorn. But the room was still so cold that undressing to get into the bath, because there was no shower, was just as much of an ordeal as getting out again into the cold bathroom, there to steam furiously whilst trying to get dry on an already damp towel, and then get dressed again. The bath itself was cast iron under its coloured enamel, and was barely heated by the water it held, and so this also did nothing to prolong the occupants' stay within. Our lounge had French windows which opened out onto the garden, and there was a dining area with table and chairs, and a hatch through to the kitchen. At the other end of the lounge from the dining table was an open fire which burnt coal from a concrete bunker in the back garden. The bunker had heavy sliding hatches on the sides from which the coal was accessed by a small shovel, and from there transferred to a tall scuttle that stood like a centipede at the side of the hearth. There was a large hatch at the top into which the grimy coalmen would empty several sacks after they'd carried them in from the road on their shoulders one at a time. Steve and I used to love watching the coal truck pull up in the road outside the house, and then see the men alight and come around to the back of the vehicle. They would then sling an empty sack on the apparatus there, and start the mechanism that sent a stream of shiny black coal into the sack with a satisfying whooshing sound, and a small cloud of coal dust. It was certainly more entertaining than watching the dustmen, for instance, who would clatter down the side of the house to empty the household dustbin into one of their own, and then carry that around on their shoulders to the truck out on the road, and tip the bin up manually to empty the contents into the back. This was all long before large wheeler bins became available, and had to be left out at the kerbside. Our mother fought a desperate battle to keep on top of the laundry, and there always seemed to be a line of washing blowing gaily across the width of the back garden. However, this was not possible when the weather was wet or cold, and there were no tumble dryers to use back then, so she used a folded wooden rack, or clotheshorse, which stood in front of the fire. The washing machine was a twin-tub model, which had to be filled with hot water via a hose from the kitchen sink tap, and soap suds added to one tub that had a paddle fitted. This rotated one way and then the other to agitate the washing in the fluffy water. There was clean water in the other tub for rinsing the washing afterwards, and from there the washing was lifted out using large wooden toms, a piece at a time, and was fed through a hand-operated mangle to squeeze the surplus water from it, before being deposited on a metal tray on the far side. It was then moved to the spin dryer, which stood upright on the kitchen floor, like a stubby space-age rocket with a lid, and a curious upright cylinder within, punctured like a colander. When switched on, there was a loud click as the lid locked, and then the whirring sound it made would gradually build in speed and volume until it seemed deafening, and the machine would gyrate slowly across the kitchen floor as if it had a life of its own, depositing water from a spout at the bottom into a receptacle tied beneath it as it went. The receptacle had to be tied rather than just stood, as the machine's perambulations across the kitchen meant that it would leave the receptacle far behind it, and a trail of water would mark its progress across the tiles. The bungalow was made of red brick, was semi-detached, and was of a chalet style, such that all the rooms were on the ground floor except for the main bedroom, which was situated in the roof space, and had a dormer window overlooking the garden at the back. The whole development had been built on the site of a former pig farm, so the land was rich and fertile, and conducive to the home cultivation of fruit and vegetables, with which our parents supplemented the family table. For years after we left, we were aware that our parents would hold up fresh produce bought at supermarkets, and state that it was not a patch on what they used to grow in later on. Shopping was a daily event when we were young, with Mum taking her wicker basket and string bag, and only getting what was needed for that night's meal, supplemented by additions from the store cupboard as required. When we were old enough, we attended the local infant school, which necessitated a good two hour walk each way from the age of five, as we had no car, or indeed any family member capable of driving one at that point. There was also no nearby bus route at the time, though there was a bus stop near the arcade of shops by the school, and buses that stopped there could take us to the nearest town. The shops themselves were different back then too. There were few supermarkets, if any, and those that existed were just large self-service grocers, rather than the barn-like superstores so common these days. I remember the nearest example, which was a good bus ride away, which had a delicatessen counter on the way in, where there was always a large ham in pride of place, on a white porcelain stand, resplendent in its coat of yellow crumb, awaiting the administration of the carving knife by the attendant in response to the next order. Supermarkets have long since moved such fresh produce counters away from the traffic fumes and ingress of flies through the doors, and placed them at the back of the shop instead. There were several separate shops for everything that one wanted, and the only two such examples that seem to remain nowadays are the butcher and the hardware store. The former has changed during my lifetime, though. I remember the butcher's tiled floor being strewn with sawdust, and rails with assorted items hung up on metal hooks. There would be whole chickens there, plucked bare except for around the head, with a hook supporting them having been pushed through the beak. In the winter months, items of game, such as pheasant or rabbit, would be similarly hung, their numbers reducing steadily over the weeks towards Christmas. The staff would wear striped aprons bespattered with blood, and various other detritus of their trade. There were also rows of large, wicked-looking knives, as well as hacksaws and cleavers hung on the wall, to be reached for to prepare a customer's chosen joint. Slowly, most of this activity became hidden in the background, and the shops themselves became gleaming areas of tiled sterility, with packaged or pre-prepared meat. With regards to the hardware shops, I used to find them to be like Aladdin's cave when I helped in my father in his search of nails, tools, or other such apparently masculine items. They seemed to be labyrinthine places, which were packed from floor to ceiling with goods, and had tools hung and secreted in every conceivable place, with the whole establishment being pervaded by a mixture of smells. The most overwhelming of these at the time was that of paraffin, which was used for domestic heaters, and seemed to be dispensed with careless abandon, and extraordinarily little in the way of modern health and safety precautions, but that's a smell that's long since been confined to history. Fruit and vegetables were available at the Green Grocer, whose establishment would burst forth from the shop front every morning, and colonise the pavement in front, with shelves of fruit stacked above floor containers full of the more robust vegetables. I remember how the shop assistant would dig into the pile of potatoes in one such container, with a shiny curved metal bucket from the hanging scales, to get a load which was then placed onto the weighting scale, and subsequently added to, or subtracted from, by hand, to get to the desired weight of produce for the customer. A process that usually seemed to end with a question from the grocer. It's just overlap, all right. The vegetables would then be deposited into the string bag that had been brought along for the purpose, with smaller items going into brown paper bags first, that were torn from a sheaf, strung up on the shelving by a loop of string through their corners, and subsequently closed with a deft twist of the wrist once they'd been filled. Then there were the fishmongers, the last example of my more recent acquaintance having closed some years ago, with sloping white marble slabs containing a mixed shoal of various fish and other seafood in amongst the sea of ice which festooned the surface. A favourite Saturday experience when I was younger was for the family to go to Bromley by train, having first caught a bus to the train station. Once there we would wander along the high streets and explore the various shops, or stare into their windows at the goods displayed there. I remember how the streets changed with time and supposed progress, and the large Churchill theatre being built in the high street. I used to like the gardens behind the theatre, which predated it and were terraced with meandering paths through the mature shrubbery, a duck pond and an amphitheatre. The gardens were a place of play and imagination for me and Steve, as we charged around after one another, or hid in the shrubs, playing our games and trying not to get lost or too dirty. When I once returned to that place as an adult many years later, I saw that it would have been almost impossible to have got lost, given the small size of the area and the sparsity of the planting, but the gardens had seemed an impossibly large wilderness to our young minds at the time. These Saturday afternoon trips always included two compulsory stops. The first was a favourite butcher, whose sausages were incomparable, apparently. They had two branches in the town initially, one at each end of the high street. This may have had something to do with Bromley having two railway stations too, also with one at each end of the town, up the hill or down the hill, Bromley North and Bromley South. The underground network reaches to the former station now, but they were thought of as well out of London back then. Butchers were presumably placed for opportunistic purchases of something for tea on the way home, and they survived on both sites for some years, until only the Bromley North shop remained. Eventually this too was swept away by the tide of change in the shopping sector, and those sausages are still mourned by my infant mother to the present day. The last stop was at the fishmonger at the bottom of the high street, near the north southern of the two railway stations in Bromley, the one from which the train home would be Here would be purchased some soft roe, a pair of herrings or a kipper for my father's tea, and usually some golden haddock for us children. This was haddock that had been dyed yellow and had a subtle smoky flavour, imparted by some process that didn't include the application of smoke, as truly smoked fish was considered too strong and salty for our taste, no doubt correctly. Dad was always on the lookout for kippers that tasted like those of his own childhood in the New Cross area of South London, and those available at this fishmonger were, he thought, the closest thing to them. He liked to have his kippers grilled and then served with plenty of malt vinegar and white pepper, and with buttered brown bread on the side to mop up the juices and to help ease down the throat those fine bones that had been overlooked by his dissection of the fish. I still remember the smell of those cooked fish on chilly winter afternoons that the darkness drew in, with the wrestling being shown on the television, followed by the interminable football results. The wrestling would be the old style combat of implausibly overweight contestants in swimming trunks and boots, rather than the gym-honed physiques and costumed personae of modern times, but the choreography and the good versus bad characterisations were much the same. In between these emporia in Bromley High Street was the Coffee Importers, halfway along. There could be no doubt about what it sold as there was a working coffee bean roaster in the window, and an all-encompassing aroma of freshly ground coffee for some distance on either side of the open doorway. It was a double-fronted shop, and whilst one window held the roaster, the other contained a working toy model of an ape of some sort that never seemed to tire of swinging over and around its wire support. Once over the threshold, there was a counter on the ground floor selling bags of ground coffee and boxes of pastries, whilst the flight of stairs up the right-hand wall took customers up to a delightful mezzanine haven of small tables with white tablecloths, at which they could order any variety of coffee and patisserie. At a time when coffee served in most establishments was made from a teaspoon of granules or powder from an almost-empty catering-sized tin, which was then topped up with hot water from a wall-slung urn, this experience was something special. At least I took my parents' word for it, with me being of an age where a milkshake was much more the thing at the time. I remember devastating the vegetable patch in the garden at home with Steve when we took our little tricycles across it in a vain attempt to imitate the scrambling motorcycles that we had seen on World of Sport, and for which we were duly punished. We liked to watch the bikes, which sounded like angry wasps as they buzzed around the course, and sent up sprays of mud whilst they climbed and twisted around a track that resembled the battlefields of the Somme. The riders ending the race caked with mud over their fronts, with their visibility limited to a small clear space on their hastily-wiped goggles. Similarly, I remember propelling our scooter around the garden before flying off the single step in the middle where the garden level dropped, just to imagine I was really jumping on the motorcycle. In all, I had happy memories of the family's time in that bungalow. It might have been the rose-tinting of nostalgia, or the fact that life was so much less complicated then, with the satisfaction in simplicity being much more abundant, and there being no thought or expectation of anything more. I spent my infancy and early school days there, and watched as things in the local environment changed around me. A large council estate was built down the road, and although this had brought new schools and a better bus service with it, I missed the more rural environment that had been before, and especially missed watching and talking to the scraggy ponies that used to occupy the field before it was given over to dense housing and the blocks of flats. School itself was a challenge. Steve just seemed to make friends at will, whilst I struggled and never really found myself comfortable in the company of others. I declined to put my hand up in class if at all possible, and just liked to keep my head down. I played with one or two classmates in the break times, but I never really met up with anybody out of school, preferring just to be at home. This was a pattern that persisted throughout my school life. I also remember some rather cursory judgements being made there. For example, one day our class was lined up in the assembly hall, and we were given a recorder to blow into in turn. I had never seen one before, and just blew into it as requested by the teacher, but was immediately told that I obviously had no musical potential and was dismissed, along with several others who could not immediately dash out a tune, on beat whatever criteria were being used to identify potential musical talent. It did not feel like a particularly inclusive process, and was possibly the format upon which Britain's Got Talent was later based. That is the end of this episode of the podcast. If you found it interesting enough to want to read more of the story, then the book is available to order or download from the Amazon.co.uk website. Thank you for listening, and enjoy the rest of your day.