So the difficulties are also related to the fact that if he objects to somebody saying something, at school he has learned to wait his turn. He puts his hand up and he waits his turn. When he was about 4, or 5 and [sister] starting speaking when he was about, well [sister] is four years younger than him. I would say to Joseph, “When you want to speak Joseph,” because he would always talk on top of people, even now, “When you want to speak Joseph, put your hand up.” And I realised I had gone really far with this, because one day in the back of the car, [sister] sat with her hand up because she wants to speak [laughs]. And they sit there, and in the house sometimes, they put their hand up when they want to speak and it is so funny, the training that you do.

So the challenges are, if I say, “Shh, not now,” he has to finish his sentence for as long as it lasts. He can’t just stop. There is no point in me getting into an argument with him on a logical basis because he will win every time. His intelligence far exceeds mine. His knowledge base far exceeds mine. And it is sometimes I just say, “Oh just shut up, please, just shut up. I am tired, just shut up.” And I close my eyes and I close down and then of course I get the rational argument, “Well that is no way to finish an argument, mummy.” You know, because then he re-quotes me and he says, “You have to talk about it.” I say, “Oh Joseph, not now.” [laughs] And he doesn’t get the body language and then he has to re-explain himself and he has to re-assert himself and I… I just walk away and he follows me [laughs]. So I go in the room and I close the door and he know that when the door is closed he has to knock on it and he can’t come in the room until I open the door and let him in so he is very, very good with the rules but he will sit outside the door and carry on telling me. He just doesn’t stop.

We were in the swimming pool last week and he wouldn’t get in the pool. Somebody had said, “Water is nice and hot,” and he wouldn’t go in. It took me quarter of an hour to get him close enough to the pool, because he is a big boy, so that his teacher could get him into the pool. But he just screamed, he thought… I said, “Do you really think I would throw you into a boiling hot pool, darling,” because it is full of other children who weren’t burning but of course he couldn’t make sense of that. When Tom was little we used to say, it’s raining cats and dogs and he was so worried about our cat. He kept saying, “Where is Bluey?” and I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand, “Where is Bluey?” Now I say it is raining heavily. I never did that again. Oh he was so scared. “It is raining heavily Tom.” And he was terrified and it took me ages to work out, that he thought, he kept saying, “The roof, the roof.” And he just thought the rain was going to break the roof and break the house. He was really scared.

I took him, he was into Power Rangers, so I bought him a Power Ranges outfit, no it wasn’t, it was one of those super hero ones, ones with all the different flying machines. Thunderbirds. I bought him a Thunderbirds outfit and he got it and he cried all the way round the shop, and screamed and screamed and screamed. “I am ready to leave you mummy.” And I didn’t understand. “Baby, it is only costume.” But it is little things like that. And you don’t, when you have just bought them something and they are wandering round the shops and they are screaming and people are staring at you because you bought them what they want, and you think what have I done? It is obviously trying to understand about literalism, about what was going on in his little head. He was just terrified.

And he hated loud noises, and he hated dogs, because I know [laughs] not this dog. He hated dogs because they are unpredictable. It is something about their heads, the way they move, their teeth, he was just terrified, absolutely terrified of dogs and we used to take him to the woods, and he wouldn’t go into the woods. We have got a lovely big wood near us and he wouldn’t go there. He thought the bears were in there because he had seen some programme somewhere on Tellytubbies I think when there was a scary bear with rolling eyes and he wouldn’t go into the woods in case the bears got him. It was just little things all the time, you couldn’t really take him anywhere. If you took him to the beach he thought the undertow or the crabs would drag him into the water and eat him. Or everything. He was terrified of everything.

But she gets very wound up about things, you know, and if we are going away, you know she gets so excited. You know she is sort of constantly saying, you know, Come on, you have got to go, got to go. You know and dashing around like a bull in a china shop. Everything goes flying everywhere and she winds everybody up and she takes everything very literally you know. If people say, you know, Well I can’t stay long, then she is constantly saying, You said you couldn’t stay long, didn’t you ought to be going? You are not supposed to still be here. You know, and she sort of gets you now, quite rude to people sometimes, you know.

And she is always I mean she is very friendly and she is quite a sort of character in the village, but she is always sort of rushing to help people with things, like you know, if she sees somebody carrying their shopping, she will grab it from them, you know sort of snatch it from them, not say, Can I help you? nicely. She will sort of grab and then she will spill everything [laughs] and you know things go wrong for her really. But she is a nice girl who is well meaning, but it just doesn’t come out right. You know.

So yesterday, he is fourteen now, he is taller than me, he is quite medium build. He is very, very intelligent. He has just got two A stars for his science GCSEs. He is still doing very well with his clarinet and piano. Yet the teacher asked him in the classroom something and he didn’t understand and he will have given what he thought was a witty reply and he said, “The teacher then said to me something about a basic level of politeness and I couldn’t understand what she said and I kept asking what she meant, but it didn’t make sense.” To him it wouldn’t have made logical sense and he remembers exactly what people say precisely. And if there is inconsistency between what they say and what they do, then he is confused. And he said, “I was so upset that I just burst into tears.” And when he cries it is a very physical thing for him. He can’t modulate his voice, neither does his crying get modulated and I said, “Well how did you calm down.” And he said, “Well the teacher said she would go and talk to the SENCO.” And that is probably what it is, the teacher probably stopped trying to explain and recognized that he had reached, that he had gone beyond his limit.

But one of the things you can never do with him is rationalise in an emotional way. It is very cut and dried and it is quite hard to have a conversation when you are trying to explain feelings and emotions and that can make people seem irrational because he just gets louder and louder with it, just doesn’t make sense. So apart from that he does surprising things. He is surprisingly considerate sometimes. He is surprisingly empathetic, which I am not quite sure whether it is learned or it is inherent. He is really, really kind to his sister and he can see if another person is involved, I would think it is a chain of behaviours and he will rush to help them.

Well I can give you an example. At Christmas time we were over at my brother’s house and my brother, my brother has kids as well, two daughters. And they had all been in his house, and they had all been playing tag and running around and while I wasn’t there apparently they had decided that there was to be no more running in the house. Well Arthur as I said doesn’t sit down. He doesn’t keep still and he paces a lot. And my brother has got a big dining room and then a door and the lounge. So there is quite a long area to pace. And Arthur goes up and down. And anyway, Arthur, we were in the lounge and Arthur and it really bugs my brother actually because that constant movement it can get too much and for my brother it gets too much. Anyway Arthur was running up and down it, because there is a like a little steps and he would run and jump. Okay. So my brother turned round to him and said… What did he say? He said, “Stop running, Arthur.” So Arthur went into slow motion. So my brother turned round and said, “Are you taking the mickey out of me?”

And you know, he really made it as if, Arthur had deliberately, was deliberately being obtuse and was trying to show my brother up in some way, you know, which is just bizarre for me, knowing Arthur. Yes, may be, yes, he didn’t listen. Yes, you know, he went into slow motion. I said to him, I said, so I turned round to my brother, I said, “[brother] you need to be… “ I said, “He is not trying to show you up. He is not taking the mickey out of you. You have got to be specific. Tell him to walk. Don’t tell him stop running, because he has stopped running. That is not running.” You know. “You have got to tell him to walk.” And then my brother in law jumped down me, “Oh so you are saying that Arthur is right, and [brother] is wrong and …” and this and that. And you know and it blew out into total thing… and then they were like, “Oh you should have waited and told [brother] later that you have got to be more specific.” And I said to Arthur. I said, “Arthur what were you …” He said, “Well I slowed down. And you just don’t want me to run, because it is not safe going fast. Well I wasn’t going fast.” [laugh]

That is the thing we don’t know at the moment, but it accounts for things like everything is taken literally. It is either black or it is white. They don’t understand things like sarcasm or reading between the lines, you know, the things that you develop, social skills or communication skills, without knowing you are developing them. Autistic children can’t do that. The brain doesn’t allow them to do that. So that is why they are always asking questions like, “Are you being serious?” You know, they don’t understand jokes or they pretend to, to be socially accepted, but don’t really understand. They read things, great reading skills, but don’t really understand what, no cognitive awareness of what they are actually reading and some of them have tremendous, highly developed skills in certain areas, like photographic memory, and they read, and like my son, anything he reads on football is locked in there for ever and he will recall it to minute detail. But if you send him upstairs to pick something up and he has forgotten by the time he gets upstairs what you sent him for. Short term memory is a big problem, but things of interest he has an enormous capacity for memory. But like I say basic living skills, he has very few.

Hes … very likely to… nowadays, typically because for example, he will be wound up by the children in the playground often not deliberately. It is sometimes because he doesn’t understand what they are doing. So perhaps they will be playing a game and then they change the rules. Games of ‘It andtag are really lethal [laugh] if you have Asperger’s ; suddenly all the children will decide that they are going to play ‘Star Wars instead and he can’t understand what they are doing at all and he can’t understand why they don’t want to play the game they were playing before and he can get very upset. He is much better at handling that but if it is combined with children, perhaps teasing him, or perhaps sometimes, deliberately winding him up occasionally, he can’t handle that very well, and he will simply sit on it for half an hour and then explode. So it can be very destructive.

In the past he would blow up very, very quickly at quite small incidents. So he would misinterpret something that somebody said, or he disliked being teased when he was younger because he didn’t understand it. He thought they were deliberately getting at him and he would explode very quickly. He is much better now. A lot more has to happen.

The other thing that will typically bother him now, will be issues around fairness; feeling that he has missed out on something. There was an incident recently, where he, because he has a lot of difficulty planning and organising, he missed out on a gold sticker at school for behaviour because he failed to take his homework diary into school at the right time, and really that is because he can’t plan very well over a week, there is not a chance. He is only nine and he couldn’t do that. He took it in a day too early and then didn’t take it on the right day and so he didn’t get the sticker and he was absolutely bereft, really, really upset because he felt, I think, so excluded, it was just something that he could not possibly attain and he was so aware of the differences between himself and other children I think and it is that kind of where he feels it was an unfairness he will get very, very upset and if he is a bit tired and maybe a bit, you know, he has had a lot of homework or something, sometimes that kind of thing will really touch off a tantrum very quickly.

And so she gets it any way fundamentally [laughs] because certain things she really ought to know; the fact that she has got to engage in eye contact and relationships with peers. Just go gently with them. Don’t sort of think that the first… you see there was only one girl about her same age as her on this course in [name of college]. And she came in one night and she was absolutely silent and she didn’t go upstairs. She didn’t do any work and I said, “Come on. What’s happening?” She said, “How do you know anything has happened?” So I said, “Well I have been your mother for 19 years,” I said, “I think I could sort of pick it out.” She said it is, “Nothing, it will go.” And she should know that I don’t give in.

So after 20 minutes she said, “Well.” I said, “It is [name of girl] or [name of girl], [name of girl] isn’t it?” So she said, “Yes,” she said, “How do you know?” I said… “Well,” she said, “Something and nothing.” I said, “It probably is something and nothing, Tiffany. It’s something that has upset you which she didn’t mean. And if she knew that you were upset, you know, she wouldn’t have done it.” So I said, then I get very defensive and sort of say, “How was she today?” She said, “Well…” It took about five days for it to get over but since they only see one another three times a week, it is not surprising. But she could have been having an off day and shed have said something like you know, I mean if you listen to Tiffany, I am the most horrible mother, I am always shouting, I never have a laugh, I never… So I know how she reacts to other people.

He is very much into music. But he is a very critical person, an unbelievable critic. If you are not singing well he will tell you. He is very blunt in company, he will, and once again that is probably the Asperger’s , but he doesn’t say it in any way in malice. It is just sort of a fact. You know, you are in a crowded train on the tube and he is “mum it smells”. You know. But then I like that. Part of me likes that, you know. And part of me worries because he is six years old and he looks like a little cherub. He has got blonde hair, blue eyes, and he can get away with it right now. And I am wondering for how much longer he is going to get away with this and we probably let him get away with, in company, all of us, because we take it, we don’t take it as it is embarrassing us. Do you know what I am saying? You can be in mixed company and somebody could be acting like a complete idiot whether they have a problem or not. And because we all take things very lightly in our family, you know if he is acting up we laugh, you know, and it seems to diffuse it and it also seems to sort of calm him down and we get on with our business. And if anybody is staring at us, we are just so what, you know who cares. And I would like to think that both my boys will grow up feeling that. You know to be themselves as the ultimate at the end of the day you know, and no worry about what other people think about you, you know, that is all we can ask of. But he is a fun boy. He is really fun.

It is like the time he had he had un-descended testicles, didn’t you? And he was going to school then and he had to have an operation after, worrying doctors to death, because of course in those days it was, oh because he has learning difficulties it is not worth, you know they wouldn’t consider them for operations or treatment or anything. So in the end they took him into hospital and I said, “Well…” I thought he would be embarrassed at school with all the boys in the class. What on earth would he tell them? So I said, “Howard, what did you tell them?” “Oh I told them I was going into the hospital and have an operation for un-descended testicle.” So it was me that was at fault, not Howard. Howard was OK, weren’t you lovely?