Make Me Normal (Channel 4 Documentary on Autism/Aspergers - Tonight at 9)

and believe me, i loathe children most of the time.

(incidentally, it's a fairly new condition to medicine: it was first clinically described in the 1940s)

The boy with the EastEnders fixation was frighteningly reminiscent of me in too many horrid ways, except obviously I don't chuck out my old VHS tapes if the letter "a" in EastEnders is written half an inch above where it is normally written, etc.

yes, i think this is the key. which raises the question: what about all the adults who weren't diagnosed 20 years ago? how are they going about their everyday lives? marcello: i'd love to hear more about your thoughts on this.

my mum spent 30+ years as a children's nurse and says the number of children now being diagnosed as having some kind of autistic-spectrum disorder is out of control: she maintains that many of them have nothing of the sort.

she also says that she thinks i'd probably be diagnosed with some such disorder if i was a child today. up until the age of six or seven i was an obsessive/slightly weird kid (vacuum cleaners, extractor fans and road-traffic signs being all-consuming obsessions) who didn't shun social contact as such but certainly showed no desire to interact with other kids. yet by the time i was in my teens i was interacting normally (well: as normally as teenagers do), and these days i'm probably too sociable for my own good.

i do remember being blissfully happy in my early childhood, for what it's worth. and utterly miserable as a teenager. still: i think that's as "normal" as it gets.

asd wasnt fucking known outside of germany and austria until the v. late 70s adn the early 80s.

'Do you like volcanoes?'

this was fascinating last night, especially the bloke who they gave a camera to who just wandered around asking people really random questions. 'Have you ever had a quiff?' absolutely no other attempts at conversation at all except these questions. i wish i can remember more of them.