Chapter 5:
Road narrows

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

For many years, flocks of artists, musicians, and students had been drawn to the ‘urban village’ where we had moved, warming to its cheap bedsits and convenient pubs. Though the first flickers of gentrification were becoming visible — a fancy café here, a skip on the pavement there — we felt at home in this bohemian corner, just five miles from the centre of London.

The flat was on the ground floor of a purpose-built post-war block at the top of a hill. It was a roomy place, easily big enough for Alice, Jon, and me. It was clean, well maintained, and regularly painted.

At the foot of our hill, God had pushed his thumb into the clay, making a dip in which the village had grown up. A banded clock tower crowned with a weathervane stood at the hub with roads radiating out like the legs of a spider. Going anywhere from this point meant climbing a hill.

I went for a walk past a disused Victorian–Gothic church which was to become a friend. I would give it a pat whenever I passed and say a few words, just as I had done with the lampposts of my youth. I found I could form reliable relationships with buildings. Being objects rather than people, they never confused me. This attitude is not uncommon for those on the autism spectrum. Wildly amusing autistic lecturer Ros Blackburn has even described the sexual affair she had with her ice skates.

I am reminded of a day, years ago, when I was on the beach with one of my nephews, a toddler who has some autistic traits. We were throwing pebbles into the water, and I explained how the receding waves tended to drag them out to sea. He looked anguished. ‘I don’t want to throw them any more,’ he said. I wondered what was wrong and then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ I said. ‘When the waves come back in they bring the pebbles back onto the beach again.’ He thought for a moment and resumed throwing. He saw the lonely helpless pebbles being dragged out to sea in the same way another child might see a person, or a pet rabbit.

I registered with an irrepressible doctor whose father had been murdered by the Nazis, and made an appointment with my new bank manager to discuss transferring my account and getting a chequebook. These then routine meetings now read like archaic rituals officiated by gentlemen in top hats.

One night we got back late to the flat. When I opened the door the floor seemed to part like a torn sheet. The carpet was a mass of cockroaches scurrying for their burrows under the sudden brilliance of the hall light.

We tried deadly powders and sticky insect traps, we complained to the management and made little headway. In the end, since the greasy insects never crawled across the dinner table or dropped onto our faces in the night, we learnt to live with them.

I got a job working with children in a play centre near Marble Arch. The money paid the rent and I was spending most of my time away from the hall of mirrors of adult life.

The area was a mixture of poor and rich families. There were youngsters from the Lisson Green estate as well as the sons and daughters of diplomats from the Mayfair embassies. Some children could name the countries of the world and speak French, Urdu, or Persian. Others could barely read. The tiny mother of one of the quieter girls worked at St Mary’s hospital, nearby.

‘What does your mummy do?’ asked a nosey parent.

‘She cuts up dead bodies,’ replied the girl.

On a trip to the Kent countryside one boy saw his first cow.

A family of four Ugandan boys used to visit: David, Stephen, Silver, and Timothy. Silver was able to put his entire fist into his mouth, to the great delight of everybody who saw the performance. Their father Musa, a self-possessed, dignified man, looked after his sons on his own, having left his wife in Uganda the day he brought them to England.

One day, we were on an organised trip to the Imperial War Museum and, as I rounded a corner with the Ugandan boys, a display case housing a stack of First World War rifles came into view. They froze, clapping their hands over their ears in terror. I had to lead them out into the fresh air.

Back at the play centre, their father asked if he could have a quiet word. I took him to a private room and we sat down. He told me about his country during the dying days of Idi Amin’s dictatorship, where he had been arrested and imprisoned for I don’t know what. He said he had been repeatedly beaten and made to parade daily with the other inmates while a uniformed solider came down the rows, whimsically picking out the men to be shot that morning.

One day, the soldier stopped in front of him. ‘I know you,’ he said. Musa looked straight ahead. The man pulled him out and marched him towards a building, where he shoved him into a dingy room and closed the door. This was it. The soldier spoke to him in an urgent whisper. ‘You helped my brother,’ he said. ‘Go! Leave! Take your family.’ He unlocked another door and pushed Musa out of the prison. ‘Cover your face at the airport,’ he hissed. ‘They will see the bruises.’

Musa gathered his children and a hatful of money, wrapped a scarf around his disfigured face, and bought five tickets out of the country. He could not take his wife; she would join him later, they hoped. Shaking with fear, he made the long walk across the airport tarmac with his boys. He was not stopped. He climbed the steps and boarded the plane.

As Musa came to the end of his story a single tear ran slowly down his cheek. I was very affected but I did not understand how to express my mood. My face remained blank. I could never have touched his arm, much less embraced him. We returned to the playground so he could collect his boys, for whom museum guns were not neutral objects. They flung themselves around him.

Life in the flat ran smoothly. Jon was busy at college and Alice and I tended to do our own thing, especially at weekends. We would walk into London or go to the pub. Sometimes we visited Brighton for the day or took our sketchbooks into the park. After a few months we decided to look for a place of our own.

In those days, flat hunting was done with the aid of newspaper ads and a copy of the A–Z map book. Someone had also given us the name of Eugene at the Busy Bees Agency, which tracked down flats for people. I rang him from the work phone, which had a pale brown body and a darker brown handset. He found Alice and me the perfect place: a first floor flat on a busy crossroads, a mile north of Euston. An elevated section of the North London line passed close by the living room window. Trains chugged by all day over an ugly Victorian bridge while lorries thundered underneath, being supplanted at night by screaming police cars and singing drunks. For a person so sensitive to noise and overstimulation it seems curious that I could stand all this, but the urban bustle merged into a background rumble. I found it deeply romantic and slept soundly. It was the quiet nights and hooting owls of the countryside that drove me bananas.

The flat was above a knocking shop dressed up as a massage parlour. I would meet the girls shopping for cigarettes and sandwiches, and hear about their sore feet. We were flanked by a pie, mash, and eel shop and a small sausage factory, which, every Wednesday, took delivery of mountains of white pork belly dotted with nipples that would nevermore suckle a piglet.

One night, when I was about to push off to bed, the doorbell went. I trotted down in my dressing gown, and there, silhouetted against a streetlamp, stood the figure of a middle-aged man in a suit. He looked me over doubtfully.

‘Do you do massages?’

‘Next door,’ I said.

‘What, sausages?’

‘Other side.’

In an upstairs flat lived two young men; the balding father of one used to present serious programmes on television. I passed him once on the landing as he went up to see his son, his crisp suit and tie clashing with the dust, shredded stair-carpet, and unopened bills that littered the floor.

We tried the pie and eel shop. The food consisted of a yellowish meat-filled pastry, served with dollops of watery potato engulfed in ‘liquor’, a hot sauce purportedly made with parsley and boiled eel juice, but actually just a flour gruel turned green by unholy quantities of food colouring. With your pie you could have a dish of hot, or jellied, eels. The jellied variety looked like something from an autopsy so I tried the hot ones. My disgust mechanism is finely attuned and the sensation of sucking the flaps and scraps off the snake skeleton made my skin creep. ‘Why do you criticise everything?’ asked Alice, not angrily but in search of understanding. I didn’t know and couldn’t say.

My zebra finches were getting on a bit, but they still hopped from perch to perch and squawked happily, or it might have been aggressively, whenever I put Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis on the record player. Through Finzi’s settings I discovered the haunting poetry of Thomas Hardy, whose novels I had always found so tedious. Finzi and Hardy remain golden threads uniting Then and Now in the ribbon of my life. Not long afterwards, both my birds died: first one, then the other. I felt the loss for a long time but kept the feeling a secret.

Alice got a job as an artists’ model. When someone asked me whether I was happy with a lot of people looking at my nude girlfriend I said that what counted was whether she was happy with it. I knew that an artist in the studio becomes as emotionally detached as a surgeon performing a breast examination. Alice worked in the London art colleges and wherever else people needed a model. One day one of the ladies from a drawing class near Hampstead gave her a lift home. She told her that her husband Freddie had written a thriller called, The Day of the Jackal. Had she heard of it?

Somebody from Madame Tussaud’s rang to ask Alice to model part of the torso of a young actress called Nastassja Kinski, who had not had time to sit for the sculpting of more than her head. They cast her hands and forearms using dental alginate. How strange to think that hundreds of thousands of people would soon be traipsing unknowingly past replica bits of my girlfriend. Somewhere today there are tucked away in forgotten holiday albums around the world a few faded snaps of Alice’s young limbs. Would I recognise them?

I went to see Bill Bradshaw in his wheelchair-adapted flat in Waterloo. He was doing an office job which he was not enjoying and every spare moment was spent working on his linguistics PhD. ‘My typist is making life difficult,’ he complained. ‘She says she can do it faster on one of those word processor things.’ We went to the pub, where Bill drank a phenomenal amount of beer and smoked thirty cigarettes. Then we went for a phaal. He had always been quite good at eating.

I visited Jon at his new flat. He told me that Katy, the belle of my schooldays, had won a prize for the best English First in the University of London. I didn’t doubt it. She was now at Oxford, being supervised by a divorced and remarried Catholic Marxist with money. It was not that Katy had an especially sparkling intellect, just a steely dedication to hard work, a canny awareness of the zeitgeist, and bulletproof ambition.

I thought I would like to work in radio but had no idea how anyone might go about doing that. In the end it was, as it so often is, a contact that put me on the path.

My aunt had just finished a short course in broadcasting techniques at an establishment near Harrow. She explained that they ran a highly regarded three-month residential course costing several thousand pounds. This was beyond me, but she said they were looking for someone with a bit of experience and technical nous, whose fees and room-and-board they would provide if that person would stay on to do a modicum of teaching and a fair bit of chair stacking during shorter courses throughout the year.

This sounded ideal, but there was just one thing. My aunt was a nun and the course was run by the Catholic Church. As a boy, I had been schooled by nuns, gone to church, learned the ropes. But this was all a long time ago. I sent them a letter anyhow and was invited along for an interview.

The journey into the outer suburbs on a musty slam-door train took me through Queen’s Park, Wembley, and Harrow. I admired the Victorian terraces and red-brick suburban station buildings as we passed. When I wasn’t gazing out of the window I was examining the seat moquette, a word coined in the thirties for the thick pile fabric used in upholstery. This one was hardwearing but unbeautiful.

I have an enthusiasm for public transport visual design systems, from typography to maps to cushions, and I often compare one with another. I once thought of having a suit made using the red and yellow moquette of the London Routemaster bus but decided it would be too prickly. Some of the best moquettes in the world are those used since the 1930s on London’s underground trains, which were part of a sustained policy of integrated company design initiated by Frank Pick, the dynamic leader of what became London Underground. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Pick as ‘very shy’ and ‘brilliant but lonely’. He was also highly focused. It was he, who in 1913 commissioned the calligrapher Edward Johnston to design the now world-famous Underground ‘bullseye’ roundel, along with a new typeface that would unify the look of all Tube trains, stations, maps, posters, and travel information. His idea was that attractive design, high functioning and well administered, can reflect an organisation’s ethos and exert a profound effect on public impression. ‘The test of the goodness of a thing,’ said Pick, ‘is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it any better …’ He applied his ‘bold simplicity’ to everything from fabric design to the architecture of his new Tube stations, overseeing every feature down to the last fixture and fitting. The designer Noel Carrington thought his attention to detail made him the ‘ideal inspector general’. Coherence, standards, and underlying systematic rules meant everything to him. I imagined Frank Pick on his cloud looking down at the seat covers of my train and cursing it.

The radio and television training centre was based in two huge 1920s houses in an affluent suburb a couple of miles from the end of the Bakerloo line. I was greeted at the door by a portly silver-haired man wearing a cravat and a signet ring. He said he was the dean. I said who I was. Exuding an aura of great suavity, he picked up the phone — a modern one, with buttons instead of a dial — and buzzed the person whose name I had been given.

‘There’s a sinister-looking young man here to see you,’ he said, looking at me archly over his half-moon spectacles.

I was asked to wait, so I inspected the entrance hall. Ahead of me, a wide curled staircase led to two floors of accommodation, on my right was an office. Through a door to my left I could see a hotel-style sitting room with several armchairs. There were other doors but they were closed. From somewhere came the delicious smell of soup. After a minute a young woman with a beautiful smile appeared. She greeted me warmly and told me her name was Lea. This seemed a funny name for a woman. Lea was American. Perhaps this was why she seemed so effortlessly buoyant and upbeat. I liked her immediately. Of course I had no clue that this was my first meeting with my future wife. Who does? She told me she would give me a tour.

Hidden away inside the building was a large lecture room, a suite of offices, a chapel with access for cameras and microphones, and a full-size sound studio with a large control cubicle on the other side of a soundproof glass. My nerdy traits were immediately excited. Most astonishing was a huge, fully operational TV studio equipped with three cameras, lighting grid, cycloramas, and a control gallery housing a desk bristling with faders, buttons, and tiny lights.

I was interviewed by two of the staff before being taken to see the boss, Peter, a canon of Westminster Cathedral. He had something of the later Trevor Howard about him, his sideboard bristled with bottles, and his office clock had only one hand: ‘one-ish, two-ish, three-ish’, it said. After a bluff chat, Canon Peter saw me out and told me they would be in touch.

Back at the flat there had been a rustling under the floorboards and we noticed tooth marks in an aubergine. Mice! Hearing a noise in the kitchen, Alice opened the cupboard door. ‘Argh! Tom,’ she called, ‘it’s not mice, it’s a huge rat.’ Cockroaches was one thing, rats another. The massage parlour had been overrun. The environmental people fixed the problem but I spent hours with a bucket of bleach, cleaning every last surface.

On Sundays there was a huge market up the road. Crowds packed the stalls, bands played in the pubs, and canal boaters stopped for a chat at the lock. There was little I wanted to buy but it was nice to spend time with Alice. She was very good with other people and was my buffer against them. She was also by nature kind. One day near Baker Street she approached a tramp asleep beside his hat on a park bench. She lifted the hat and deposited a packet of cigarettes and a five-pound note.

Wandering about under a dark arch at the market one weekend she drew my attention to some colourfully braided lengths of what looked like rope. ‘Aren’t these unusual,’ she said, lifting them up for me to examine. At once the ropes were whipped out of her hand. They were the dreadlocks of a man who had been bending forwards examining some bric-a-brac.

Despite her social skills and her altruism, Alice had always had a fiery temper, and more than once I found myself in conversations with flying crockery. Like other Aspergers I shrink from conflict. When one evening I was hit on the head by a shoe I began to wonder how much of this I should be expected to put up with.

A letter arrived from the radio and television training centre telling me I had been successful in my application. I decided I would live at the centre during the week and come home to Alice at the weekend. I handed in my notice and left for the distant suburbs.

*

The three-month radio and television training course covered everything from the way a television studio worked to how to survive a tricky media interview. A BBC producer called Helen Fry talked to us about features. She had worked on Plain Tales from the Raj, the radio programme I had admired. I was going to discuss it with her during the coffee break but I was put off by the press of other people and overcome by anxiety.

We were given an introduction to drama by a very experienced producer, who took all of us through a short radio play. Some students were chosen to act, others took turns directing, and I, of course, volunteered to do the sound effects. This involved little more than putting down some cups and saucers and pouring out the ‘tea’ — actually cold water. It irked me that such effects were often too loud or in some other way exaggerated, as if the sound effects person was concerned lest his or her day’s work go unappreciated. I carefully underplayed it.

‘Excellent sound effects,’ said the visiting producer. I had seldom been so flattered, for this was Piers Plowright, the man whose sound montage on death I had been so taken with. I wanted to tell him how much I loved his work and explain my conviction that a radio listener could detect the difference between hot and cold liquid being poured into a cup, but again I was unable to open a conversation or introduce myself.

The director of a new television drama called EastEnders showed us how to produce a multi-camera studio programme. Whoever was directing had to make endless real-time decisions: cueing the actors, and instructing the vision mixer, engineer, cameras, sound operators, and who knows how many other people while sitting in a darkened control gallery in front of a bank of monitors.

For some reason that nobody knows, the camera takes a particular liking to certain people and I found I was better in front of it than behind. I could talk to a lens more easily than I could a person, and I didn’t have to order other people about. Presenting a show called Book Review, I gave an excellent impression of myself, looking relaxed and competent while they fed into my earpiece the developing chaos in the gallery, as student directors and vision mixers got in a shouting muddle, floor managers wandered into shot, and everything that could go wrong did. The adrenaline under the eye of the camera kept me agile and I found I was able to concentrate on my script, take the director’s cues, watch the clock, and process the background hubbub, without too many problems.

People with Asperger’s syndrome notice and remember distracting information that others ignore, and they can do this without it damaging their performance. This so-called, ‘non-selective attention’ was reported by UCL psychologists Anna Remington and John Swettenham, who asked a group of Aspergers to find the letters N and X in a ring of indifferent characters. Any letters that appeared outside the circle were irrelevant and should be ignored. The test was against the clock. They found that Aspergers processed more of the distracting information — the letters outside the circle — than did typical people, without this making them worse at the main job. In fact, they were better at it. Clearly there are times when distractibility is an advantage.

The most permanently useful training I had on the course was in how to be interviewed. As with other Aspergers I can find it hard to master my thoughts when asked a question, particularly one about myself. When I was being grilled I would often give strange terse answers, as I did in life, or would trail off into inarticulate irrelevancies. Watching my lacklustre performances being played back was a brutal awakening.

I learnt that although a media interview looks like a real conversation it is a mere imitation, with its own strange rules. Once I had understood this, I found the process easier, and with much hard work I learned how to pretend to be me, and to use the useful politicians’ trick of responding to questions rather than answering them. This technique was exemplified by General de Gaulle who once waved a sheet of paper at some journalists, saying, ‘Gentlemen, here are my answers, now what are your questions?’ Of course, you could take it too far. This interview training helped me decades later when I was obliged to do endless interviews to plug books I had written. The rules of mock exchange were clear, and I enjoyed the performing.

When the course finished I stayed on in my bedroom ‘over the shop’. I did a bit of hospital radio and I was offered some reporting work with the BBC. It was nice to get a cheque stamped with their monogram — my first broadcast earnings. The rest of the time I was helping out on the short courses that ran throughout the year. These were often for foreign students, from Scandinavia, India, Europe, and several African countries. On one course it began snowing and some Ghanaian priests who had never seen snow put on their overcoats and went onto the lawn, where they danced like children.

On another course a lot of senior English clergy, including a future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, arrived to have their interview skills polished up. One or two were on the ball. Others couldn’t remember the question or keep their earpiece in. Another time the genial and rather vague director of a publishing house that produced English translations of papal documents arrived. Lea helped him make a short film and I talked to him about the right sort of typography for his captions. Later I saw him coming out of the ladies’ toilet.

Lecturing more philosophically about the media was a Dominican priest named Gerard Meath. I introduced myself to him and told him he had taught my father at Laxton School. He remembered both my dad and my uncle Ralph. I walked with him to the car park, where he hiked up his habit, revealing a pair of pink legs and brown sandals. ‘These medieval garments weren’t designed for the modern world,’ he announced, climbing into his car, which I remember as a Triumph Spitfire but probably wasn’t. Then, staring absently into the distance, he mused: ‘You know what, Tom, there’s nothing so stupid as a nun.’ With a sudden roar he was away, leaving me standing in a cloud of amusement and exhaust.

Oddballs, it seemed, were attracted to the Church. Running one of the courses was a ‘mad professor’ called Leonard Chase, who had been at the BBC in the early days, working on the radio thriller Dick Barton – Special Agent and the first episodes of the TV police drama Z-Cars. He had been the person who suggested Valerie Singleton as a suitable presenter for Blue Peter and had finally been made the corporation’s head of training. He told me he had once produced a magic show for television, becoming so interested that he had taken up the hobby himself. He showed me a mysterious effect in which he pushed a borrowed pen through his jacket without leaving a hole. I was baffled until he revealed that the coat was woven from a tweed so loose that the fibres would part to allow a pen through, before closing up again. Leonard was a member of the Magic Circle and he invited me along as a guest. In time, and after a terrifying examination, I too became a member.

Canon Peter, the radio and television training centre’s boss, was a whisky priest of the old school, whose phenomenal swearing was enough to curdle communion wine. He flew a 1935 glider, which he drove to airports in a long box on top of his Renault 4. He knew all the best hidden-away restaurants in London, though he was himself no chef. On the cook’s day off he offered to make dinner for Lea and me. This turned out to be three catering meat pies blackened to a cinder in the deep fat fryer, served with frozen vegetable cubes boiled to a pulp. The meal was accompanied by several bottles of excellent wine, most of which disappeared inside the canon.

Lea and I began spending more time together. We went on a long walk and were followed by a Siamese cat. We lit a fire in one of the building’s old grates, producing a lot of brown smoke and not much heat. Lea sifted the chaff and grain of my character, kept what was worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blew the rest away. Little by little our relationship changed. Something had happened. I decided that I was going to have to talk to Alice.

That weekend I went back to the flat. There was a steady drizzle, the pie shop and sausage factory were dark, and a blustery wind was holding a wet sheet of newspaper against the glass of the massage parlour: ‘More pressure on Kinnock,’ it said. I walked up the dusty stairs in darkness because the timer switch had failed. I let myself in and began the most horrible conversation of my life. ‘You’re being very good about this, you know,’ said Alice. But I felt I had stifled a baby. There was blood on my hands for a long time.

*

The Canon invited Lea and me to a proper dinner. Round the table were several people including a couple of senior BBC types. I was out of my depth, but Lea charmed them even after she had sent a pickled onion flying into the lap of the Head of Religious Broadcasting. She mentioned that she had got herself a job offer as a production assistant with the BBC Drama department. The other senior BBC man leant forward, ‘Oh, you won’t be wanting to do that for very long. Come and see me when you’ve settled in and we’ll sort you out with something more suitable.’ I was shocked that this was the way it worked.

I think it was at around this time that, while having my eyes checked, I became properly interested in the weird typographic characters that are used on the test chart. Like everyone, I had been having this same eye test since childhood and I noticed, again, how strange the letterforms were. Looking into things, I discovered that abstract shapes had traditionally been used, but that in 1862 a Dutch ophthalmologist, Herman Snellen, had developed his own alphabet, using capital letters, or, at least, what are designed to look like capital letters. In fact, Snellen’s shapes are not true letterforms at all and anything typeset in them would be next to illegible. Their purpose is not legibility but the testing of visual acuity while allowing the reader to identify easily each shape that he or she can see — a huge leap forward.

Just ten letter shapes are used in the standard chart: C, D, E, F, L, N, O, P, T, and Z. Their idiosyncratic geometry makes the thickness of each letter stroke equal to the width of the white spaces in between, and each serif the same. The height and width of the letters are five times this measure. Though the test has been developed over the years its properties remain the same today, more than a hundred and fifty years after its first use.

The Snellen letters have a systematic beauty, which I come back to often. But whenever I explain all this to opticians they seem bemused.

I was discussing the Snellen chart with Lea, but her mind was elsewhere. Her visa was about to run out and she had to return to the States. We went and stood outside in the drizzly rain. She did not believe it would be easy to get permission to come back to Britain to work. There were tears. I suggested we could get married. She nodded. There were no stars, no candle-lit dinner, no gemstones, just the gravel of the wet drive.

Lea packed her bags and I said I would go with her to the station. The writer and comedian Barry Cryer lived round the corner and for some reason, which I now forget, his wife dropped us off. I saw Lea onto the train and went back to her empty room. She had left a bottle of hair conditioner on a glass shelf. I picked it up and read the back. It was tremendously quiet without her.

With church attendance in England on the brink of its dramatic decline, the writing was on the wall for the training centre. I would be moving out of the place shortly anyway, my year being up. It had been arranged for me to spend a month as a spear-carrier with a local radio station off the M1. On my last day I found myself at the breakfast table with Canon Peter and the dean, who was demolishing a pile of toast and marmalade in engrossed silence. ‘This is where you came in,’ said the canon.

I collected my possessions, held in a single rucksack. As I left, Canon Peter was roping his glider to the car. ‘The year comes full circle,’ he said, giving me an unexpected hug that I did not know what to do with. I turned and looked up at the dark window of Lea’s room. The sun caught the twinkle of ice on the casement.

*

I know exactly where I was standing at three thirty-nine in the afternoon on Tuesday 28 January 1986. I was beside the news desk of the local radio station, preparing to edit an interview I had done with a local cobbler. In those days you recorded onto magnetic tape and to make an edit you had to cut it with a razor blade either side of the bit you wished to remove, before uniting the two ends with sticky tape. It was a precise mechanical job that I enjoyed immensely.

The news team were nearby, wondering how to announce the officially unconfirmed collapse of a local firm. ‘Say they’re “folding”,’ said the editor. ‘Use that word.’ Next to me, a TV monitor was transmitting coverage of the latest space shuttle launch.

All at once something caught my attention. ‘Er, I think there’s some big news happening here,’ I remarked. One or two of them looked up but nobody moved. Being a mere ‘attachee’ to the station I was of very low status.

The door burst open and a reporter dashed into the room. ‘Have you seen it?!’ he panted. They shot round to the monitor. The space shuttle Challenger had blown up during launch. The crew must surely be dead.

‘Right,’ said the editor, ‘Drop “Potholes”. This is it for the four o’clock. Chris, find a local spokesman. Ronnie, get on to London and see what they’ve got.’

During my month with the station I did a bit of everything: recording trails, interviewing local celebrities, sitting in on tedious meetings. Princess Diana visited the town and my job was to sprint from reporter to studio and back again with reels of tape. I said things like ‘Steve says the second vox pop is best’ and got replies like ‘Tell him to give us a three-two-one countdown on these for God’s sake. We’re pulling our bloody hair out.’

Some of the programme producers, including news producers, struck me as remarkably ill informed. They knew the ranks of the police force, the currencies of the world, and what you weren’t allowed to say about court cases, but I had to tell various people at various times, a) who John Ogdon was, b) what ICI stood for, and, c) who composed Peter and the Wolf. Though many presenters were admirably quick on their feet I was disheartened by the contrast between their amiable joviality in front of the microphone and their brusque, humourless pushiness in the office. This two-facedness struck me as both glib and underhand.

I sent a thin blue airmail letter to Lea in America. ‘It’s working with people I’m no good at,’ I said. ‘The horror of meeting people is something I will never escape. I find it hard even to talk to them here. Perhaps I’m just bonkers.’ I had been aware for many years that something funny was going on with me but this was the first time I had written it down.

I left the place without fanfare, deciding that a radio station which was little more than a jukebox with traffic reports was not the sort of radio I was interested in.

Since the cupboard was bare, my parents had dubiously agreed that I might stay with them for a short time. I scanned The Guardian every Monday looking for media jobs, but in the meantime I needed cash. I went for an interview at a family-run department store in a nearby spa town.

‘We are the Harrods of the South East,’ said the lady interviewing me.

‘Surely Harrods is the Harrods of the South East,’ I thought, but didn’t say.

They put me in the gentlemen’s outfitting department. I felt as if I had fallen into Grace Brothers, the fading department store of the BBC’s Are You Being Served? I was given training in how to use a tape measure and also in something called, ‘Being Positive’, which amounted to pretending to be every shopper’s friend. I didn’t do very well at this. If I thought a garment didn’t fit, looked ghastly, or was badly made I told the customer so, but it was explained to me that this was ‘poor salesmanship’.

Despite their offensive propensity to lie through a smile, I found my colleagues to be more rounded, mature, and serious than my university cohort. They tried to show me how the world worked and this was good for me.

One quiet morning during the first week, my supervisor asked me to try on a jacket that a suit rep had given him. It was pale blue and the lapels were about a foot wide. It looked very unusual in the changing room mirror and I was sceptical.

‘Is this right?’ I asked through the curtain.

‘Try the trousers,’ he said, handing them through.

The trousers were of the same colour but would have made a sailor’s bell-bottoms appear narrow. They were too long and the waist was loose. Looking at my absurd reflection the first inkling came upon me that I was being set up.

‘Come out and let me look at you,’ said my supervisor.

Clutching the waist of the trousers I waddled out from behind the curtain to find the whole team standing in a semicircle. A loud roar went up.

‘I was led,’ I said, ‘Led, like a lamb to the slaughter.’ It had been an initiation ceremony, and I had survived it.

The public areas of the shop were deeply carpeted but the staff stairs were cold and hard. Coming down them one day I passed the open door of the MD’s office.

‘What’s a “mausoleum” and how do you spell it?’ came a voice.

I stopped and put my head round the door. ‘It’s a big building with tombs in it,’ I said. ‘M-A-U-S-O-L-E-U-M.’ To my astonishment the boss blew his top, sending me packing and screaming at me from the head of the stairs. What was the matter? He wanted information; I had that information; and I had given it to him, at no cost.

But there was a cost. I didn’t understand it then, but I had made a social error of the grossest kind, severely undermining a person whose sense of self resided, perhaps exclusively, in his position as alpha male. To have a subordinate encroach on his territory and display evidence of superiority in front of another subordinate was excruciatingly damaging to his self-esteem. The omega male had urinated in the alpha male’s lair. I try to be more careful now, but still put my foot in it from time to time. If you have Asperger’s you tend not to pick up on these things as others do.

I sent a daily postcard to Lea, keeping her up to date with my thrilling adventures. ‘They put me in charge of trousers,’ I wrote. ‘Hooray! This is so stimulating that I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up.’ I knew that I wanted to spend my life with Lea and I was saving every ha’penny to travel to the States to get married. But marriage seemed a ridiculous business, and to me weddings were superstitious rituals unsuitable for a decent person to get himself mixed up in. I had made a private agreement with Lea. That was the important thing, not a public display.

Nonetheless, there were rational reasons to go ahead, the chief one being that I would mortally offend Lea’s family if I did not. On the other hand, I could not invite members of my family or any friend. I could not even talk about it. I had no understanding of how hurtful this course of action was to be to my parents, Jon, and my brother and sisters, nor how puzzling it would be to my wife and my in-laws. It was possibly the most damagingly autistic thing I have ever done. I did not understand my motives and it would take decades for the light to dawn.

By early summer I had a plane ticket, but to be married I needed my birth certificate. I asked my parents where it was.

‘Why do you need it?’ they asked.

‘Because I might get married,’ I said, using the conditional tense to buffer the announcement. Naturally they were nonplussed, but all I could think about was my own discomfiture. What a truly hateful business this wedding nonsense was. How and why did people put up with it?

*

Girt by the vast expanse of flat grasslands of the Great Plains, the oblong state of North Dakota stands in the geographic centre of North America. If you hammered a giant nail into the cowboy-flavoured town of Rugby ND you could rotate the whole continent around it. The wide Missouri flows through the Dakotas like a liquid mountain, sparkling under the broiling sun or groaning beneath a foot-thick lid of winter ice. This is the country’s oven, and its ice box. To the dark-red west the burning coal furrows of the northern Badlands let tufts of smoke into the huge skies. Before their destruction the Mandan, Lakota, and Hidasta peoples lived here. Their name for the area meant ‘place of the tall willows’.

The plane was making its descent into the airport of the city — now improbably named Bismarck — the state’s capital and Lea’s longtime home. As we banked to port I spotted the capitol building below me, projecting from the surrounding flatness like the arm of a drowning man. After so many months I was about to see Lea again.

Coming out of the cool aircraft into the stifling humidity of the summer air I saw her waiting for me. She was smiling excitedly; her hair bleached by the sun. We were very glad to see each other.

She drove me home and I was inspected by family and friends. I tried to seem normal.

‘He doesn’t like to be hugged,’ said Lea, ‘because he’s English.’

I hit it off with Lea’s mother, an energetic surgical nurse, and, more gradually, with her father, a generous host. He had worked as a midshipman on the Great Lakes freighter, SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which finally took her crew to the bottom of Lake Superior in a monster storm. He had been a union firebrand but wanted to talk about Chaucer. The opening of The Canterbury Tales had been drummed into me at school, so I was able to impress him by reciting it from memory over dinner.

Beyond the family, my accent was a cause of great interest and amusement. At the Ground Round restaurant on Third Street I tried to ask about their beer. I used every pronunciation known to phonetics but the waitress looked blank. I was obliged to write it down on a napkin. ‘Oh, beer,’ she said.

‘Even when you swear it sounds so polite,’ someone told me.

The visitors bureau described Bismarck as ‘a hub of culture, history, and shopping’. Everything was somewhere else and you got there in a car. Directions were given by green highway signs crowded with ill-positioned blue shields containing ill-spaced yellow numerals. Next to these, on the same sign, were white Native American-head silhouettes, with black numerals on them indicating who knew what. So ill drawn were they that at even a short distance they looked more like squashed albino hedgehogs.

Lea took me to a cattle auction, with real cowboys chewing real jerky and buying real cows. We went bowling. The noises, and smells, and lighting were horrible, and I was obliged to wear special shoes that made me cringe.

Few locals ventured beyond the state, but everyone was on top of the world. Strangers greeted me warmly, and unlike his surly British counterpart the Pepsi deliveryman whistled with pride. You were not old, you were ‘senior’, and if you were wrinkled there was something you could do to defeat it. Life, and even, it sometimes seemed, death, could be tamed. My waitresses for today offered me expansive breakfasts of bacon, waffles, and syrup. ‘Oh, hey, are you English?’ or Irish, or Australian, they would gurgle. ‘How cool.’ Shortly before the wedding I was taken to be measured for a monkey suit. Could it be altered by next week? No problem. The constant sunny-side-upness was a refreshing change from the Northern-European stoicism I was used to, but it got a bit much. Checkout girls kept telling me to have a nice day, even when I had other plans.

We visited a pig farm where they dressed us in white scenes-of-crime outfits. We looked as if we were going to be handling plutonium. A thousand animals were squashed together in an unlit concrete hangar. Bowling balls had been provided to distract them from killing each other out of boredom and fury. There was no happiness in these nitrogenous sheds and we left. The smell of pig clung to our clothes and car for days.

Near the confluence of the Heart and Missouri rivers we saw the rebuilt house that General Custer had lived in until his unfortunate appointment at Little Big Horn. All around was the familiar prairie landscape I had heard about in the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which my mother had read me when I was a boy. We visited the On-a-Slant Native American village, where the Native Americans were no more. Native American matters were handled, I learnt, by a government agency called the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, which stood, the Native Americans said, for, ‘Bossing Indians Around’.

We were asked to speak to a class of English undergraduates at the university. They wanted to know about exchange rates, which jobs paid most in Britain, and my advice for getting on. ‘Cultivate the art of doubt,’ I said. ‘Read a book. Think for yourself.’ They looked blank.

We went to hear wedding organists demonstrating their skills. I was dumbfounded by their commingled incompetence and chutzpah. A fat young woman stumbled through simplified wedding marches on a Wurlitzer in her dining room.

‘Do you know any Handel?’ I asked in desperation.

‘Oh, are you an organist too?’ she squeaked.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘but I have heard of Handel.’

After slaughtering a stripped-down arrangement of The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba she turned to face us with a huge smile, mistaking my rictus of disbelief for approval. So bad was she that she thought she was good. I later learnt that this cognitive peculiarity has a name: the ‘Dunning–Kruger effect’. It’s a good one to remember. It seemed to be more pronounced here than at home.

I was staggered by the stuff that came out of the television. It was a freak show of wobbly soap operas and shouty commercials for one-cal root beer, spectacular storewide savings, and control-top pantyhose. ‘Like sands through the hourglass so are the days of our lives …’

Clicking through the million channels I found the commercial-free C-SPAN (the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network), which was transmitting live pictures from the space shuttle that showed the astronauts doing science experiments. It was bliss to sit there for half an hour and watch two white-clad people drifting about holding weightless petri dishes and bits of foil. Almost nothing happened and it was mostly silent. Every few minutes the camera would cut back to Mission Control, where two or three people sat, scratching their noses. From time to time a quiet voice would ask a question or make a cryptic announcement. Like poetry it sloooowed you down.

I hadn’t given Lea an engagement ring. It seemed irrational to waste money on a superstitious gewgaw. Why not give a woman something of value instead: a nice big potato, say, or some pens? Lea’s father no longer wore his wedding ring so Lea decided to have it resized for herself. I am not a jewellery wearer or remembrance poppy flaunter but they told me the ceremony was to be a ‘two-ring’ affair, meaning that I also needed one. I went to a discount store resembling a low-grade Woolworths and approached the young man behind the counter.

‘I want the cheapest wedding ring you’ve got.’

He drew my attention to a revolving mock-velvet display. ‘This is a medium weight court ring, Sir,’ he said, pointing with his little finger. ‘Is that the sort of thing?’ An aerosol of synthetic cinnamon blew across us.

‘How much?’ I said.

‘A hundred and seventy five dollars.’

‘How much is that one?’ I asked, indicating a tin-coloured also-ran at the very bottom. I didn’t have time to mess around.

‘That one, Sir,’ he said, making the face you might make when clearing rotting fish from a gully, ‘is thirteen dollars and twenty cents.’ I bought it, declining the fancy box. After the wedding it turned my finger black so I threw it away.

If I were to do all this again I think I would be more aware of other people’s feelings about things like rings. For me and my autistic mind they had no symbolic meaning, purpose, or value. For many people, perhaps most, they do.

The night before the ceremony, the tuxedo arrived, swaddled in tissue paper. I tried it on. The trousers and sleeves had been painstakingly adjusted but everything was two inches too short, revealing my socks and half a yard of shirtsleeve. There was no time to change it.

Lea’s father was pacing up and down, complaining that he was having a heart attack.

‘Take one of your indigestion tablets,’ said his wife, who, after a lifetime of nursing knew the difference between pre-nuptial anxiety and acute myocardial infarction. But his symptoms worsened and he was taken to the emergency room.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, clutching his chest.

‘You’re having a heart attack,’ they said, and put him in intensive care.

On the morning of the wedding, I showered and decided to dry my long hair in the hot sunshine. This had the curious effect of making me look like the secret love child of Albert Einstein and Phil Spector. My brother-in-law, who was to be my best man, tried to damp it down but it was hopeless. He’d get it flat in one place and it would spring up somewhere else.

The venue for the service was a split-level 1970s fibreboard church, brutally carpeted throughout. We had rehearsed the evening before and the amiable young priest who was to be the celebrant took it well when I insisted on going through everything I would be called upon to say, so as to expunge anything I believed to be false.

On the day, there seemed to be special rules which nobody had explained to me. Moments before the ceremony I was admonished for eating a sandwich. Looking around the crowd as I stood on the carpeted platform, I realised that apart from Lea and her immediate family I knew not a soul.

We went to a local hotel for the reception. Lea’s family’s friends and relations came to shake my hand: university people, mechanics, elementary-school teachers. They wanted to chat. The whole thing was the typical Asperger’s nightmare. Luckily there was alcohol to take the edge off. A local photographer took photographs of us holding bits of cake: me in the runt’s suit, my long hair shivering in the air conditioning. But she did something wrong and the pictures came out so orange that we threw them away.

We drove some wedding cake to my father-in-law in the ER. He was plugged into bleeping machines and looked green. We stood briefly in the incongruous setting, Lea in her white wedding dress, me in my short-sleeved tux.

We had decided to travel to South Dakota for our honeymoon to take a look at Mount Rushmore, which Hitchcock used so brilliantly for the climax of North by Northwest. It was a long drive across the prairie, with the accelerator set on ‘cruise’. There was sun, wind, and mile after mile of flat openness. We passed occasional small towns that seemed unchanged since the days of the Wild West but for the paraphernalia of the internal combustion engine. We were to stop overnight en route but because of a baseball match most of the hotels were booked up. At the last minute Lea had found us a motel and reserved a room.

It was dusk when we arrived. The owl that had been flying alongside us flew off as we pulled in. We could see this was not the ideal honeymoon place. Its dust, neglect, and yellowing net curtains made Bates Motel seem like the Ritz. We looked on the bright side and pushed on south next morning.

Seeing Mount Rushmore after dark was said to be dramatic, and hopes were high. A man gave us a fascinating talk about the monument’s construction and announced that the lights would now be switched on to reveal the presidents in their glory. There was a deep clunk and we found ourselves staring up at a vast curtain of mist.

‘You’ll have to come back tomorrow,’ said the guide.

Back in North Dakota someone asked if we would like to tour the State Penitentiary. Not many honeymoons feature a prison visit so we said yes. We were shown around a newly built part of the jail. There were cells off a gallery from which you could look down into an open area. We were introduced to a polite inmate in a smart uniform, who proudly showed us his room. He was particularly pleased with the view from his arrow-slit window, out onto the parking lot.

‘What’s he in for?’ I asked our guide afterwards.

‘Raped an eight-year-old girl,’ she said, looking for something in her handbag.

She took us through a locked door into a room where convicts were spinning pots and painting sunsets. Some were huge unsmiling Native Americans who were not in prison for parking violations. A few had murdered people. I felt uneasy. I was a skinny little thing accompanied by two women. The inmates spotted my strange demeanour at once, and had they decided to get nasty I don’t think I would have lasted long.

On our way out of the building we passed a dim passage with a parade of squat old cells. Pacing like animals behind the flaking paint of their iron bars were the gloomy figures of caged men. It was nice to get out in the sunshine again.

Not much later we heard that the priest who had married us had been admitted to a mental hospital.

*

We returned to England with little money, nowhere to live, and no jobs. Lea’s application for a work permit had been denied while we were in the States so she couldn’t accept the BBC post. My patient parents put us up while I checked in with Eugene at the Busy Bees Agency. One day a strange voice answered. Surprised, I said: ‘Is that you, Gene? Um — is that you-you Gene? Er — is that Eugene?’

We liked North London so Eugene sent us to the purlieus, some less lovely than others. We turned up at a house near the Holloway Road, where the door was opened by a giant in a none-too-clean vest. ‘You’re early,’ he grunted through broken teeth.

We were shown into the dark hallway. Off this uninspiring passage sprouted a kitchen with a filthy stove and a frosted plastic window onto somewhere else. The lino-floored sitting room contained a massive fridge covered in brown stains, and a vinyl sofa with foam rubber erupting from a long knife slit. The nearby lavatory was so narrow you would have had to back into it if you wished to take a seat. Everything smelt of fried onions. We were polite but didn’t stay for tea.

We saw an attic flat in a half-timbered house in an Edwardian suburb near Alexandra Palace. It had a charming little kitchen and a decent size sitting-cum-dining room. If you stood on tiptoe you could peer from the skylight into the wood opposite. ‘This is good,’ I whispered. Lea seemed doubtful. She was used to American walk-in closets, en suite bathrooms, a carport, and a gym. In the end we took it and came to love it.

Now married to an Englishman, Lea was offered another job by the BBC. I continued to check the paper.

Like everyone else, almost all Aspergers want to work, but many of these frequently talented people end up with no kind of permanent paid employment. I knew that I struggled in interviews: misunderstanding the situation and making people feel awkward by my strange eye contact and Pan Am smile. I got the feeling when I was turned down for things, as I repeatedly was, that something had gone awry during the interview — as if I had used the wrong knife and fork during a royal banquet. I would sense the ice forming on their faces.

Employers tend to hire people who are like them, but Aspergers are not like anyone else: they are like themselves, and when the employer asks the question, ‘Will this person fit in?’ the answer is often a reverberant, ‘No!’ Though there are niches where autistic people can make a powerful contribution to organisations using strengths other than social facility, it’s getting the job that is often the hard bit.

The UK’s National Autistic Society has found that employers think autistics need solitary technical jobs requiring attention to detail. A good number do want jobs of this kind, but others do not. For example, as many autistics want to work in the arts as in IT, and this was true of me, though I did not know exactly what I wanted to do. Surely there must be a field for my particular powers, if only I could find it.

Plenty of people with autistic traits show strengths early on in the spheres they later go into professionally, and it is frequently the oddballs — those who had a miserable time of it at school — who end up with the most interesting jobs. Anthony Hopkins showed early promise as an actor, and the author E. B. White, who was troubled by noises and smells, and so fearful of public occasions that he was unable to attend his own wife’s funeral, had always been interested in writing. He adored nature, and this, along with his love of children resulted in his classic Charlotte’s Web. ‘All writing,’ said White, ‘is both a mask and an unveiling.’ He was fascinated by the systematic rules of language and, in typical pedantic style, co-authored The Elements of Style, a classic guide to English usage.

I too have always deeply enjoyed the pernickety details of style, and find etymology rewarding. A few years ago I discovered the Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com, the compiler of which is Douglas Harper, who has an enthusiasm for the history of Cleveland street railway cars. Learning this I felt the secret handshake of the Asperger and was unsurprised to find the following in his brief online autobiography: ‘I was thought to be in need of remedial education for dyslexia; had the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome been known then, I have been told I might have been given that.’

*

Money was tight. We were eating a lot of cheap mince, and liver. I applied for a broadcasting job but botched the interview.

‘Your application form is beautifully typed,’ they said.

‘My wife did that,’ I replied.

I needed income. One evening in a pub the landlord heard me say I had done bar work.

‘I can give you a job, if you like,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘Now.’

On Saturday nights the place was packed and a band containing the Punch cartoonist Wally Fawkes pulled them in. I didn’t get on with the other staff but the evenings went in a flash and I was reminded of my time at the hotel on the river.

Later, I managed a high-street toyshop in Islington. A collection of elasticated animal noses was delivered: pig, horse, cow. I arranged them in a basket and wrote a notice: ‘Animal noses. Pick your own.’ The actor Bob Hoskins came in and spent a fortune but was shirty when I wanted to verify his credit card. I sold the protean Michael Ignatieff a wind-up steam train. ‘I thought you’d like that,’ I said. In the middle of summer, I put out a big Santa Claus holding a sign: ‘Only 173 shopping days to Christmas.’ The job had its moments, but I was at a loss. The owner resented my querying her instructions and my assistant complained that I was insufficiently bossy.

I took a job at a lithographic printer’s run by a man who combed his hair across from the back. When he went to the post it was blown into a vertical ginger flame. His ink-covered assistant ate a lot of cold sausage and taught me to fan paper, a skill with which I can still impress people. They put me behind the counter, dealing ineptly with customers who wanted things photocopied.

A mild little man asked me to copy some Polaroid pictures he had taken of himself wearing ladies underwear, and a famous actress wanted the whole of Othello reproduced. ‘Cheaper if you do it yourself,’ I said. There was an old soldier who frequented the place dressed in a smashed-up hat, disintegrating tie, and a threadbare shirt that poked out of the fly of his baggy trousers. His chin was a patchwork of smooth bits and rough bits and his broken glasses looked pre-war. But he was well scrubbed, smelling strongly of coal tar soap, and spoke in clipped officer-style tones.

‘I must have this document copied,’ he said. ‘It’s my letter to the Queen.’ I looked down at the scrawl-covered ream of dog-eared sheets so thumbed and soft they barely hung together.

I didn’t know what had gone wrong for this man, but he must once have been a normal little boy sitting down to tea with his mum or running about laughing with his playmates. Not knowing quite how to handle the situation I hesitated, but a colleague, one of the world’s natural psychologists, stepped forward.

‘We can do this for you, Sir,’ he said, ‘but you will have to leave it with us.’ The man put both hands down on top of the papers and, like a cat with a kitten, drew them in protectively. He decided he would do it himself and was in the shop for hours.

One day a man in a black suit came in. He showed me part of a newspaper containing a two-column story. ‘What do you think is wrong with this?’ he asked in an insistent monotone. I looked it over and read it through. I didn’t know what he was getting at. ‘Look,’ he said earnestly, not meeting my eye, ‘the margin between the columns has a vertical rule in it. That’s all wrong.’ I must have looked puzzled. ‘It’s the space between the columns that is the separator, not the rule. The rule does not help: it confuses.’ I made him five copies and he left.

On the way home I realised he had been making a point so dazzlingly obvious that it was impossible to understand without deep thought. His five minutes with me made such an impression that in all the work I did in later years I would object whenever a designer or typesetter tried to use a rule instead of space to separate columns of text. He was an odd, monomaniacal character, that man: a chap after my own heart. It is only lately that I have realised that he was showing definite traits of Asperger’s syndrome.

On Saturday mornings Lea and I would potter about the flat, drinking tea. Standing on tiptoe and looking across to the wood I used to listen to a radio programme called Loose Ends, in which a fey academic named Professor Donald Trefusis sometimes presented, ‘wireless essays’ on serious subjects. This was, in fact, character comedy of the highest quality. I admired the way the writer–performer, whoever he was, attacked full-frontally the things and people that annoyed him. The anger-turned-to-laughter reminded me of the letters of Edna Welthorpe (Mrs). I could do that, I thought. I would be good on Loose Ends. Not that anyone was going to invite me. It was only years later that I discovered the name of this young performer. He was Stephen Fry.

We took weekend strolls around the suburb and I noted lampposts, bridges, and road signs. The signs were generally of the Kinneir and Calvert sort, but tucked away here and there one could find examples in the old style, which had evaded replacement. In one of these, the white arrowheads pointed to ‘Highgate; Holloway; Finchley’. Something about the character of this twenty-year-old notice told of a time of bomb sites, trams, and tweeds. Against the classic faded blue background, the letterspacing of the bold black capitals on white oblongs was good, and the typeface admirably clear, but as a unified thing it just wasn’t as effective as the new signs. Nonetheless, despite my love for the new, the muddle-through British charm of the quieter age shone out from the face of the old.

Lea had been at the BBC for a while, working on various dramas. She was good at the job, but the pay was feeble. One day the man I had seen coming out of the ladies’ toilet at the radio and television training centre got in touch and offered her a job. He was the publisher of the Pope’s encyclicals in England and wanted to expand into making and selling videos. The money was a good deal more than the BBC and there was a pension, so she said yes. After a while he needed a new editorial assistant and he offered me the role.

‘I’ve never worked in publishing,’ I told him.

‘I’ll teach you. I think you’d be excellent,’ he said. ‘And I’ll pay you more than you’re earning.’

I couldn’t believe my luck. The work sounded fascinating and Lea would be in an office upstairs, so we could unwind on the Tube home. The new boss was a change from the printer with the vertical hair. He was a polished Brasenose graduate who read Latin, and seemed clear-headed, sane, and sensible. Little did I know.

I left the printer’s and started at the publisher’s, which owned a tall white building in a Pimlico square, minutes from Victoria station and close to the road where my mother had lived after her father’s death.

‘You will share an office with me,’ said the boss. ‘Here’s a key to the garden.’

He was as good as his word, teaching me about book production and editorial matters. I was introduced to Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers and learnt about ‘Oxford style’. I found I was a natural proofreader who could spot a wrong-font hyphen at a thousand yards. I fell in love with the so-called ‘Oxford comma’, the much-argued-over, ‘extra’ comma before the last item in a list. I found some delicious examples of what could happen if you failed, or refused, to put one in: ‘This book is dedicated to my parents, Gertrude Stein and God’ and ‘Alan Whicker’s tour included meetings with Mother Teresa, an 800-year-old demigod and a collector of dildos.’

These were the fag-end days of hot-metal printing, a world populated by old men who could zero in on a p instead of a q in a tray of upside-down back-to-front type. From them I learnt about the craft of compositing and printing. My childhood days poring over sheets of rubdown letters came back to me. There was an inky magic to the business, which was shortly to be swept away by computers.

I sometimes ate my lunch in the beautiful garden in the middle of the square. The gardener, who wrote books on the subject, had a fondness for catapulting cables high into the plane trees, up which, over the years, he trained a forest of climbers.

I was guided around the publisher’s stock room by two crones who had worked in the office since the war. Their life’s meaning was to hate each other. As they bickered I looked through the backlist: apologetics, the lives of the saints, the Catechism, Church history. One day I recognised the cover of one of the pamphlets. It was a biography of Padre Pio, a priest who claimed to have had on his hands the bleeding wounds of Christ. It was the very booklet Bob Strange had shown me years ago in the art department refectory.

The company was full of unusual characters. Doing some sort of office management job was a woman who insisted on being called Bernard. Her face, a colleague told me, would change from green to blue whenever he walked into her office, as she clicked off the prototype poker website she was furtively using. In an attic room dwelt a tiny lady of about a hundred, who made tea for the boss in an iron kettle that weighed a ton because its interior was encrusted with two inches of pre-war limescale.

The quickest way from the editorial office to the stock room was down a very dark staircase that backed onto a yard. The rear of other houses at right angles to this one looked over the same space. As I ran down one day I glanced through the tall window that lit the stairs. Across the way was a brightly illuminated room and walking about inside it a young woman, completely naked. There was a delight in seeing this graceful figure unselfconsciously moving about in her space, unaware that she was being observed, but at the same time I felt a pang of protectiveness. It was an odd business.

One spring day, the big brown office telephone rang. It was a friend telling me of the death of the comedy actor Kenneth Williams. I remembered watching him during recordings of Just a Minute and thinking there was something very weird about the man. He was a terrific raconteur but he grimaced and scowled, and refused to drink the BBC water, calling it, ‘foetid’. He was noticeably remote, using very restricted eye contact, and accepting handshakes and the odd hug without enthusiasm. A cold fish. His editor Russell Davies called him ‘a strange and dislocated personality’, while his revealing diary, which he said eased his loneliness, recorded in perfectionist detail his isolation and constant health anxieties: notably his bowel problems.

In his areas of special interest, including history, typography, etymology, and the rules of English usage, Williams was erudite. He loved maps and as a youth had been an apprentice at Stanfords, the London map company, before joining the Royal Engineers as a map draughtsman. He was an enthusiastic reader of non-fiction and poetry, but a stranger to bookshops and libraries. He read very few novels.

He took enormous pains with everything he did. Having once been hurt by a critical letter from a member of the public, he arranged for a friend to drive him to the writer’s address, where he made notes, before being driven back to London. He then wrote an excoriating reply to the man, containing criticisms of his house and garden.

Williams himself lived alone in a spartan, unwelcoming flat. He had, like Sherlock Holmes, a ‘catlike love of personal cleanliness’, and talking to Russell Harty in 1974 said he was revolted by ‘sludge’ under the soap. He sealed his cooker with cellophane to keep it clean and was very sensitive to mess and noise. Footsteps bothered him and when the occupant of the flat above disturbed him by moving about or playing music, he poured out his venom.

In a gripping interview with Owen Spencer-Thomas on BBC London, Kenneth Williams expanded on his odd traits. He said he used to cry continually in moments of great adversity and sought refuge in mirth: ‘There is much in … life that is very frightening, and every now and again you very much need the sort of safety valve that laughter supplies.’

He seemed content only when performing, and happiest, perhaps, when performing alone. He did this increasingly on chat shows, where he liked to show off his extensive and peculiar vocabulary, dropping words like ‘polity’ and ‘otiose’ with didactic precision. When asked on Just a Minute the archaic meaning of the word ‘let’ he explained without pause that it was ‘the old King James word for, “stop”’.

Williams entertained very few visitors. Only those privy to his three-ring telephone code could get through, and those allowed into his flat were not permitted to use the toilet. He preferred to see his friends one, or possibly, two at a time and found it almost impossible to join in with groups. On holiday, beneath a searing Tangier sky, he refused to remove his tweed jacket and relax.

After sporadic homosexual fumblings as a young man, his sexual encounters were almost entirely with himself. In his distinctively weird delivery he told Joan Rivers in 1986 that he was, ‘asexual … I should have been a monk … I’m only interested in myself and would regard any kind of “relationship” as deeply intrusive. Privacy is the most important thing in my life, and anything which invaded that would be a threat.’

Despite the threat of adults, Williams took great pleasure in children, who adored him. He told Owen Spencer-Thomas: ‘There is a tremendously childish element in me’, and he found children ‘totally direct’, explaining: ‘They dress nothing up in any kind of sophistication or diplomacy.’ This was true of Williams himself — he could be appallingly rude. His sometime friend Gyles Brandreth said that in the end he gave up on him after he misjudged the social mood at yet another dinner party and went too far.

Along with other traits, Kenneth Williams’ extraordinary perfectionism, solitude, anxiety, strange vocal delivery, limited eye contact, sensory peculiarities, directness, narrow special interests, uncommon vocabulary, liking for sameness, loneliness, emotionality, distaste for social touch, and inability to join in, can, I believe, best be understood as indices of Asperger’s syndrome.

*

I saw Jon from time to time. He had finished his post-graduate degree at the Slade and had decided to be a painter, using every moment of his spare time. He exhibited in Cork Street but to keep the wolf from the door he took a job teaching art and art history at a South London private school, where the sixth-form car park was full of Jaguars and BMWs.

Bill had submitted his PhD thesis and asked me and Lea over to his Waterloo flat. We got there mid-morning and as usual the place was full of cigarette smoke. It was untidier than usual, with foil curry containers on the floor, in the wastebasket, in the sink. The ashtrays were overflowing and there were wine bottles everywhere.

‘Been having a party?’ I asked. Bill said he had a cleaner who came in every week, but it seemed to be getting on top of him. He lit a cigarette and invited us to his local pub to unwind. By midday he was so unwound that we had to help him home. As we left he was too out of focus to wish us a proper goodbye. He seemed lonely. ‘I’m worried about him,’ said Lea on the train home.

Anthony had become a postman and was responsible for delivering to Soho and Theatreland. He started early and finished at three, when he would return to his flat to paint, or watch Ealing comedies.

Lea and I wanted to buy our own place and found a garden flat close to the station in a seaside town where the prices were lower than in the capital. Moving from our bit of London with its little shop that ground its own coffee, its Art Deco cinema, and its green spaces, was a wrench, but I had always loved the sea. And the commute to London was hardly longer than the rattly Tube journey in on the Northern Line.

Our newly converted flat had a patch of mud described in the particulars as a ‘west-facing rear garden mainly laid to lawn’. We spent weekends clearing it of Victorian bottles, lumps of a corrugated air-raid shelter, and what appeared to be the skeleton of a medium-size dog. It was a terraced house so we were obliged to push the rubble through the flat in a wheelbarrow. We tore down a gnarled climber that appeared to be dead before a neighbour told us it was an old rose tree that flowered beautifully every year.

We went on holiday to the West Country and had ham and eggs in a tiny pub. Driving back to the rented cottage we bounced between the dry-stone embankments of the narrow lane. As we rounded a corner an owl took off from a post, spreading its wings in the headlights. We were miles from anyone but in the silence of the night a strange noise woke us. Out in the black someone was coughing. I sat up, every nerve alert, my catastrophising mind imagining a swarthy Thuggee squeezing through the kitchen window, strangling cloth between his teeth.

In the morning we flung open the curtains. The sky was blue and there was nothing to see for miles: only the thirsty meadows and a sprinkling of sheep. As we scanned the landscape one of the flock began producing a repetitive rasping cough. It bore none of its nocturnal menace.

*

On Monday nights I would visit the Magic Circle, tucked away in a Bloomsbury side street. Close-up magic is an ideal concern for a mechanically adept but socially inept creative person. When an Asperger performs a close-up trick, he holds all the cards: an apt metaphor. There are no surprises for him. He is in charge. He alone knows what is going to happen next, and for once it is not him but everybody else who is taken by surprise by the unpredictable turn of events. This reversal of the social roles can be very satisfying for an autistic person, who is so often the one who feels at sea in social assignments.

On my first night at the Circle I was introduced to a magician called Terry. He was a naturalistic technician of the highest water and a wonderfully entertaining performer. Whatever he did he did superbly. After I had known him for a while I heard him suddenly play the piano one night, and was astonished by his technique and artistry. Whatever he did he had taught himself. My Aspergic desire for the highest quality in everything was rewarded just by knowing Terry. Others didn’t know what I was on about, yet as Sherlock Holmes observed: ‘Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognises genius.’

I noticed that the members of the Magic Circle were quite often as odd as me. The British mentalist Derren Brown has said that, ‘magic does seem to appeal to creative and often quite isolated [people]’. I watched them around me at the club, performing for guests or delivering monologues to each other on the minutiae of their special interest. There is, I now realise, a pinch of autism in many of them. The best are wonderful entertainers; the worst are inward-looking bores. How interesting that sleight-of-hand magic is an enterprise enjoyed almost exclusively by boys and men.

*

The good thing about my publisher–boss was that after showing me the editorial ropes he left me to my own devices. As well as the mechanics and structure of English I became increasingly interested in the production side of publishing, so as well as my editorial responsibilities I organised the switchover from paper-and-paste and hot-metal printing to computer-assisted design and manufacture. I learned while I earned.

Though the boss led with a light rein, something was amiss. One day he called me over. ‘You see all these unopened letters,’ he said. ‘This is what I do with them.’ He lifted the front of his desk and a mountain of paperwork slid onto the floor, where he began pushing it into several wastepaper baskets. For a moment I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t.

A week later I walked into the office to find him holding his head in his hands. ‘It’s the tree in my garden,’ he said, giving me a haunted look. ‘It’s growing. What am I going to do …?’ He was not really addressing me; he sounded frankly mad.

*

A national newspaper was running a column featuring obscure and arcane questions from readers, to which other readers sent in serious or funny replies. The questions varied from, ‘Are floppy disks corrupted by being placed near the floor on tube trains?’ to ‘Why is water wet?’

I couldn’t resist it and over the next few years I sent in numerous carefully considered and artfully composed replies. All were entirely bogus, some ludicrously so. To have a letter published you needed to sound authoritative and be sufficiently detailed, brief, and quirky. It was also important to use the right sort of address and the right pseudonym. My favourite pen name, of many, was, Anan Abegnaro, who I made sound like an African academic, though it was really just, ‘orange banana’ backwards. These spoof letters took up quite a bit of my spare time and were, I suppose, my latest special interest. It was deeply pleasing to fool editor and reader alike. Almost all of my contributions were published, first in the paper and then in a series of books. Nowadays, owing to the instant checkability of everything via the Web, this would be so much less likely to succeed without even more care and preparation. But it could be done …

*

Over my time at the Pimlico publishers I got to know the area well. One day, walking in Longmoore Street, I noticed a faded painted notice on the yellow brickwork. ‘PUBLIC SHELTERS IN VAULTS UNDER PAVEMENTS IN THIS STREET’ it said in white capitals on a black square. There were more in Lord North Street near the river, and in Brook Street, Mayfair. These were wartime signs showing the location of makeshift bomb shelters. Their functional lettering had a great beauty and I went in search of others in St James’s, Deptford, and Bermondsey. None had the allure of the Westminster signs.

One pleasant evening, Lea and I were sitting on the lawn where long ago the patch of mud and dog bones had been. The kitchen phone rang. It was Bill’s mother, a wonderfully old-fashioned middle-class English lady.

‘Tom, you’re ex-directory, I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’ I knew at once what she was going to say. ‘Bill died last week. He was staying with friends and they couldn’t wake him. I’ve got him here now. He looks asleep.’

I could see the picture of Bill, laid out on the mahogany table of his mother’s Reigate mansion, his beard brushed — for once.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.

‘Nobody does,’ she replied with admirable stiff upper lip. ‘I shan’t say more because I’m finding it difficult to keep my emotions in check.’

She was a remarkable example of that distinctive type, of which there remain very few: the upright English matron.

We went to the funeral with Anthony.

‘Was it a heart attack?’ he asked.

‘Too much beer, too many fags, and a diet too rich in curries,’ I guessed.

At the wake, a large dog had defecated on the lawn. I felt awkward, standing there clutching a cucumber sandwich, unable to talk to anyone. Lea smoothed a few introductions and oiled the gears all round. Unlike me, she inspires confidence in people, and, being the least autistic person I have ever met, has become my praetorian guard in social situations.

The best partners for Aspergers seem to be either people like themselves — who share the same behavioural constitution and similar emotional needs — or stark complementary opposites. My inward-looking personality and Lea’s outward-looking one augmented each other.

‘Let’s go to the pub,’ said Anthony.’

‘It’s a shame Bill’s not here,’ I said. ‘He’d like a pint now.’

*

Our son Jake was born. He was small and monkey-like. We needed more space so we let our flat and took a house further up the road. One day I saw a young woman picking rosemary from the bush in our garden. She rang the bell. ‘Hello,’ she smiled. ‘I live on the corner. Celia who was here before you always let me take some rosemary when I needed it.’

‘Help yourself,’ I said. She had put me in the position where I could hardly refuse.

‘Where’s your wife?’ she asked, coming into the sitting room.

‘Taken the baby for a walk.’

She held the rosemary to my nose. ‘It’s got a lovely perfume,’ she said. I sniffed the herb and as I did so she picked a thread from my sleeve. We discussed the weather, the neighbours, and her boyfriend.

‘Celia went to a wife swapping party,’ she said suddenly, giving me a quirky smile that I didn’t understand.

‘My uncle went to one of those and ended up with his own wife,’ I said, repeating a joke I had heard in 1975. I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

The young woman’s smile vanished. I knew something had gone wrong, but I wasn’t sure what. She looked at me coldly for a moment, a flicker of contempt in her eye, before striking me down with a brusque smile and letting herself out.

Life ticked over. We watered the garden, read books, and went to the shops in our unreliable Mini. Young Jake grew. My handlebar moustache grew, and was still unfashionable. Street urchins would throw orange peel and contumely in my direction as I passed. Three hundred and fifty years ago Samuel Pepys noted the same ‘absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at every thing that looks strange’. Lea took a media job in government. I stayed where I was. Sameness!

A couple moved in next door. The man put his head through the hedge. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Fancy a pint?’ This was Mervyn, who was to become my staunch drinking companion over the next quarter of a century. He is positive, puts up with my strangeness, and keeps in touch even though we now live in different towns. He is one of my ‘normal’ friends, and is also happy to talk to me about typography or road signs.

One evening, he knocked on the door. ‘Do you want this?’ he asked, flourishing a lobster. ‘The girls are in tears because I said I was going to drop it in boiling water.’ The lobster gesticulated in slow motion, its claws held shut by elastic bands. I told him I didn’t want to watch this handsome insect struggle and scream as it died in the pan.

‘We’ll stab it,’ said Mervyn. ‘Have you got a sharp knife?’ He put the lobster on the kitchen floor and I held it. Then he sank the knife in where he said it was supposed to go. Young Jake was fascinated.

*

The boss was becoming increasingly peculiar. His desk was now a garbage heap of unanswered letters and he wandered the corridors aimlessly, fretting about the finances and the tree in his garden. He turned to me one day with a frown: ‘If God made everything,’ he reflected, ‘who made God?’ This seemed to me one of the basic questions one ought to have come to a conclusion about before taking up a lifelong career in religious publishing. He couldn’t go on and retired early, being replaced by a new, prematurely bald man of emetic piety.

Of all my bosses, the bald man was the only one who never noticed how uncomfortable I felt around other people, and made no effort to accommodate my quirkiness. The neuroticism of his educated, more congenial predecessor was replaced by an offensive tactlessness. He thought it absurd that I drove a Mini, and frequently told me so.

He was unencumbered by clue and ruled the office by fiat, which struck me as not only inefficient but wrong. After I began querying his arbitrary decrees on technical matters, about which I knew more than he did, he told me, ‘You have a problem with authority.’ As with much of his peevish analysis this was false. It is true that, like many Aspergers, I resist ‘mere’ authority, whereby people are given orders without appeal to the tribunal of reason, though I do accept that a competent mother, for example, must rule on bedtimes and stop her child running into the road. But authority should generally be viewed with great suspicion and challenged at every point. We call this attitude rational vigilance, not ‘a problem with authority’. My real ‘problem’, of course, was not with authority, but with the bald man. ‘He’s all piss and wind,’ said a colleague, ‘like the barber’s cat.’

At a Tube station late one evening I was waiting for a train to come up on the indicator board when I spotted a blind man with a white cane feeling his way along the empty platform. He was gently drifting to the left and heading unwittingly for the platform edge. All at once his stick dropped into the abyss and he gesticulated wildly backwards, recovering himself just in time as a white-faced member of staff ran to his aid.

This minor cabaret having finished, I absently examined the Tube map on the wall. Over the years this archetype of good design has sunk deep into my psyche and I am alert to every change or addition. The best I applaud but the worst infuriate me.

Despite all the tinkering over the years the Underground map has survived essentially intact for nearly eight decades. It was the creation of a diagram nerd named Harry Beck, who in 1933 was encouraged by his dynamic boss Frank Pick to improve the bewildering traditional Tube map: a wormery of coloured lines confusingly superimposed on the surface topography of London’s streets.

Beck developed a revolutionary de-cluttered map of the Tube system. Its secret was that it was a map in name only. Dispensing with slavish geographical accuracy, he lifted the Tube lines from their serpentine meanderings, and, like an electrician drawing a circuit board, repositioned them horizontally, vertically, or at an angle of forty-five degrees on a plain white background. Gone was the ghastly snarl of wandering Tube lines, and in its place was a plain rule-governed schematic showing just the lines. Beck equalised the spaces between stations, pulling outlying stops in towards the centre, and though he greatly distorted the geography of London the new diagram was an instantaneous hit with passengers, who, being in a tunnel, didn’t care about geographic considerations such as exactly how far A was from B. Simple diagrammatic clarity overruled sprawling topographical exactitude and the new Tube map soon became a model of clear information design — an unbeatable template for transport diagrams around the world. Nowadays its popularity also makes it an attractive motif for tourist T-shirts, mugs, and other profitable tat.

*

I had been at the publisher’s too long and I heard that an international accountancy firm wanted someone to manage their publications. Here was a job that would make use of all my editorial, production, design, and technical skills, and pay me better. I sent them a letter and was asked to an interview.

I understood now that a job interview was a game that, once you knew the rules, could be played to your advantage. So I went to a bookshop, where the ‘business’, ‘self-help’, and ‘personal growth’ sections had expanded hugely, and bought a how-to-succeed-in-interviews book. It was a treasure trove of likely questions and rules of behaviour for the game. The eye-opening instructions told me to: 1) Prepare a thirty-word statement that sublimated my story persuasively, 2) Give affirmative answers to every question: it was forbidden to drop below the zero line. If asked a question such as, ‘Why did you fail?’ I should have up my sleeve a positive response. For example: ‘Even the best cricketer is sometimes bowled out’ or ‘I learnt a lot from that valuable experience’. Persuasive language, restricted hand and arm movement, and a high smile-rate were, apparently, the keys to success.

The idea that you could, or should, prepare for an interview in quite this way had never crossed my mind, and it seemed intrinsically dishonest. Perhaps it was the reason that the brash snake-oil salesmen often landed the jobs, leaving their more technically able but less calculating competitors in the dust.

I practised, as instructed, got a good haircut, as instructed, polished my shoes, as instructed, and went for the interview at an office near St Paul’s Cathedral. I kept well above the zero line with my prepared answers. It was outrageous flimflam but I got the job and was put in the communications team.

The department was led by a grouse-shooting and cuff-shooting partner of the firm: a double-breasted, chalk-stripe ex-newspaperman whose alloy of urbanity and Fleet Street scar tissue enabled him to charm journalists away from the deadliest question. Technology, though, was beyond him and it was rumoured that he had once used correction fluid to paint out a typo on his computer screen. His secretary printed off all his incoming emails, which he would read before leaving for his daily eleven o’clock ‘meeting’ outside the office, returning at three, smelling of beer.

The accountancy firm was full of high flyers: very intelligent people who really kept me on my toes. Yet their brainpower was of a constrained type. They were extremely well informed, and really knew numbers, but they didn’t make connections in the way I did. One very bright guy refused to hold a meeting in room thirteen, because he was superstitious. How intelligent is that? I wondered.

They were the most conscientious people I have ever worked with, and the industrious atmosphere was good for my anxiety. If you said to someone, ‘Can you let me have those notes by nine o’clock on Tuesday?’ you could then forget it. You didn’t have to ask twice. At five to nine on Tuesday they would be dropped on your desk.

As well as dealing with the firm’s publications, of which there were many, I had to edit the senior partner’s internal newsletter. This was always larded with metaphors from sport and military conflict: it was all about winning. Being an aggressive, competitive alpha male of the usual kind, and chairman of his own appreciation society, the senior partner took good care to dominate everyone, from the prospective alpha males who circled him, biding their time, to his secretary. I was no exception and he used to make me wait on a low chair in his office while he conducted deliberately trivial phone calls standing at his tank-sized desk. It was fascinating to observe.

The year 2000 was approaching and all the talk was of the ‘new millennium’. In my Aspergery way I argued that as there was no year 0 the current millennium would not end until 31 December 2000, making 1 January 2001 the proper start of the new millennium. I soon gave up, having learnt not to go on uselessly about matters of linguistic or scientific importance that are of no social use to people.

The ‘millennium bug’ was said to be a thing. There were forecasts of dire aftershocks as a result of computers being unable to tell the difference between 2000 and 1900. Systems would crash, law firms, banks, and water companies would seize up, and electricity grids would run out of juice. The firm had decided to produce a magazine setting out the wonderful ways in which it could protect clients from the cataclysm that might destroy them at one second past midnight on 31 December 1999. As I suggested ideas for the magazine’s cover, a tall, dark-haired young woman approached and interrupted me with a grammar query.

‘Is it “The committee is meeting” or “The committee are meeting”?’ she demanded. I explained that collective nouns could be singular or plural, depending whether one was referring to their individual members or the whole group.

‘In your example, either form of words will be okay,’ I said. ‘But be careful, because, though you can say “The committee nodded their heads” or “The committee was smaller when I sat on it”, you cannot say “The committee nodded its head” or “The committee were smaller when I sat on them.”’

This seemed to annoy the tall, dark-haired, young woman. She gave an impatient snort, and, swivelling on her axis, pushed off with her nose in the air. ‘What a very annoying person,’ I thought.

The millennium arrived with none of the predicted disasters, though much lucrative consulting business had been done. I had changed seats and found myself sitting near the annoying, tall, dark-haired, young woman, who fired hostile glances in my direction. After a week she was put in the empty chair beside me. ‘Great!’ I thought. ‘Fantastic! I’m stuck next to this humourless cow for the foreseeable future.’

But once again I had made a mistake. Her name was Josephine and she turned out to be a hilarious, kind, intelligent, and generous person, though she would go for the jugular if she thought someone was behaving badly. When it comes to friends, Aspergers are harpoon fishers rather than net fishers. We target people. Josephine understood me and was another dose of energetic affirmation in my life. She was patient, waving away my peculiarities. ‘You are very hard on yourself,’ she told me.

Now and again we would wander down Amen Court, Sermon Lane, or Paternoster Row, ancient alleys with names that doffed their caps to the hegemony of the Church, while beneath our feet the unremarked Roman bones of an earlier imperium lay at rest. Or we might visit Dr Johnson’s house or have a drink in Arthur Conan Doyle’s watering hole, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, both of which were nearby. Josephine seemed able to drink any amount of malt whisky without becoming noticeably plastered. We have been friends now for more than two decades.

At about this time, the UK government introduced new regulations for the design of the letters used on vehicle number plates. Over the preceding decade there had been an increasing laxity in what was being allowed, which offended my Aspergic respect for rules, coherent systems, and also high quality design. The new system was brilliant and soon became one of my special interests.

Like the Snellen eye-test characters and the Calvert and Kinneir typographic characters, the newly designed number plate characters took into account the special conditions that affected their legibility in the real world. Novel features had been introduced to increase clear identifiability. The letters have no serifs, except for just two, the B and the D. I wondered about this until I realised that the serifs, which otherwise add complexity where simplicity is required, prevent those two letters being mistaken at a distance, at night, or in mist, for the figures 8 and 0. Like Calvert and Kinneir’s letterforms, the new numberplate characters had other legibility-improving touches, such as the straightening of the ends of diagonals on the K, X, and Y, and the oblique cutting of curved terminals on the C, G, J, and S. I tried to interest others in all this but was met with blank stares. It was fifteen years before that I met another number plate enthusiast. He told me he belonged to a club for the number plate cognoscenti, and was writing a book on the subject. He also mentioned that he had Asperger’s syndrome. I was unsurprised.

I continued to travel to work from the south coast — not by road but by rail. One chilly morning a train was slowly pulling out of the station. As it did so a man holding a prayer book got down from the platform and put himself gently under the wheels. There was a lot of shouting as he was slowly mangled. An expressionless man next to me on the platform took a steady drag on his cigarette, blowing blue smoke into the air. I was equally expressionless.

Every morning I would surreptitiously study in the scratched glass the reflections of my fellow commuters. There was a bookish grey-haired couple who I dubbed Doctor and Professor Tramadol. They had jobs, I supposed, in a concrete polytechnic and were probably bad at shuffling cards.

Work was busy and the accountants bright and hardworking, but after eighteen months their tendency to rigid thought had become tiresome. They admired the material results of my work, for I am conscientious, and insist on high quality. But though I am a concrete thinker my mind tends to roam playfully, which made them suspicious of my methods. I was, once again, a fish out of water, and I decided to leave.

I found myself a job with a magazine publishing company, the proprietor of which was, implausibly, an art historian and Oxford don. With the grand title of Managing Editor I was charged with relaunching one of his undernourished journals and turning it into a successful magazine. From my City foxhole this had looked like an exciting idea, but I was to be no less a square peg than before, and had I paused I might have spotted that this was the latest in a series of round holes. I would have to take orders from the managing director and give orders to a team of writers, neither of which had I ever been very good at. Nonetheless I said yes. I told Josephine I was going. ‘Don’t leave me here!’ she cried.

On my last day they arranged a small leaving presentation, at which I cringed. Then I went down in the lift and crossed the vestibule’s terrazzo floor for the final time. As I passed through the revolving door out into the fresh air of Fleet Street the sun was bouncing off the cement of the surrounding offices. Beside a pillar-box a bird was worrying a discarded sausage and at an open window a man in shirtsleeves was fiddling with a loudhailer. Catching my eye he put the thing to his lips.

‘Good afternoon!’ he announced. People looked round.

‘That’s nice and loud,’ I shouted back. We both laughed. I was forty-one and my hair was starting to recede.