First published in 2016
by Jessica Kingsley Publishers
73 Collier Street
London N1 9BE, UK
and
400 Market Street, Suite 400
Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA
Copyright © Colin Thompson 2016
Foreword copyright © Tony Attwood 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78592 046 2
eISBN 978 1 78450 301 7
Everything in this book is true. Some of it is seen through rose-tinted glasses, some of it through dirty windows grey with smoke and tears and cobwebs, but all of it happened. Things are not necessarily in the order they happened, because where they are just seems to be the right place for them. You might think some things are just too unbelievable or funny or silly to be true, but every tiny detail really did happen.
The beginning is not the beginning. It is the first page because I really like the first sentence and I want it to be the first one in this book.
Deya – Mallorca 1968
I was sitting on the terrace of Robert Graves’ house with his wife Beryl.
‘Remember this,’ Beryl said. ‘One day this will be your Good Old Days.’
I used to wish that Beryl had been my mother.
*Over the years there were several people I wished were my mother. My mother was
never one of them.
FOREWORD
The term Asperger’s syndrome describes someone who has a different way of perceiving, thinking, learning and relating. This can lead to remarkable creativity and talent in fine art, imagination and sense of humour. Colin Thompson exemplifies all of these qualities. His autobiography is engaging and informative, but is also itself a work of art. As you read his autobiography, you will be enthralled by his abilities as an artist, gain insight into the world as experienced by someone who has Asperger’s syndrome, and also enjoy his great sense of humour.
Tony Attwood
My Family Tree.
Not so much a fine
Old English Oak as a copse
of mixed provenance.
1968 – OVER THE HILLS AND...
When I was twenty-four we went to live in the eighteenth century.
We travelled there by van, a very cheap old sort of furniture van, hired for the single job of taking us and our sort of furniture away from London – six hundred miles north by road, fifty-three point seven miles west by sea and a final twenty-five point nine miles by road to the far, far away extreme west of the Outer Hebrides.
We were so happy to discover the world wasn’t flat even when you went to the very edge. That night, the sea loch next to our house froze over and in the morning when the tide went out it left big sheets of ice draped over the rocks.
We had taken a time machine to another world and another age.
The next day, my oldest friend Mike, who had driven the van, took it back on the ferry to the twentieth century, leaving me, my very, very pregnant second wife Heather and a dog from Shepherd’s Bush market ready for the next bit of our Good Old Days. The day after that an ambulance took my wife back across the island to Stornoway Hospital, where she was told to go into labour for almost twenty-four hours and Hannah, the 0.99 per cent person who had been conceived in Mallorca and seemed so huge, came reluctantly into the world, very small and as white as a china doll with her mother’s red hair that she could eventually sit on.
So there were three of us and the dog in the croft house with its own tiny beach we had bought for £400 that I had borrowed from Robert Graves with the instructions to pay him back ‘when it rained gold’.
Robert had given us another instruction – that we should call our son Danté. Except our new son hadn’t been paying attention when Robert had spun Heather’s wedding ring on a long red hair over her stomach and the one-hundred per cent guaranteed boy was a girl and so not Danté, but Hannah. Nor was her sister Alice twenty months later.
We grew potatoes and caught fish and mussels and backache and chickens with a rooster who died of a broken ego, but left us with some tiny chicks who had to live in the kitchen because the weather was unimaginable unless you lived in the Outer Hebrides, which we did.
So we learned to lean on the wind and not fall over.
And we all grew a little bit older and maybe wiser and the eighteenth century was mostly wonderful with early Bob Dylan albums, weak black and white TV with only one station and no phone, until two years later they finally put up the ten telegraph poles we needed, and no road to the house, until we finished spreading the two hundred metres of rock with shovels and a bit of dynamite and more backache, and a very old Renault 4 with the doors fallen off, which forever refused to die, even when we tried to burn it and buried it beneath a five tonne rock and covered it with earth.
And then, several light years away from real life, with a baby and a dog, we finally remembered something we should