Dear Miss Landau

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Crossing the Continental Divide

The Greyhound gears down as it climbs into the Rocky Mountains, up past slopes of scree dotted with pine and fir and aspen. The Interstate is a scar cut into the mountains and the bus the ant traversing the straight razor. And so it hunkers down and pulls up the pass, past Lookout Mountain and one most strange dwelling place, shaped like a flying saucer and standing tall on the highest bluff.

Vast deep passes cut through the mountain walls, rock of iron dusted the lightest shade of sand. Pine trees clustering on ridges sharp as the blade of a Bowie knife and holding onto clefts in the sloping stone.

The bus goes past Silverthorne at 8,790 feet, a town of standardised shopping malls, it seems, coming just after a shallow inland sea. Long lean Mack trucks with smooth curved engine cowlings carrying logging or pipes, sometimes lacking the traditional old twin smokestacks, cruise alongside and then we are come upon the Vail. Vail Pass, at 10,662 feet the summit and apogee. A high elevated flatland bowl at the top of the Rockies, the continental division crossed and now descending in the wake of the Vail, the foliage thickening and the stone reddening a touch.

A sign says Exit 19, No Name, 1\2 mile. Old style telegraph poles shadow the route of the downhill railroad like tall thin crosses and I’ve no doubt these parched mountains broke many a prospector and sent them right up further higher passes and straight on to Boot Hill.

Travelling down this rollercoaster country equivalent of Chicago’s El, truly dwarfed amidst great plummeting rock walls, the debt of trillions seems an abstraction in the greater scheme of things.

The mountains pare down and fall away to dusty plains and cloned truck stops. We roll into Las Vegas and I phlegmatically end up in the same old hostel I’d been in before, but at least they have a private room. I can clean up, catch up on sleep and go see my favourite old Starbucks franchise on Fremont Street.

There is a sameness to it all. The snake has swallowed its’ own tail, I’m getting towards the end of my trail and I do not expect much more to happen.

James A. F. Christie
22nd August 2012

The Greatest Country in the World

“There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world ... we lead the world in only three categories:

Number of incarcerated citizens per capita.

Number of adults who believe angels are real.

And defence spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined.

... The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.

America is not the greatest country in the world any more.

Enough?”

(The Newsroom, HBO, 2012)

But it could be, but it won’t happen unless we all do a serious reality check, and perhaps get a bit angry. So here, for my sins and my perdition, are my observations and my prescription:

A girl in Chicago who’d worked for the Board of Trade and blown the whistle because of all the corruption she’d seen. The bureaucrats lining their pockets and killing their country. They’d fired her for it and she ended up living on welfare in a tent city near San Francisco for three months. The sense of community was the greatest she’d ever known.

A voluntary officer helping the homeless in Las Vegas who reminded me that the town had been in the top three US cities for unemployment for the last three years or so. Unemployment was 18%, it was not improving and there seemed no end to the recession. And the other 82% and the national debt? What about reining in their spending?

“People are petulant,” he said. They like their perks and their toys, and they just don’t want to give them up.”

Kids further up Fremont Street in Vegas, lurking around Starbucks and panhandling strangers for dimes because they had to. Because they were working below the minimum wage. Because they had no medical plan, no security and no future. Because they had no belief left in the American Dream and an unprintable reaction when I asked them how they felt about Obama.

This is the first American generation who will be worse off than their parents, and they’re angry, but they’re not mad as hell enough to do anything about it and that’s the problem.

A guy from Lone Pine on the bus to L.A., wondering why he bothered to pull a man out of a burning car, because the man spent the next twenty-five years trying to sue him. Wondering what kind of country seems content to let him spend twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year controlling his diabetes. This year, next year and every year. A guy who served in Iraq and saw a bunker stuffed with all the armaments America had given Saddam in other days, and who, as we pulled out of Mojave, literally wondered why, “we couldn’t all just get along.”

Now maybe you who read this think I’m writing with rancour in my soul.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and given the bubbling soufflé of corruption in a eurozone gorging itself on mountains of cash and a Britain with no jobs, no future for most and a similar mountain of debt, I’m going the way of some commentators and wondering why we don’t just look west and link up more firmly with America once more.

Perhaps I am viewing this special relationship through rose-tinted glasses, but as the bus homed in on Los Angeles, the splendidly ridiculous thought occurred to me that Britain and America have far more in common than in separation, a far stronger special relationship regarding joint intelligence and co-operation than perhaps we fully appreciate and a joint heritage quite a bit closer than we quite comprehend.

In historical terms, the Mayflower did not depart Plymouth so terribly long ago (6th September 1620) and America did not declare herself independent until 4th July 1776.

Thomas Jefferson himself, principal signatory of the Declaration of Independence, even stated that:

“Believe me, dear Sir: there is not in the British Empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But, by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose; and in this, I think I speak the sentiments of America.”
(29th November, 1775)

He didn’t like the British Parliament.

Neither do we!

But nowhere in his statement do I see a dislike for the British people, and I’d like to think that holds true today.

A ninety-year-old Chinese statement recently said of Europe that it has to recognise it is in a deep hole and will take years to climb out of it. That it has to stop moving money between different accounts and trade and sell real commodities. Grain and wheat and corn and so on.
We pursue the culture of youth too avidly and ignore the wisdoms of age too readily. This is the clearest statement of hard common sense I have ever heard, from a man one-third the age of America itself and living proof that the past is alive and closer than you think.

And I am just that little bit less willing to tie myself to a squabbling group of cobbled together nation-states with wildly different languages, cultures and attitudes than I am to hitch my wagon to a single superpower which may or may not be in eclipse.

The United Kingdom, United States and European Union are all in deep holes and will all need a clear and icy sense of purpose to dig ourselves out of them. In my opinion, I do not think the EU will have enough cohesive will to do so. I think America might have enough can-do pragmatism to manage it, and of course that’s where my heart and soul is anyway.

I’ve quoted Steinbeck quite some times in the last few years, and noted he was partisan in his support for the migrant workers in The Grapes of Wrath.

I, too, am partisan in my support, and for the most illogical of reasons, but at least I know it.
Sitting in the Greyhound terminal in Denver (ably staffed by no staff…) and contemplating the rock wall before me, I saw another day and another time. That other younger man, coming the other way near a quarter of a century ago; and though I had passed through the door into summer once again I realised this journey would be the last.

Not the last trip or trek for sure, but the last time I’d go out as a backpacker. I’d pushed body and soul again and come through well, but truth to tell I’d had my day, and seeing that mountain wall let me make my peace with times past and with today.

Unlike Jody’s grandfather in Steinbeck’s Red Pony, I’ll not stay locked in the past with the Piutes and the plates, never able to move beyond that first trek, setting myself up for a fall. I’d retraced my steps like a dancer chasing shadow, and now I knew I’d not quite seen it all.

So I’ll look out west and link up with America if I may, but there’s one thing I must say:

Nothing can ever touch the way it was that day.

A sidewalk, Sunset in L.A.

A girl with dancer’s grace, moving easily on her way.

Always remembered, dear Miss Landau. I was there that day.

James A. F. Christie
16th September 2012

And I guess that sums it up for now! But I'd really appreciate it if someone would alert Alex to the fact this rogue Asperger is out there and could really be an asset.

So could you please put Dear Miss Landau on your Books page?

Two editions of Letter to Juliet recorded and sent to WGTR in Chicago, three blogs prepared for the Huffington Post (UK), pleased to say there is mention of Dear Miss Landau in Juliet Landau's biographical entry on her UK agent's website, and hoping to get back to Drusilla's new adventure with Spike. I've now met Spike himself, semi-officially locked down Spike's last name and confirmed in public that both James Marsters and I seem to have felt the same acting chemistry with Juliet Landau/Drusilla nearly fifteen years apart...

But despite all this seeming success, I'd still like to hear more from Wrong Planet.

We should be on the same planet together.

You there, Alex?

It's the UK edition, but there I nevertheless am!

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/james-c ... 90473.html

Any comments anyone?

I would like to hear from Alex!

Here is the link to my second Huffington Post blog:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/james-c ... 57347.html

but it is, if I may be frank, potentially so shocking and disgusting I've also included the complete draft:

In case you think the atrocious treatment of learning-disabled patients at Winterbourne View care home was a one-off blip, or if you think that organisations today would never cover up Jimmy Savile’s alleged activities the way they did thirty or forty years ago…

In 2008, the Race Equality Services Review, an analysis by the Health Service Journal of a report about the experiences of black and ethnic minorities (BME) in the National Health Service (South East Coast region) concluded there was institutionalised racism within the NHS as a whole.

In 2009, after the deaths of six learning-disabled patients, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s report Six lives: the provision of public services to people with learning disabilities said (among other things) that “fundamental principles were not being upheld … an underlying culture which values human rights was not in place.” Regarding complaint handling, the Ombudsman stated that the families “gave repeated examples of failures to understand their complaints … defensive explanations; a failure to address the heart of the complaint; and a reluctance to offer apologies. Our investigations generally confirmed this picture.” The Ombudsman finished by saying, “we are still left with an underlying concern that similar failures to those identified in the investigations will occur again.”

In a Facebook debate in July 2010, David Forster, a director of the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, wrote that they had employed “too many who are lazy, unproductive, obstinate, militant, aggressive at every turn and who couldn’t secure a job anywhere outside the bloated public sector where mediocrity is too often shielded by weak and unprincipled HR policies.”

I saw people just like that. David Forster was right, and for his honesty he was disciplined by NHS management because, as NHS surgeon Sir Roy Calne stated in the Daily Mail in July 2007:

“…as a result of the justified furore over nurses’ poor pay, the unions have become stronger. Management dare not offend them, which means that when they should be disciplining staff who cut corners on hygiene or who work ineffectively, they instead hide behind the tangle of employment law to avoid confrontation.”

You might think this article is biased and derives from prejudice, but I am an Asperger, I worked in the NHS with a black man who’d come to the UK from Africa, and these public quotes exactly match our private experiences. I was driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown while my black colleague was pushed completely out of work and onto the dole for three years. The NHS even fobbed him off when he asked for a reference, which he has not received to this day.

We both worked in an office where the staff, as beautifully defined by Guardian writer Lynsey Hanley in her book Estates: an intimate history “were warm towards others who looked and acted exactly like them, but unforgiving, going on vicious, with anyone who didn’t.”

For example, I witnessed the way a fellow staff-member talked to my black colleague when this officer thought he had made a mistake with the stationery.

First, some back story. My grandparents once lived in Africa themselves and they did have black servants. I neither condone this nor condemn it. It is simply history.

At the time, there was one cast-iron rule in any well-run household: never, ever humiliate a servant, because they could not answer back.

Unfortunately, some households were run by families who had emigrated from poor parts of Britain. In Africa, even poor households could afford black servants, and when people from the slums suddenly found themselves able to lord it over others they abused the privilege, ignored the cast-iron rule and treated their servants like slaves. Other whites looked down on them and I consider them the scum of the earth.

So this officer marched into the office, marched up to my colleague, accused him of making a mistake with the stationery (which he had not done), and as he tried to explain this, the officer talked over him, talked down to him and waggled a finger under his chin as if he was a dumb six-year-old. All this took place in front of several other people.

He was a man of 48, and far brighter than the officer. I was filing notes four feet away from them. I saw it all, and I’ve never been more ashamed of being British. These people were intolerant of anyone who was in any way unlike them, acted as if they had the God-given right to declaim loudly and endlessly about any subject under the sun, and were unforgiving of anyone who disagreed with them.

People with autism are usually unable to filter out extraneous noise, and my other colleagues insisted on playing a radio non-stop all day every day. After a while it became literal torture for me to listen to it, but despite bringing this matter to the attention of NHS management, nothing was ever done. I eventually referred myself to Occupational Health and was signed off for six months.

Regarding the behaviour of my fellow members-of-staff, my consultant stated that “they have poor educational qualifications” and “they don’t know any better.”

Never in the field of human history have so many pathetic excuses been made by so many (not so few) for so many. Jimmy Savile would have been very safe in today’s NHS.

Again, most people with autism need routines and a daily framework to function without suffering severe stress. I was left hanging for six months and did indeed come to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I was seconded to another post at the last minute.

People with autism also have much higher levels of fear and anxiety than most. In my case the effect was like brain damage.

I was left with a shaking right hand, a brain which worked even more slowly than it had before and, on occasion, slurred speech.

It took me eighteen months to recover.

Meanwhile my black colleague found another job in another part of the NHS and felt like he’d escaped the lousy situation he was in, but he’d only swapped the frying pan for the fire. Every single member of staff in his new office was (in his own words) “a malicious bigot.” After five gruesome months, he was in very bad condition and the unendurable strain was damaging him psychologically and spilling over into his family life. Despite several pleas to management, the NHS appeared unwilling to control its own staff and he finally resigned in desperation.

Without a reference.

He was unemployed for three years.

He and I have good reason to believe that the NHS is indeed institutionally racist, and not a fit and proper employer of either the learning-disabled or people from black or ethnic minority backgrounds.

The NHS is supposed to be the caring profession, but he and I no longer think they care.

Not long ago, my black friend said to me:

“I have seen corruption, violence and injustice in Africa; but neither my wife nor myself had ever witnessed such utterly disgusting and xenophobic behaviour from people until I came to work for the NHS.”

Such behaviour and such cover-ups are not a blip. O brave new world, that’s so very like the old one…

James Christie

James Christie is the author of Dear Miss Landau. He was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, a mild form of autism, at the age of 37 in 2002. He lives and works in Glasgow.

(Interview with David Mello for the Joss Whedon website Whedonopolis)

1) Will you be sending a blog every week?

It depends on how much spare brainpower I have. As (hopefully) explained in Dear Miss Landau (DML), my major autistic disability is a massive deficit in information-processing ability. In brief, it’s as if a modern computer was powered by a twenty-year-old processor, so I have to nurse this faulty part along quite gently. If I get too tired, I can’t write. In fact, I can’t even think or speak all that well. Thankfully, my old brain has a form of back-up hardware which keeps me going, which is how I managed first time in Vegas after I’d been on a Greyhound bus for twelve hours. This is explained in more detail in chapter 37 of DML.

Luckily – in some ways, anyway - I am an unpaid external contractor, so within reason I can blog whenever I like.

2) How did you get the job?

Since Dear Miss Landau was published in March, Chaplin Books and myself have been exploring every single marketing possibility we can think of. In this case, Amanda Field (managing director of Chaplin) noticed the UK version of the Huffington Post had bloggers writing for it and asked them if they wanted a real-life Asperger blogging for them. They said “cool,” I supplied a couple of possible blogs, the deal was done and that was that.

Or perhaps there was a bit more to it than that. If life is a race towards redemption and Allah really does weave men’s destinies into many strange tapestries (a quote at the start of DML), perhaps another strand really was woven into the tapestry of my life. I had a short and inglorious period as a journalism trainee at a ghastly newspaper twenty-two years ago. I did not then know I was autistic and their idea of training was to put trainees under tremendous stress and try to make us do six things at once while also attending lectures in the badly mistaken assumption that this would make us “thrive” under pressure. For an Asperger, this was living hell. Ironically, I was the one they’d been counting on to come up with ideas, but their approach lost them all the potential they might have reaped, turned me against them for life and completely destroyed my self-esteem.

It was a very, very long, hard road back. I kept quiet about what had happened because whining about it would have sounded like the worst case of sour grapes in the world. The only way to redeem myself was, I felt, legitimately to make it into print. Specifically, I wanted to see the words:

The moral right of James Christie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

on the flyleaf of my book. One simple sentence, but the hardest thing in the world to do. Nor would I accept a compromise. The possibility of vanity publishing was always out there and self-publishing via Amazon is becoming easier and easier. When neuro-typicals started talking about such options, I just said no. I did wonder if I was being a bit black and white about it, but in the end the gold seal of authenticity can only be awarded when a professional publisher accepts your work on merit.

I am naturally eternally grateful to Amanda Field for doing so, but in some ways publication of Dear Miss Landau was the end of a long road, not its beginning.

Nevertheless, events did continue to take place, so I was quite pleased also to become a sort of feature article writer for the Huffington Post (UK), which was what I’d originally perceived myself to be when I was writing on the road in Australia. One does wonder what might have been if I’d been properly supported in the first place, though. Both the newspaper that nearly wrecked me and many other organisations go on and on about getting “passionate and talented” people and then seem hellbent on beating that very talent out of them...

Maybe that will work in some cases, but perhaps the fact that I proved I really had talent by coming back from a personal pit of hell and pulling off the near-impossible means these organisations don’t always know as much as they think they do.

3) Are you given an assigned subject, or do you decide what to write about?

Basically the latter. The Huffington Post’s advice is that “the first thought is usually the best thought,” but although I am defined as a blogger that doesn’t mean I will then dash off a biased article without thinking. I’d say it is vital to have some idea of media law, to be able to verify my sources and/or to be willing to swear on oath that I was an eyewitness to an event depicted. If necessary, I would even consult a lawyer. In fact, I did all of these things when I wrote my second blog, and knew perfectly well that it still might not get past the UK blog team. Blogging may sound totally new and cutting-edge, but the same old rules of journalism still apply.

4) It’s been a while since Dear Miss Landau was published. How well has it sold, and are you satisfied with the response the book has been getting?

Well, my publisher once said to me that most first-time novelists sell an average of 15 copies. Dear Miss Landau is now pushing 2,000 and except for one lady who couldn’t stand it, has had superlative reviews. As I had to beat tremendous odds just to be published, and as the prospect of a second printing was a far-distant dream on the horizon not too long ago, I am pretty satisfied, but I do feel there are further dreams which should become reality...

5) What about the readers? What have they said about it?

Tim Coates said on Radio 4’s A Good Read that Dear Miss Landau was:

“the best book I’ve read for ten years.”

And this was combined with presenter Harriett Gilbert’s highly perceptive comment that seeing the world through my eyes was “really riveting.” This was because she felt that, unlike books such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, my autism was the real thing, not merely a novelist’s ‘device’ - and unlike many memoirs which purported to be accurate but turn out not to be so - “what you’re getting with Dear Miss Landau is the truth.”

I considered the “device” comment very complimentary, and based on that wonder if Dear Miss Landau is the first true autistic adventure story ever written?

I’m not sure. Seven Pillars of Wisdom might have a prior claim, although Lawrence of Arabia was never formally diagnosed with Aspergers…

Another reviewer on Goodreads.com said that:

I read this constantly thinking “is this for real?” An autistic Scottish man in his 40s has an obsession with a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and writes a 250,000 word novel based on the character and ends up travelling to Hollywood and meeting the actress who plays her. You couldn’t make it up.

I think that review sums up the whole thing rather well. If the tale of Dear Miss Landau had been a fictional screenplay set for a Hollywood pitch, it might have seemed over-plotted and unrealistic, but it all really happened and proves, I suppose, that truth sometimes really is stranger than fiction.

I wasn’t sure how I’d react to a bad review, but in the event it didn’t bother me at all. In some ways the book others read is for me only a reflection of the life I lived, and I can say with authority that it described and recounted real events very closely. Plot holes weren’t plot holes – they were things I genuinely got wrong or forgot to do! And if one day scholars of literature could travel back in time and observe events as they actually unfolded, then they really would (metaphorically speaking) see a lanky bloke stealing the Enterprise for his Helen of Troy that first day in March 2010. They could sit at another table in that Starbucks Drive-Thru in Barstow on the 12th, watch me make contact on Juliet the Notebook while coming in on a wing and a prayer, or wait a little way from me on Sunset Boulevard, where I met my dear Miss Landau one Sunday morning not so long ago.

6) Is blogging tougher than writing a book?

In all honesty, it’s probably a bit easier. To gain the ability to write Dear Miss Landau, I had to practice for two decades, get myself traumatized at work, go through a near-nervous breakdown, rebuild myself and send myself across the world to a once-in-a-lifetime meeting on Sunset Boulevard.

In the case of blogging, all I have to do is utilize some of that ability to write about five hundred words about what’s pissing me off that week. Without deadlines to worry about, I’m not under excessive pressure, so it’s not too stressful.

I’ve also had five or six years blogging experience thrashing my former “profession” of librarianship on Tim Coates’ Good Library Blog. Tim, I’d better explain, is the former CEO of the UK bookstores/retailers WH Smith and Waterstones, a library campaigner, and founder of the e-book store Bilbary. I am also writing my own thread entitled Dear Miss Landau on SlayAlive’s fan website.

7) Are you hoping to write another book, and if so, any ideas on what it could be about?

That may be the million-dollar question, and for the answer – to really give an answer worthy of the question and which might unlock a few of the mysteries around Dear Miss Landau (like how in God’s name it came to be at all!) - it’s best to go back to that moment on the train travelling up the West Highland Railway when I first started writing Drusilla’s Roses, the predecessor and companion to Dear Miss Landau:

I did not then hear Drusilla’s song, but perhaps she sang to both of us in those early days. First to Juliet Landau, who had just begun to write a two-part Drusilla story for IDW Publishing’s Angel comic book series, and then to me.

Miss Landau later said she was “drawn into Dru’s rich, dark world”, and so was I. In fact, I was positively yanked. The 08.12 to Mallaig, sitting at one end of the West Highland Railway in Glasgow’s Queen Street Station, might have seemed a long way from Los Angeles, but both places saw Drusilla’s rebirth and both were as real as real could be.

It was January 31 2009. I was going up to the West Highland town of Glenfinnan for the annual general meeting of the Friends of Glenfinnan Station Museum. For no particularly well-thought-out reason, I’d bought a green Pukka Pad jotter with me to make notes and perhaps to do some writing...

I opened the jotter, put pen to paper, and Dru grabbed me by the throat.

I’ve known bad writers and worse film-makers who reach for a cliché at every turn, but real life can often put fiction to shame. If I must label my experience a thunderclap high above the hills which let vitality and creativity run like fire through my veins, if I must say my pen began to shoot across the page as if it had a mind of its own, that I completely ignored the views of Loch Long, Ben Lomond and Rannoch Moor, nearly forgot to get off the train at Glenfinnan and wandered through the meeting half-aware, thinking only of getting back on the train to Glasgow afterwards and writing some more, then that is what I shall do, and without apology, for that is what really happened that day. I began to move away from the drab and vicious life I had known, to open the door into what would become a glimpse of heaven at Sunset.

And if that is cliché, I only wish I could live every day of my life that way.

(Dear Miss Landau, chapter 14)

This is one reason why Dear Miss Landau might sound a bit over-dramatic if pitched to a Hollywood player, but that’s the way it happened, and right from the start it felt less like I’d planned anything out and far more as if I’d gone on a:

...complete creative bender. I wrote, I would say, not a story about Dru, but the story which should have been written for her at the time of Buffy but wasn’t.

In my opinion, the character of Drusilla had not been developed as fully as the other members of her vampire family – Spike, Angel and Darla – had been. It was as if Dru herself chose me to finish the job. I know how strange that sounds, but that’s how it felt at the time. There are any number of technically proficient writers around, but she needed someone who also loved her passionately, with all his heart and soul, and would fight to the last drop of his blood to bring her back.

She needed her noble knight, and she found him...

... I broke every rule in the book writing Drusilla’s Roses while Dru looked happily over my shoulder. I had no plan, did not do that many drafts, and most of the time had no idea what I was going to do next. The primal beast got out, it was like Rocky Balboa going after Ivan Drago, and it was the greatest creative experience of my life.

(Chaplin interview, March 2012)

Then, of course, it got even stranger. I titled the original story Drusilla’s Roses without the slightest idea Rose was Juliet’s middle name, was amazed to be contacted by Juliet after I’d sent her the tale, took the trip across the US to meet her, and on the way across something strange happened just outside Somerset, Pennsylvania:

I also remember something else, way up in the Alleghenies on the Interstate, thinking, musing and looking back down a long valley spruced up with pines. Seeing a great white church in the distance, boxy and stark.

To pass the long hours, travellers sometimes fall into a contemplative state. The mind seems to empty and truths become apparent. I don’t know how it works.

All I do know is that a single thought came to me, and though I am loath to believe in fate, I cannot forget its words:

I’m going to my destiny.

(Dear Miss Landau, chapter 34)

At the time, I said nothing of this to Juliet. I was extremely sensitive about any accusation of stalking, and back then there was no Chaplin Books, no Dear Miss Landau, and no sequels to Roses. Juliet and I hadn’t even met, and there was no guarantee we would.

A subconscious voice telling me straight-up that I was going to my destiny therefore sounded more than a little presumptuous and quite odd, so I shut up about it.

But those little questions of why I was there and how well-fitted I actually was for the role I seemed to be fulfilling kept surfacing. Several months after the first trip, I sent a writer’s commentary on Roses to Juliet, and at one point said:

Analogy that lately occurred to me: A bit macho and clichéd to an outside observer but very real to me. The advice Rocky got from his trainer before he went out for the 15th round against Ivan Drago in Rocky IV:

“All your power! All your strength! Everything you’ve got! Punch until you can’t punch no more! This is your whole life here! Now go out there and do it!”

I’ve heard Joss considers a life a fight [shown at the end of Angel], and I can’t dispute his philosophy much. Maybe that’s why I got the job of writing Roses. It needed someone willing to give everything they had, and that’s certainly what happened, although it wasn’t exactly a fight. Dru wasn’t my opponent. She was quiet, placid and supportive. I liked having her around.

On a purely scientific basis, I was also in the right place at the right time. I read a fascinating article in New Scientist in 2006 which basically made the point that, in addition to talent, it takes 15-20 years practise to develop extraordinary mastery of a subject. Well, I’d done my time, and when Drusilla grabbed me, I was more ready than I knew. I kept the article, by the way, and could scan and send it to you if you were interested.

What else? I’ve tried to answer every question you asked in March to the best of my ability, but even I sometimes struggle for an explanation. I’m professionally loath to just place everything at the doorstep of fate and destiny, but I personally rather like the idea and, as Sherlock Holmes once said: “take away the impossible and whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.” I can’t escape the improbably logical conclusion that I was meant to do this and am fulfilling my allotted role. Well, best just to keep my feet firmly on the ground and go out there and do it. Dru IV is gelling nicely in my head and I’m looking forward to starting it, even if this may be Dru’s last dance.

But then again, who knows?

(Drusilla’s Roses, writer’s commentary, 2010)

So it really did seem (as mentioned in Dear Miss Landau’s foreword) as if Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate was, quite literally, weaving the threads of my destiny into a very strange tapestry. By now I’d successfully completed the first trip across America and met Juliet Landau on Sunset Boulevard, Drusilla’s Redemption had been delivered to her about two weeks before I set out that first day in March, and in conversation in Hollywood I’d explained my intent to write a second sequel – Drusilla Revenant – the story of which would be wrapped around Juliet’s own tale of Drusilla in Angel 24-25.

I’m really not sure if that has ever been done before. The unofficial tale wrapped around the official tale with the keeper of the flame’s knowledge… Drusilla’s Roses had ended like a classic love story, with Xander taking his newly-ensouled lady back to the house on Candlewood Drive. Drusilla’s Redemption managed to capture lightning in a bottle and take the story on, developing Drusilla’s personal history, forcing her to mature and cope with a relationship and sending her to Africa to (indirectly) fight for her soul much as Spike had done. Redemption also tied up vampire creation myth (Cain and Lilith) with early Buffyverse history (the Old Ones, the Shadowmen and the first Slayer) and located it in the Great Rift Valley – essentially tying up loose plot strands from Buffyverse canon and relating it to Dru’s personal journey:

Drusilla sat up straight with the good posture of the well-bred Victorian girl, clasped her hands demurely and began to recite.

“First there were the Old Ones, demons of power and thunder who made this earth a hell of fire and sulphur for aeons without end. Then they faded away from this transitory plane like mist on a February morn, and out of Africa came mortal Man.”

“Which part of Africa?” asked Xander suspiciously.

Drusilla cocked her head towards the ceiling, as if listening to the stars.

“From the abyss. The rift. The great valley of the ancients, so Solomon says.”

“The Great Rift Valley, you mean?” said the sister, fascinated.

“Where’s that?” asked Xander, wishing he’d paid more attention in history class.

“About six hundred miles east of here,” the sister replied.

“Before he ascended,” Dru intoned, “the last pure demon fed upon a woman called Lilith who dwelt in the Rift Valley. He possessed her, infecting her human body with the essence of a demon.”

“So this Lilith became the first vampire?” said Xander.

Drusilla smiled brightly. “Yes, dear. You might say I am a daughter of Lilith.”

“There is mention of a Lilith in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Talmud,” the sister mused, “and the Kabbalah says Lilith’s soul was lodged in the depths of a great abyss. The abyss could have been the Great Rift Valley. It’s also said that Lilith was created to be Adam’s first wife, but she ran away. After he slew Abel, Adam’s son Cain found her and lived with her in a land to the east of Eden”

“Lilith dwelt with Cain in the Rift Valley, east of this Eden,” Dru said in agreement. “Together they sired a race of vampires. Half-breed demons. Pariahs. Welcome in neither the house of the human nor the demon,” she finished glumly.

Xander’s head was spinning. Adam’s first wife had been turned, set up home with his son in Africa and created a vampire race who wandered about like a bunch of stateless refugees?

He kept his mouth tightly shut, but felt a certain blasphemous relief that at least he and Dru weren’t the first human and vampire to try living together. In fact, Cain and Lilith set a pretty big precedent.

Drusilla’s eyes swivelled towards his and he realised she’d read his mind. She gave him a quick, private smile and went on.

“Pockets of the Old Ones’ demonic power still lingered in and around the Rift Valley. So sorcerors called Shadowmen chained a girl up in a cave near the Rift, infused her with the Old Ones’ power in order to fight the vampires, and created the first slayer.”

“I get it,” said Xander. “And this particular pocket – the well of the slayers’ power - isn’t just in Africa. It’s right next door to us in Africa.”

“Yes,” said Drusilla, sanely and soberly. “And it’s very easily affronted. First, it was angered by the spell the Scoobies cast to defeat Adam. Then it was infuriated by the activation of all the potential slayers. Now, the presence of this slayer and of one of the Scoobies who originally angered it has roused it to white-hot fury. It won’t show any mercy. Not to the slayer. Not to the children. And not to us.”

“You have come right back to your beginnings,” the sister said quietly to Drusilla. “To your garden of Eden. And this is where it ends.”

(Drusilla’s Redemption, 2010)

Out on Catalina in March 2010 I researched locations for Drusilla Revenant and started work on it a few weeks after I got back.

As stated on the last page of Dear Miss Landau, Revenant contains the possible conclusion to the unfinished story arc I believe I saw in a Buffy episode a week after I finished Redemption. The word revenant itself means “one returned from the dead or from exile” and this fitted the story so perfectly it wasn’t true.

And the odd thing is, I don’t know where I got the word from. I was originally going to rather reluctantly call it Drusilla Returns, but then this eight-letter conundrum just waltzed out of the back of my mind. The right word, in the right place, at the right time…

So perhaps that’s how the incredible story reached, if nothing else, the end of the beginning. Because, to toy with cliché, the story didn’t end with the last page of Dear Miss Landau, it went on, both in real-life and in fiction. Juliet and I continued to correspond. I wrote Revenant, finding it surprisingly easy to merge the two storylines and the official and unofficial Drusillas. I even gave her sisters names, but when I finished Revenant I did not release it to any fan-fiction websites.

There was a chance the now complete Drusilla trilogy could be published, but it wouldn’t be a very good idea to expect a publisher to try and sell copies for cash if I’d already given away the remaining text for free, so Drusilla Revenant – complete with the dramatic twist which could turn the Buffyverse upside down – is still sitting on my bookshelf like the Lost Ark of Buffy’s Covenant and I truly wish the fans would mount a campaign for its release, for I’d truly love to turn it over to them…

Once Revenant was finished, I went straight into the first draft of Dear Miss Landau, but this was not with the confidence of a writer secure in the knowledge that his signed and sealed publishing contract was safely filed. One autism-friendly publisher the NAS thought was a sure thing had (as is often the case) said it wasn’t quite right for them, so it was a choice between hawking my wares round the few publishers who would even look at an unsolicited manuscript from an untried author without an agent, or just writing the thing before I forgot too much of the trip to be able to. I decided to do the latter as I’d have no wares to hawk if I didn’t.

So that’s how Dear Miss Landau began, as a draft written in hopelessness in an old stone house deep down amidst the Scottish Borders, only a few months after I’d stolen the Enterprise for my Helen of Troy. The ship becalmed once again in a deathless Sargasso Sea and foolish hope being quietly beaten to death, but the hands refusing to accept the inevitable or impossible, forging the words honed from a lifetime of experience and refusing to knuckle under to realism.

The winter of my dreams set in but the pages started to pile up all the same. In a literary sense I was on another journey, but in this case I thought I was facing the absolute certainty of failure. There was no lady ahead for me this time and no harbour for the ship.

Forty-six years old. No track record, no agent and no contacts.

Hopeless.

Do it anyway.

I remember finishing the first draft early in 2011. It hadn’t been that difficult a job. I’d been able to paste in several of the blogs from the actual trip and selected a few emails which could (with Juliet’s permission) be used. I think it was about 1.00 a.m. one Saturday morning.

Now, remember Tim Coates’ Good Library Blog which I’d used to merrily thrash my former “profession” for six years? We’d just got broadband at Roberton, so I turned on Juliet the Notebook and put one simple, fateful message onto the Blog:

Anyone know a publisher?

That was all. Nothing else.

I spent the weekend in unutterable depression, quite sure that was the end. That, to paraphrase Bridget Jones, I’d die a sad lonely old man talking to his own colostomy bag and be found three weeks later half-eaten by Alsations. The manuscript would then be found and I’d be a posthumous success…

Apart from the bit about the Alsations, that is an accurate description of that long weekend, and of the next thirty or forty years as I expected to live them.

On Monday morning, I got an expression of verbal interest from Chaplin Books.

Amanda Field, managing editor of Chaplin, had been a fellow blogger, and she’d been reading me the whole time.

If that doesn’t seem incredible enough (and Chris, the owner of Biggar’s local bookshop, Atkinson-Pryce, later agreed the odds against publication were about five million to one), the date I received the expression of interest was 14th March, 2011.

A year to the day since I’d met Miss Landau on Sunset Boulevard.

I think I sent her an email that day, metaphorically throwing up my hands and saying I believed in fate and destiny…

Well, the verbal interest was confirmed in writing, five test chapters were accepted, Dear Miss Landau was quietly written in a Glasgow flat and a small town in the Scottish borderlands over the next few months while all the public hue and cry followed Whit Anderson’s doomed attempt to reboot Buffy. Whit’s script crashed and burned while Dear Miss Landau, which I’d originally conceived as a screenplay, was published to rave reviews in March 2012 (almost exactly fifteen years to the day after Buffy first aired) and there’s been a long struggle since then to get media attention and publicity.

At present, there is the possibility of an audiobook version of Dear Miss Landau, but that, I think, is not the full picture:

It was highly unlikely that a person with autism could gain enough empathy to write Drusilla accurately, but somehow I did.

It was, as John Plowman mentioned on A Good Read, extremely difficult even for someone with connections to contact a Hollywood celebrity. I succeeded in doing so without connections, and with a one-time only long shot (the text of Drusilla’s Roses and a covering letter addressed to a certain Dear Miss Landau) which I never expected to hear of again.

It was extremely unlikely that Juliet Landau and I would enter into an online correspondence, but we did.

It was very unlikely that a person with autism would find it within himself to cross a continent for his film star, but I did.

As stated, the odds against an untried, traumatised, autistic, forty-six year old writer without an agent being published were astronomical, but it happened.

There have been other coincidences.

Overall, and although I’m neither gambler nor statistician, I’d say the odds against all of this happening were so high that chance cannot fully explain it.

Perhaps that thought I had in Somerset, Pennsylvania, was right all along.

In my opinion, then, the full tapestry (and possible future history) of events is still to unfold. It’s been perfectly clear in my mind for two or three years. I respect Miss Landau’s right to choose which path through life she wishes to take, and Amanda Field has been understandably preoccupied with publishing and promoting Dear Miss Landau, so funnily enough I guess that leaves me as the only person with a full working knowledge of what I’ll christen this tripartite path I appear to have been yanked onto.

So here’s the truest answer I can give to question seven:

a) Dear Miss Landau, with its melding of fiction and reality, was published in March 2012. I originally conceived the idea as a screenplay while walking down the hill from Candlewood Drive, and it can easily be turned into one.

b) The next book should be the Drusilla trilogy – Roses, Redemption and Revenant. The three novellas which would make up this book would give it a nice, neat length of about 100,000 words – and the novellas are already, written, proofed and edited! They’re all done! One signed set is sitting in my bookshelves in Glasgow, (I just got Drusilla Revenant signed at the Vampires Ball at Heathrow) and Revenant is waiting to be read. Chaplin and I are having trouble getting this to the attention of Simon Pulse (a division of Simon & Schuster) and we need help from the Buffy fanbase to do so.

c) Dear Miss Landau should be optioned as a film. During two trips across America, virtually everyone I met either had a friend or relative with autism, or knew of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – sometimes both. I’ve no doubt there is a large potential audience out there. The film version (with Juliet Landau’s permission) would differ quite a bit from the book and is probably the only possible means in existence today by which some of the original cast of Buffy could return (albeit briefly) to their roles… Again, Chaplin and I need help to achieve this.

Incidentally, I’m also working on a fourth Dru tale, recently renamed Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires, which should (I sincerely hope) be the romantic tale of love and bullets which James Marsters apparently always hoped would reunite the deadly duo.

It is also intriguing to consider the fact that at the Vampires Ball this year, I described to James Marsters the way I gained a sudden connection with Drusilla in 2009 (Dear Miss Landau, chapter 14) and asked him how it compared with the acting chemistry which sprang up between himself and Juliet Landau when he was being cast.

Exactly the same, I understand.

So that’s it. One possible future for the Buffyverse is sitting on a bookshelf in Glasgow like the Lost Ark of the Covenant, just itching to be revealed. A unique book which would make a unique film is waiting to be noticed.

It will be a great pity if such potential never fully saw the light of day, but I should accept the cast and fans’ right to exercise their own free will.

On the other hand, I do have a theory about why all this has happened.

As most fans will know, the 2009 Star Trek reboot featured a plot line wherein a bad guy from the 24th century came back in time and knocked the tapestry of Kirk and crew’s 23rd century destinies askew.

As Spock put it:

“Whatever our lives might have been, if the time continuum was disrupted, our destinies have changed.”

Being both an Asperger and a bit of a geek, I’m quite au fait with the concepts of Schrödinger’s Cat, possible futures and alternate timelines. Amazingly, there was a pivotal moment in October 2009 where I found Juliet’s “lost” email and had to decide whether or not to answer it (Dear Miss Landau, chapter 25). If I had not done so, it is highly probable that the time line in which you, the reader, are now living and reading this article, would not exist.

There would probably have been no enduring correspondence between the Hollywood star and the Rain Man from Partick, no sequels to Roses and no Dear Miss Landau. The two trips across America would never have taken place, Juliet Landau and I would not have met that day on Sunset Boulevard, the possible unfinished story arc would never have been spotted by me and so on.

This is what happened:

Late on a stygian Friday evening early in October, I took a look at my obsolete account.

I scrolled down through the 75 or so emails stagnating in the inbox, deleting some, not really concentrating on the job but still doing it with autistic precision.

Then I saw something.

An email from Juliet Landau, dated August 15 2009.

The 15th?

The 15th!

Two weeks before I’d emailed her!

With the care of a librarian handling the Book of Kells, I opened the email:

From: Juliet Landau Sent: 15 August 2009 03:57 To: James Christie Subject: Your Story

Dear James

I just finished your story. I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it. You managed to catch Drusilla’s voice and behavior so beautifully. The sad, lost, haunted feeling of Dru was there. I myself have just written a comic about Dru as part of season 6 of “Angel.” Please check it out if you’d like.

I sat there for a full five minutes, deciding what to do.

Take the advice and hold back, or take a shot in the dark and reply?

Sometimes there are signs.

I felt a quite a lot like Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance in the time-travel film Back to the Future Part II. He and I, both at a turning point between two alternate futures and not sure which road to take.

Reply. Something might happen.

Hold back. Nothing will happen.

In the end, I came to a simple decision.

Juliet Landau had been kind enough to email me. It would be impolite not to at least reply.

So, with the click of a mouse, I summoned the future…

(Dear Miss Landau, p. 94)

Boy, those guys in The Big Bang Theory would love this…

I even wrote an article on the subject in April 2012:

http://www.glasgowwestend.co.uk/showlog ... ntid=13579

Why, then, has it turned out this way instead?

Well, to turn to Star Trek again, although Nero’s incursion altered the timeline, Kirk and his crew still had destinies they were meant to fulfil: Kirk to command the Enterprise, Spock to be science officer and so on; and despite the damage to the timeline it seemed as if they were all, by accident or design, slotting themselves back into their proper historical settings.

In the case of myself, Juliet Landau and Drusilla, the disruption – if indeed there even was one – was not quite that dramatic.

I mean, given the literary metaphors in Dear Miss Landau, I wouldn’t mind taking command of the Enterprise and fighting Nero to the death, but I don’t think that’s quite what’s required here.

It’s as if, a few years ago, something went wrong. Maybe not a big thing. An opportunity was missed, a story arc unfinished, a character and a person’s potential perhaps slightly overlooked. Even a small glitch can cause major alterations in a timeline. This is known as a ripple effect.

Something which should have happened, but didn’t. Events and destinies not unfolding quite the way they should have. This concept was most recently explored in the 2008 Doctor Who episode Turn Left where Donna Noble’s decision to turn right instead of left at a junction led to massive temporal changes and millions of deaths, including the Doctor…

Over the past three years, it has often seemed to me that the tripartite path detailed here is the one that should be taken. It has already enabled me to change my life and redeem myself by becoming a published author. It also, frankly, helped me regain my faith in women, which had taken quite a battering. I’ve had to take a highly conservative position regarding this up until recently, but I’m now as sure as I can be that this is the way to go and that there is more to be done.

It feels like somebody up there is trying to do a repair job, and it’s not finished yet.

To be clear but partisan about it, ever since Dear Miss Landau was published I’ve been able to say that if it all ended tomorrow, I would have nothing to complain about.

But I think fate, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, has thrown us all a curve ball; and if we don’t run with it, don’t look for that sunlit city on the hill, we’ll regret it to our dying day.

James Christie 21st December 2012

Five Values, Six Goals and Seven Strategic Priorities Mean as Much as a Partridge in a Pear Tree!

I went to a meeting about autism the other day, its aim basically to improve services for people with autism. It was a frustrating and demoralizing experience, sitting with well-meaning people who wanted to bring live-wires to such meetings but who then made the electricity that sparkled along those selfsame wires fizzle out as it seemed, almost immediately, that no progress would be made and almost inevitable that the well-meaning idealism would fall straight into the same deathtrap of guidelines, PR about "great strides forward" and ticks of boxes which in and of themselves sounded laudable but had (and this is the truly terrifying part) and have absolutely no relation to the reality on the ground.

At Winterbourne View care home, patients who had similar and/or more severe versions of my own learning disability were (according to Rebecca Cafe, BBC Bristol) slapped and restrained under chairs, held down and forcibly medicated, and in one case had mouthwash poured into their eyes.

In Parliament, Tom Clarke, MP for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, recently said:

"We cannot undo the pain, the suffering and humiliating experience endured by people with learning disabilities, and we most certainly cannot leave it to the bureaucratic monolithic machine to ensure that such abuses never happen again".

The problem, Tom, is that you're probably going to leave it to the monolith anyway and as a result such abuse will indeed happen again.

To take a historical example and to quote from Francis Wheen's aptly-titled tome How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World:

"...an official inquiry into the semi-privatised British prison service, commissioned after two murderers and an arsonist escaped from Parkhurst jail in 1995 [said]: 'Any organisation which boasts one Statement of Purpose, one Vision, five Values, six Goals, seven Strategic priorities and eight Key Performance Indicators without any clear correlation between them is producing a recipe for total confusion and exasperation' ".

Mumbo-jumbo has indeed conquered the world to the point that too many of us do not realize that carefully-worded arguments, bullet-pointed recommendations and guidelines pushed out ever so precisely by far too many pens mean absolutely nothing in practice. David Dimbleby recently defined BBC management's jargon as "bonkers and gobbledygook" so I'm pyrrhically pleased to say that at the end of a report I myself wrote four years ago, I called a spade a spade and said:

"In the end, bad people in your offices are doing bad things to other people."

Before I handed the report to the authorities, I took it to a friend in order to get his opinion. He considered that sentence too simplistic and suggested I modify it. I politely refused. I felt there was no sense in soft-pedaling on or softening my stance regarding the ugly treatment myself and others had endured.

A year or two later, the abuse at Winterbourne View was exposed. I met my friend for dinner not long after and said to him:

"You remember I refused to modify that sentence? Now you know why".

James Christie
25th January 2013

I met Joss Whedon the other day.

Details can be found here as I can't paste in a photo:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/4206394786/

You know, I think this is quite important. I've met one of the most important people in Hollywood, he's got a copy of Dear Miss Landau. Serious stuff could happen...

Kathy Lette's new novel, The Boy Who Fell To Earth, which will be coming out shortly in paperback, deals with the trials and tribulations of a harassed thirtysomething mother coping with her autistic son. Kathy herself has written an entertaining, insightful article about the trials and tribulations of a fiftysomething mother (herself) coping with her own autistic son.

Fine.

So why am I pissed off?

Because (and this hit me like a quiet hurricane, if that's possible), Kathy and many other commentators, websites and Facebook pages seem mainly to be concentrating upon autistic children and young people.

The opening lines of many posts speak for themselves:

My 8 year old daughter was recently diagnosed...

What's it like for kids whose siblings have autism...

How can I help my child if she won't verbalize?

1 in 50 school-age children are affected by autism spectrum disorder...

This is laudable, heart-rending and worthy, so what's the problem?

Answer: young children grow up and young people grow older, and they stay autistic.

I was an autistic child, I was an autistic young man, now I'm an autistic middle-aged man. Sooner or later I'm going to be an autistic old man. Over the last few years, as I grew more aware of autism's trials, tribulations, advantages and disadvantages, I noticed that there seemed to be a vague generalized assumption that kids and young people sort of grow out of autism.

Well guys, we don't. And that's why I'm pissed off.

I empathize with parents struggling to support, diagnose and educate their remarkable and often maddening offspring; and I understand the need to recognize the desperate situations some overstressed Mums and Dads find themselves in. But I also fear that in the frantic scramble to help autistic youth successfully reach adulthood the ongoing problems of what happens next, of how an adult with autism is supposed to cope, have perhaps been slightly overlooked.

The National Autistic Society Scotland (NAS) recently launched a campaign entitled Count Us In: it pays to listen which did indeed highlight the fact that although services for children are improving there is still a real gap in support for adults.

To make the statistical case:

79% of people with autism think public understanding of autism is poor or very poor, 69% of adults with autism haven't had an assessment of their needs since they turned eighteen and 66% feel they don't have enough support. As 33% of autistic adults in the UK have had severe mental health problems because of a lack of help, as only 15% have a full-time paid job and as it can cost over three million pounds to support each adult with high-functioning autism throughout his or her lifetime (there are at least 433,000 autistic adults in the UK), about 1.299 million million pounds will be needed to help people who, if given the chance, might be capable not only of helping themselves but also, to now make the emotional case, to change the world.

Think I'm overstating the emotional case?

Think about it.

Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Lawrence of Arabia and Albert Einstein may all have been adults with autism.

So what did they do?

Just discover gravity, help found America and write the Declaration of Independence, help lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, develop the general theory of relativity...

If it will cost us many millions merely to support such individuals, what might it profit us if we help them develop?

Attitudes need to change. In my own case, a newspaper editor took a wrecking ball to my confidence and self-esteem, a tutor sadistically informed me that I "didn't listen and didn't learn" and a large public sector organisation pushed me to the brink of a nervous breakdown. It did not have to be this way, but it was, and on the road to writing Dear Miss Landau I took more punishment than Rocky Balboa ever did against Ivan Drago.

Kathy Lette, I understand, wants people with autism to flourish. So do I, and it would be nice to see some lost and forgotten adults on the spectrum come home.

(Previously published in the Huffington Post U.K. by James Christie)

I was thinking about roles in life for people with autism the other day, and my thoughts turned to The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Lee Cooper.

And I realized a simple thing.

Sheldon is The Man!

More precisely, he's the alpha male of the new age. The Head Honcho, the Big Cheese, A Number 1. All the things I was calling Joss Whedon the other day...

However, he is also pretty hopeless at social intercourse, lacks empathy, and is horribly arrogant about his intellect. In another time, he might have been the villainous Mekon to Eagle comic's heroic Dan Dare; but nowadays he tends to hang around in comic-book stores, receive heartfelt restraining orders from the likes of Stan Lee and Leonard Nimoy, and fail to formulate an effective algorithm for relations with his girlfriend, Amy Farrah Fowler.

An easy character at whom to laugh.

But let's look at him from another angle. Sheldon Cooper, who, like his friends Leonard, Raj and Howard, displays some very geeky/autistic traits, is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology. With thirty-one Nobel laureates to its name as of 2010, Caltech is one of the greatest research universities in the world. The institute's aim is "to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education" and the basic purpose of theoretical physics is (according to Wikipedia) "to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena."

Or in other words, quite literally to work out how the universe works.

Each generation has its own alpha males and there's little doubt that Aspergers would have made pretty poor pioneers in America's era of westward expansion, but today's frontiers are a different matter entirely. Sheldon and his colleagues are working at the cutting edge of science, helping the West maintain its lead in the global knowledge economy and, when they make a discovery (theoretical or actual), potentially altering our relationship with the physical universe around us.

For example, evidence for the possible existence of dark matter (which apparently accounts for most of the mass of the universe and plays a major role in the evolution of galaxies) was first found by astronomers and astrophysicists eighty years ago. A spectrometer on the International Space Station only made what may be the first actual observation of dark matter a day or so ago.

Does dark matter matter?

Well, that's the question to which the answer is uncertain, but research, by its very nature, often provides unexpected replies to unspoken queries. Freeze-dried food, better Goodyear tyres and space blankets were all surprise spin-offs from research into space travel by NASA.

So, to risk a generalization, many of the physicists, scientists and astronomers who are changing our world may be on or near the autistic spectrum. People (like me) who do not necessarily fit in to mainstream society all that well, who might have a liking for comic books (I started out with Superman, flirted with Star Trek and ended up browsing through Buffy...) and who have that slightly obsessive focus on one subject which could lead to the unification of conflicting field theories.

Can we afford to find roles in life for such quirky savants? Even to love them?

A better question might be: can we afford not to?

(First published in the Huffington Post U.K. by James Christie)

Captain Kirk and the Crass Interviewer

Over nearly thirty years of working life as an adult with autism, I have disobeyed orders, lost respect for my superiors, publicly rebelled against my "profession", been embittered by bureaucracy and on one memorable occasion was told by an ex-girlfriend who'd had the misfortune to end up as my manager that I was "the most difficult employee she'd ever had..."

Thanks, dear.

But I also survived and even flourished in the neuro-typical world of work, travelled independently in Australia for nearly a year, lived in Glasgow for decades and ground away at writing when anyone sane would have given up. Against all the odds, I then went out on the road again at the age of forty-five to meet with my Hollywood film star on the shores of the Pacific, wrote the book on it and somehow got myself published.

And like it or not, there's no real doubt left in my mind that without the ornery, bolshie, eccentric and occasionally plain different aspects of the sometimes unlovely persona listed in the first paragraph, I would never in a million years have done all the things I've just mentioned in the third.

In Alan Dean Foster's novelization of J. J. Abram's 2009 Star Trek reboot, Starfleet captain Christopher Pike tries to explain to a rebellous, disobedient, wilful and cocky repeat offender called James T. Kirk why the young man is what Starfleet actually needs.

" 'That instinct to leap without looking, to take a chance when logic and reason insist all is lost - that was his nature. It's something Starfleet's lost. Yeah, we're admirable. Respectable. But in my opinion we've become overly disciplined. The service is fossilizing ... Lemme tell you something. Those cadets you took on? Ivy Leaguers or the overseas equivalent, all of 'em. Oxford omelettes. Sorbonne sisters. They'll make competent officers. Run their departments with efficiency and class. But command material? People I'd trust with my life when confronted by a couple of Klingon warbirds?' He shook his head dolefully."

Pike and Kirk are fictional, but as the real-life Jimmy Reid stated in his famous 1972 Glasgow University rectorial address:

"Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, 'What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?' "

While companies the world over proclaim they intend to help individuals reach their full potential in order to achieve dynamic organizational growth, I have personally found that far too often in practice the actual intention (conscious or otherwise) from the interview stage onwards is to encourage a culture of corporate conformity in which (as Ruth Dudley Edwards succinctly commented in the Daily Mail of 25th June, 2013) "risks are not taken, you cover your back, fill in the forms properly and follow instructions to the letter."

It's an insidious process, and it does lead to fossilization.

But I think Pike and Reid are right, that Britain has indeed fossilized, and that many, many organizations are failing utterly to make use of the quirky, individual and sometimes brilliant skills adults with autism can bring to the table because they instinctively feel that such people will not fit in.

Crucially, such people struggle at interview because they can't or don't want to drone out the bland, standard responses. The company hires the corporate clone instead and the conformity goes on.

In my case, I succeeded brilliantly in one historic job which involved restoring part of Scotland's literary heritage because I had qualities which would never have shown up in a formal interview, but failed horribly in a corporate training course which embodied every aspect of the bad management and control freakery I've alluded to in this blog.

So, rather than moan to you that the person you might actually most need is the one you're throwing out at the first hurdle, let's see if there's anyone out there with free will who might like to hire an adult with autism.

Not me, necessarily. I've proved my worth and I'm not going to sit through any more crass interviews.

But somewhere out there, there's another Captain Kirk. An adult with autism who could change the world. An Asperger you're overlooking.

So show me you're not a bunch of fossils, reply to this article, and let me see you do something about it.

(First published in the Huffington Post U.K. by James Christie)

If We Ruled the World...

According to the Daily Mail Callie Rogers, Britain's youngest lottery winner, is broke but happy.

I've been broke. I was not happy.

Although I'd be the first to admit I'm a charter member of the grumpy old men's club (special section for particularly mean old fogies...), there are times I'll honestly admit I get completely exasperated with the illogical antics of the neuro-typicals (NTs) who rule this sceptred Isle, our Earth.

I understand Ms. Rogers did not have the best start in life and I sympathize, but why in God's name couldn't she just have got a good lawyer, listened to her independent financial adviser (I believe the National Lottery does try to supply such help), invested her money carefully in low-risk bonds, told the hangers-on to *** off and got on with her life?

She'd never ever have had to worry about bills again, could have had more time for her children, and maybe even helped her community.

But no, that would have been too logical, and neuro-typicals (as I once wrote myself) think emotionally first and logically second. And as neuro-typicals make up the vast majority of the global population, they do indeed rule - and frequently ruin - the world.

Ms. Rogers is not the only example, nor are the antics of NTs confined solely to the ranks of Lottery winners. Mention must however be made of John McGuinness, a hospital porter from Livingston who won five times as much as Ms. Rogers and still managed to blow the lot, most notably via - let's put it gently here - an ill-advised investment of four million pounds in Livingston Football Club...

And what of the highly-educated CEOs and non-executive directors of such august institutions as the Bank of Scotland and The Royal Bank of Scotland who managed, within the space of a few short years, to destroy two organizations pivotal to Scotland's global reputation as a cautious, reliable and financially astute nation? Surely they should at least have been able to behave maturely...

In the case of The Royal Bank of Scotland in particular, why in the name of all that is holy did such a supposedly logical and astute organization buy the Dutch bank ABN Amro (a toxic timebomb of bad debt) without carrying out proper due diligence?

Because the then CEO Fred "The Shred" Goodwin was an emotionally arrogant individual with an ego approximately the size of Jupiter who'd allegedly been kept waiting to see senior management at ABN Amro. Fred's ire and ego were aroused by this, bad decisions followed, the timebomb was flogged off for too high a fee and we all ended up paying too high a price.

Where's the logic in breaking banks and blowing millions, and why the unctious defensiveness when asked for a logical explanation and some gesture of humility?

And while credit was crunching, banks blowing and lottery tickets followed by millions of banknotes wafting away o'er the White Cliffs of Dover, what was your autistic blogger doing?

Well, buying a flat with a nineteen-fifties style mortgage, having that flat properly surveyed (a sort of due diligence, one might say), putting down a large deposit and paying off his mortgage early...

This may sound a little smug, but I remember sweating my fearful way through those decisions with the hard facts of life laid out clearly before me by my autistic brain. As an Asperger, the phrase "oh, it'll never happen to me," is simply not part of my vocabulary and I knew darn well the truth of the saying that we're all "three months away from homelessness."

If I hadn't made those decisions properly, I'd have forfeited my flat five times over. My next-door neighbour was a bit more easygoing, and lost his home ten days before Christmas.

So sometimes I get exasperated when I see people damaging and destroying their lives, because I know that a few logical decisions could easily avert much unnecessary pain and suffering; but if I open my mouth and say so, everyone tells me I'm being too logical and boring.

I'm not sure it'd be better if Aspergers ruled the world, and it might indeed be pretty boring, but sometimes I wonder...

(First published in the Huffington Post U.K. by James Christie)

Mom’s Kind Words: Kill Your Autistic Kid

Over the past few months and amidst other topics, I've tried to make the case that some autistic children and adults have, can and may in the future make great contributions to society.

Newton discovered gravity, Jefferson helped draft the Declaration of Independence, Lawrence helped lead the Arab revolt and Einstein developed the general theory of relativity.

More recently, Jacob Barnett, an Asperger like me who started off unable to speak, was found to have an I.Q. of 170 and could become another Einstein.

And yet, just the other day, Anonymous of Ontario slipped a letter beneath the door of Karla Begley, mother of an autistic son called Max, and told Mrs Begley (among other things) that "you have a kid that is mentally handicapped ... they should take whatever non ret*d body parts he possesses and donate it to science ... go live in a trailer in the woods with your wild animal kid ... do the right thing and move or euthanize him."

I'm supposed to be fair and even-handed, but today it's going to be difficult. I grew up around mentally-handicapped adults and autism is a different type of disability. In my experience, mental handicap basically means the person's I.Q is too low to cope with everyday life whereas many people with autism have high I.Qs. Mine is 120 and you've just read about Jacob's. There are also wild and dangerous people with mental issues from whom society should be protected. For many years I lived not that far from the State Hospital, Carstairs. That's its new name. Its old title - Carstairs State Penitentiary for the Criminally Insane - was much more no-nonsense and descriptive...

People with autism do have difficulty integrating into society, but we are not ret*ds and we are not wild animals. I find Anonymous of Ontario's use of those words highly offensive and can only assume the author of this loathsome letter is a wilfully ignorant xenophobe.

The comment near the end of the letter, however, which suggests Mrs Begley either moves or has her own son killed, veers into territory once occupied by Hitler's Final Solution, and while I'm not going to waste everyone's time with some overwrought byline like "have we learnt nothing from the horrors of the Holocaust!" I feel the sour sense of reacquaintance with the fetid intolerance and parochialism which still, as this stinking missive confirms, lurks so near the surface of the so-called civilized carapace with which we cover ourselves.

In Nicholas Monsarrat's 1951 novel about the Royal Navy, The Cruel Sea, sub-lieutenant Lockhart sees a party of badly-burned RAF officers at the theatre, and hears a woman's comments about the way they look:

"The faces were all shattered in the same formless way, mutilated alike by wounds and by slap-dash surgical repair ... 'They oughtn't to allow them in,' whispered a woman sitting just behind him. 'What about decent people's feelings?' "

It seems to me the cruel sea is still kinder than some people can be.

(First published in the Huffington Post U.K. by James Christie)

The Pointy-Eared Robot and the Republican

...And the first part of my title, paraphrased and sewn together from two separate scenes, is pretty much what neuro-typical Captain Kirk called Asperger-like Mr Spock in the most recent Star Trek film, Into Darkness.

Kirk couldn't understand why Spock didn't seem to be responding emotionally to the fact that he'd pulled the Vulcan out of an active volcano seconds before Spock would have been stir-fried.

Kirk had displayed concern and empathy regarding his first officer's imminent demise, only to be told, upon the Vulcan's arrival aboard the Enterprise, that "you violated the Prime Directive."

In short, and if I've got my Wikipedia-based definitions right, Spock failed properly to demonstrate either cognitive or affective empathy - the understanding of another person's perspective or emotional state (cognitive) and/or the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion (affective).

Put simply, Spock failed to say:

"Thank you for saving me from a horrible death, Captain. I know you'll probably be thrown out of Starfleet for this, but I am eternally grateful!"

No, I can't imagine Spock saying that either. Kirk probably felt like calling him a pointy-eared robot and many neuro-typicals may think people with autism are unable to empathize with others.

Liane Kupferberg Carter's blog in July's Huffington Post goes into the pros and cons of autism and empathy better than I can, so I'll just say this:

My mother broke her hip last month.

I did my best to understand her pain. I stayed with her in A&E, liaised with the nursing staff, brought her everything she needed and did everything I could. I even fed the cat. My first response was logical - people with autism, on the whole, think logically first and emotionally second. So, in a word, we do have emotions (sometimes very strong ones) but they can be bunged in the back seat by the brain while the logic does the driving. I even joked with some of the staff that the best thing to do was work with them rather than run around waving my arms in the air and ranting, "do something!"

But it wasn't funny. I knew Mum could lose her country lifestyle, her mobility and her Attendance Allowance. I knew how fragile her existence was and what could go wrong. Ever since my father died in 1999 and I'd become her administrative carer (as I termed it), I'd lived with the knowledge that everything could change if she took a single tumble down the stairs. My response, both then and now, was to do everything I could to help her and the practical nature of the focused Asperger brain was actually pretty useful. Walk the halls weeping later, make sure Mum has her biscuits and books about Downton Abbey now. Do not demand action from the consultant. Find out the facts.

Perhaps the colloquialism "keep calm and carry on" could have been coined for Aspergers!

We were very lucky. Mum turned out to be one of the 3-5% percent of senior citizens who recover from a hip fracture without surgery, she only spent eight days in hospital and there is a good chance she will be able to enjoy the rural life for a few years more.

But when the worst of the worry was past, the emotion did come forth. While Mum's hip was being treated and I was holding the fort, the Republicans were holding the U.S. government to ransom over Obamacare. Relatively unrelated matters, but a few days after Mum came home, the autistic ability to think in pictures summed up for me how I felt.

Quite illogically, I imagined what I'd have done if a Republican had walked into the ward while I was sitting with my mother, wagging his finger at me and saying something like "you really should be paying for this."

I'd have killed him with my bare hands.

(First published in the Huffington Post U.K. by James Christie)

Lawrence of Asperabia

Peter O'Toole has passed away. Like Jeffrey Bernard, he is rather more than unwell; and the news has savaged his fans and followers more acutely than the critics of Macbeth savaged him back in 1980.

I remember him for different reasons, most simply because on the day I was diagnosed, my psychologist (a highly-experienced man who'd dealt with hundreds of Aspergers) told me unequivocally that he'd once seen Lawrence of Arabia and that T. E. Lawrence (as written by Robert Bolt and played by O'Toole) had displayed unmistakable symptoms of Aspergers:

"He focused intently on one precise skill - cartography, drove his employers mad and disappeared into the desert on a camel!" he said.

I focused intently on cataloguing, drove my employers mad and disappeared into the Mojave desert on an Amtrak train!

There's also one short scene in Lawrence which clinches the argument for me.

Near the start of the film, T. E. Lawrence walks through the officers' mess in Cairo en route to have a "pow-wow" with a general. His uniform is rumpled and gives the impression he is an outsider, He wears his cap indoors (which looks out of place), disrupts a game of billiards and twirls dyspraxically into a fellow officer. He is considered a clown, he says it's just his manner. The general doesn't know whether he's bad-mannered or half-witted. Neither does Lawrence.

I know the feeling.

That single scene, written economically, shot cleanly and acted immaculately, captures Lawrence's Aspergers perfectly.

At the time (1961-1962) no one had ever heard of Asperger Syndrome, yet Bolt, David Lean and O'Toole caught its characteristics perfectly. One reason I agree that Robert Bolt's screenplay is arguably the greatest ever written, and perhaps why I have been increasingly influenced by and impressed with it.

There's one other funny thing. It was mentioned in Dear Miss Landau that, as we prepared for my own little trip (to go see Juliet Landau, not take Aqaba) in 2010, the National Autistic Society Scotland did begin to wonder whether I might be the first Asperger to carry out and record such a trip.

Perhaps I was, but Lawrence predated me with Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Revolt In The Desert. As he is now long dead and cannot be diagnosed, I could cling to my paper title on a technicality, but on the whole I don't mind coming second to such a man.

(First published in the Huffington Post U.K. by James Christie)