I came across this theory today, which has great relevance to people who suffer from hurtful experiences.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_susceptibility_hypothesis
Monday 22 November 2010
Monday 20 September 2010
chippie, where did it go wrong ?
This was in a chippie in Balloch, near the Loch Lomond shore.
The menu offered a choice of cod haddock or plaice, but I could see they had not many fish ready to serve and all looking the same. I dislike inviting rebuffs in life, asking for things when the answer might be no, but there is a feeling of fairness involved in taking a menu literally and not make do with what turns out to be provided in practice - I had to find out, so I asked which fish they had. Cod or haddock. Okay I chose cod. Haddock is the standard chippie fish and sometimes unpredictably it can have a funny strong taste, so I chose the cod. Oh, that means we'll have to ask the chef to put a cod on and it will take 10 minutes, is that okay? If I had said haddock it would have been served instantly.
Matter of principle concerning choice and not being humiliated, not to back down, even though it was 6:10 and the wait was annoying. I was feeling worn out and hungry, after Balloch's curious layout with not much of a main street and it's invisible from the buses, had caused me to end up in the Haldane housing estate and find the way back. Positive side of the wait, was that at least they were offering service, willing to put this fish on and cook it for you. That sounded good, so I could plan to have a pickle and a slush drink too.
So when it was time to serve the cod, they had run out of chips and this is in a quite crowded shop. So another 5 minutes wait, and more. By the time I got served I had already decided to walk out in a huff at 6:30 if not served by then.
In most places the vinegar would just be a dollop of their own chosen size. Here, no, helpful again: is this enough? Yes. Now, I think my first mistake was to wait politely until she had stopped pouring, which was another few seconds, she obviously not believing it was enough, before speaking up to ask for a pickled egg. I thought it would be annoyingly pushy to go for it while she was still doing the vinegar. As soon as my voice began any sound at all, literally just the first P, she reacted: "Bit more?" She was that irrationally quick to hear what she expected instead of what I actually wanted to say, even quicker than to let me say it. The vinegar is fine - "that enough? More?" - How was this rational?
Now of course we are both sounding defensive because we are no longer gelling when we speak. I had now had to cut across her swiftly proceeding action to get msyelf heard right. The atmosphere was going wrong, as it always does when a pointless collision of meanings happens with a shop server who is jumping to her own conclusions.
Because she had cut across my speech, I had stopped speaking again, and because I had stopped speaking again, she said "I can't hear you." How the hell was I supposed to expect that, logically? Once someone says they can't hear you, you know they have begun to get annoyed with you, which makes it all the harder to get them to hear you, they are less patiently listening.
No, the vinegar is okay, really - she is already starting to wrap the meal up now -"it's a pickled egg I'm trying to ask for." "Pickled egg, okay. Just couldn't hear you." She has clearly heard egg, so far so good. Despite the unfairness of the "can't hear you" muck, keep hoping this will turn out well. Now, can any rational voice in the world please explain what happened next?
She went over to the pickle jars, and looked back at me: "Egg or onion?" Why the hell does a server who has already heard egg, turn back round and ask you egg or onion? "Egg, yes." So she opened the egg jar, looked at it doubtfully for 2 seconds, then closed it again and opened the onion jar !!! Now, unless you believe folks should be dictated to what to eat, what the hell else did you expect me to do than I did? I called across, "EGG!" In a fed up emphasised tone, because it was completely illogical what was happening, and she answered in the same tone, "Calm down!!"
So in no time I now counted as a difficult annoying customer trying her patience, a dangerous thing to be, because I did not let her force onion onto me instead of egg after she had heard egg perfectly clearly. It was now necessary to escape the hell from that shop as soon as she had served the damn egg, dangerous to stay and let the hostility escalate and get into trouble. So I lost the opportunity to get the slush drink, and having never tasted Irn Bru in a slush form before, I never have still. It was obvious that if I had asked that inconceviable idiot for it, she would likely have misheard something and insisted on choosing the flavour for me and treated me as a troublemaker if I argued.
She was the shop, the host, I the customer was only the visitor, the system is not on our side when astounding nonsense like this happens. The system does not assume that a person whose communication is not being heard right is in the right, it favours the mob in not having to understand anything else than they selectively choose to. When you are a man and the idiot is a woman the PC may work against you for that too. There was no other safe option than escape double quick from the idiot's presence, and carrying a meal tainted by the unforseen emotional bruise, no longer to be enjoyed, after wasting 20 minutes on it.
Bob Lawless
The menu offered a choice of cod haddock or plaice, but I could see they had not many fish ready to serve and all looking the same. I dislike inviting rebuffs in life, asking for things when the answer might be no, but there is a feeling of fairness involved in taking a menu literally and not make do with what turns out to be provided in practice - I had to find out, so I asked which fish they had. Cod or haddock. Okay I chose cod. Haddock is the standard chippie fish and sometimes unpredictably it can have a funny strong taste, so I chose the cod. Oh, that means we'll have to ask the chef to put a cod on and it will take 10 minutes, is that okay? If I had said haddock it would have been served instantly.
Matter of principle concerning choice and not being humiliated, not to back down, even though it was 6:10 and the wait was annoying. I was feeling worn out and hungry, after Balloch's curious layout with not much of a main street and it's invisible from the buses, had caused me to end up in the Haldane housing estate and find the way back. Positive side of the wait, was that at least they were offering service, willing to put this fish on and cook it for you. That sounded good, so I could plan to have a pickle and a slush drink too.
So when it was time to serve the cod, they had run out of chips and this is in a quite crowded shop. So another 5 minutes wait, and more. By the time I got served I had already decided to walk out in a huff at 6:30 if not served by then.
In most places the vinegar would just be a dollop of their own chosen size. Here, no, helpful again: is this enough? Yes. Now, I think my first mistake was to wait politely until she had stopped pouring, which was another few seconds, she obviously not believing it was enough, before speaking up to ask for a pickled egg. I thought it would be annoyingly pushy to go for it while she was still doing the vinegar. As soon as my voice began any sound at all, literally just the first P, she reacted: "Bit more?" She was that irrationally quick to hear what she expected instead of what I actually wanted to say, even quicker than to let me say it. The vinegar is fine - "that enough? More?" - How was this rational?
Now of course we are both sounding defensive because we are no longer gelling when we speak. I had now had to cut across her swiftly proceeding action to get msyelf heard right. The atmosphere was going wrong, as it always does when a pointless collision of meanings happens with a shop server who is jumping to her own conclusions.
Because she had cut across my speech, I had stopped speaking again, and because I had stopped speaking again, she said "I can't hear you." How the hell was I supposed to expect that, logically? Once someone says they can't hear you, you know they have begun to get annoyed with you, which makes it all the harder to get them to hear you, they are less patiently listening.
No, the vinegar is okay, really - she is already starting to wrap the meal up now -"it's a pickled egg I'm trying to ask for." "Pickled egg, okay. Just couldn't hear you." She has clearly heard egg, so far so good. Despite the unfairness of the "can't hear you" muck, keep hoping this will turn out well. Now, can any rational voice in the world please explain what happened next?
She went over to the pickle jars, and looked back at me: "Egg or onion?" Why the hell does a server who has already heard egg, turn back round and ask you egg or onion? "Egg, yes." So she opened the egg jar, looked at it doubtfully for 2 seconds, then closed it again and opened the onion jar !!! Now, unless you believe folks should be dictated to what to eat, what the hell else did you expect me to do than I did? I called across, "EGG!" In a fed up emphasised tone, because it was completely illogical what was happening, and she answered in the same tone, "Calm down!!"
So in no time I now counted as a difficult annoying customer trying her patience, a dangerous thing to be, because I did not let her force onion onto me instead of egg after she had heard egg perfectly clearly. It was now necessary to escape the hell from that shop as soon as she had served the damn egg, dangerous to stay and let the hostility escalate and get into trouble. So I lost the opportunity to get the slush drink, and having never tasted Irn Bru in a slush form before, I never have still. It was obvious that if I had asked that inconceviable idiot for it, she would likely have misheard something and insisted on choosing the flavour for me and treated me as a troublemaker if I argued.
She was the shop, the host, I the customer was only the visitor, the system is not on our side when astounding nonsense like this happens. The system does not assume that a person whose communication is not being heard right is in the right, it favours the mob in not having to understand anything else than they selectively choose to. When you are a man and the idiot is a woman the PC may work against you for that too. There was no other safe option than escape double quick from the idiot's presence, and carrying a meal tainted by the unforseen emotional bruise, no longer to be enjoyed, after wasting 20 minutes on it.
Bob Lawless
Monday 5 April 2010
Report into David Seagrave’s humiliation and ordeal at the SMART centre in Astley Ainslie hospital grounds 9-3-2010
In Sept 2008 I suffered a soaking south of Oban and the windscreen of my Aixam microcar misted up. I was shivering badly and had to stop frequently to wipe the windscreen in the INSIDE. I inadvertently made an illegal right turn in Oban in driving rain and was spotted then whisked to hospital with exposure symptoms, discharged spent a night in Oban and returned uneventfully to Dunfermline. On another occasion I was BLOWN BACKWARDS at Auchtertool and collided at about walking pace with a car heading up the hill known as Newbiggin Bank. DVLA required me to sit a driving test after police reports about these quite minor incidents where NO tangible harm came to anybody. The original green Aixam was beyond economic repair because of its intrinsic flawed design and bought back in part exchange for the present blue one that was reconditioned and had done only 10,000 miles. Soon after delivery of the blue one ALL the damning flaws of the design were woefully apparent. Though it was driveable in dry summer weather the engine falters in downpours, the windscreen persists on misting up in damp weather and the engine CUTS OUT when I bear right.
I am however bound to declare that when I rode scooters I was frequently obliged to stop so as to restore my circulation even in summer and I can NEVER NOW ride a scooter any distance because of the wind chill factor. For all of my adult life I have gone on strenuous Sunday hikes in beauty spots and this is a crucial element in my personal quality of life. The blue Aixam enabled me to reach Durness and climb remote mountains. Without it I can no longer reach most of the Highlands. It is the MEANS TO REACH the Highlands NOT an end in itself.
DVLA have long contested my right to drive Aixams which are in Britain “heavy quadricycles” but taxed at the same rate as Minis though weighing under 400 Kg and having 450cc GLOWPLUG engines (NOT repeat NOT diesel) which is sadly their Achilles heels. After about 2,000 miles the green Aixam became as much an extension of my body as my artificial leg. Apart from a few misjudgements I have now covered 17,000 uneventful miles at MODEST speeds at 100 mpg. I am acutely cognisant of such matters as the 3.5m turning radius and all that flows from the pig-headed refusal of the British to accept metrication such as misjudging how much fuel is left. We but fuel by the LITRE but it is still MILES from place to place! And yet Government maps are calibrated in km squares!
I was very in edge when I arrived at the SMART centre having been delayed on the bus ride. I was made to play with puzzles of the sort given to very small children. I identified road signs and had to read a passage about a Shrewsbury man as though I was a foreign immigrant required to locate English county towns. I had caused offence by wearing a smart jacket, clean white shirt but khaki home made Gripperbreeks that securely hold my false leg on WITHOUT NHS straps that come asunder. I continued to cause offence with my Daily Telegraph English. I was grilled about my personal habits and why I owned a funny foreign car. I was finally to cause the very utmost offence by saying that I NEVER INTEND to buy a full size car because it is too costly to run!
The Junta who were grilling me acted in a very Kafkaesque manner. One of them had heard about Asperger’s Syndrome and shut me up. I was forced to tell them why I had no job since 1971 and why I had been admitted twice to mental hospitals and something about my father’s constant denigrations that caused them to frown, then I had to admit that I suffer badly from bronchitis and in 1952 was admitted to hospital and in bed through the severe winter of 1953 and also how cigarette smoke and motor fumes made me ill. As thought I was admitting that I had convictions for sex offences! A Levantine-looking man with very badly accented English mixed up ULLAPOOL with LIVERPOOL when I was forced to confess that I had driven twice from Ullapool to Dunfermline taking 14 hours on each journey and they refused to accept that the largest city I had driven through is Dunfermline itself or that 95% of my journeys are to the Highlands. I could NOT satisfy them because I have no intention whatsoever of driving in to cities and all who take to the roads must in their eyes be capable of surviving the ordeal of driving through Edinburgh or London – which is the most squalid city in Europe? Perhaps Edinburgh. Britain is not France where octogenarian grandmothers drive sentry boxes on wheels happily up and down steep hills in Normandy (Not that I would expect my tormentors to know Normandy).
Then came the ORDEAL in a Vauxhall as heavy as a taxi. I was dumped in a seat where I immediately got itching and back pains, nowhere to park my false leg comfortably and above all else the steering wheel was so awkwardly placed that I ad the very utmost difficulty steering the car. The HORN was operated by a thing in the middle and I inadvertently operated it as I turned the wheel. I GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO MYSELF as my tormentors breathed down my neck and a woman repeatedly distracted me. I soon got hopelessly lost in the hospital grounds which have narrow rutted tarmac tracks as ill maintained as the road to the foot of Ben Hope with enormous potholes. I was soon in a state of acute panic and suffering progressive incapacitation due to the nagging pain in the back and SINISTER sensations of incipient cramp in both legs. My mental compass was spinning as if I was in a strange foreign city and I desperately wanted to stop and lie down as sensations in back and legs – as bad as my sporadic IBS – gripped me.
During the final Inquisition I was told basically that I was quite unfit to be on the road and one reason was that I GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO MYSELF. This reminds me of equally hurtful interviews where I was made to be worse than bad or mad because when provoked as I was most certainly on that occasion I “GO TO PIECES” and the act of TALKING TO ONESELF marked me out as a madman in the Victorian definition of “maniac”. So I left, shattered and later on Blackford Hill I was assailed by chest pains which have worried me ever since.
The imminent sharp rise in motor fuel prices will price many people off the roads and confine them effectively to corridors served by such public transport that still exists. It will pace large areas of Britain OUT OF BOUNDS unless people have vehicles as thrifty as the Aixam. I must now make observations on the behaviour of the Junta. I am drawing up a Civil Servants Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome in support of the O’Donnell Bill which will deal in depth with the ingrained prejudice so rife in high places.
We Aspies have NO HOPE of ever satisfying authoritarians because out autonomous fear related reflexes take over then confronted with people like the Junta at SMART. No mater how skilled we are at any given task when pursuing it unharassed we will break down sooner or later if people are breathing down our necks. As Debi Brown has explained so eloquently we with AS are readily overwhelmed by everyday input overloads. Consider me proceeding along the Mid-Clacks road even in driving rain. I have a mental map of its entirety which is instantly updated when I spot road works. I flow along it at 60 KPH in daylight or 40 KPH after dark as automatically as I walk down Dunfermline’s streets. I am alert and spot other road users and indeed stray animals. When I encountered football hooligans in Falkirk I assumed that they would deliberately leap into my path to provoke an accident or jump onto the bonnet and smash the windscreen. On that occasion I readily imagined being assaulted by successive groups of drunken hooligans and my Amygdalic Shunt was taking over as I crawled past fearful with every good reason that the hooligans would push the Aixam over and beat me to death. These actual incidents illustrate how I behave in the road. It is acting according to PRESUMPTIONS on the part of other road users in such a way that I an always in full control. When incapacitated by input overloads I show it by such ways as talking to myself and of course involuntary SWEARING. I recall a few incidents of this sort where I was in severe discomfort at the limits of language. My ordeal in the Vauxhall was a bad as these incidents. My tormentors could no more understand my pain than Arab terrorists who torture kidnapped Europeans nor can they accept that AS is NOT a moral failing NOR is it to be equated as they did with MENTAL DEFICIENCY but it is a differentness of brain function that most emphatically gives rise to such fail-safe behaviours on the road as the Falkirk incident where of course I gave the hooligans a wide berth. SO we Aspies are forced into collisions with the Heavy Hand of Authority or rather its steamroller and we are crushed and dumped by the wayside.
I could suggest a fair test whereby I would have been followed in my Aixam along FAMILIAR roads near my home by someone with a video camera. Now I have to underscore the absolutely fundamental difference between thrifty microbars and ordinary vehicles. Microcars will HAVE TO SUPPLANT ordinary cars simply because of their fuel economy! On the Continent NO PROBLEM as they are already ubiquitous. IF I can ONLY regain my licence by passing in a Vauxhall as heavy as a taxi I am doomed to fail and I will be denied access to the Highlands for the rest of my life. Countless thousands of elderly and disabled motorists will be denied access to places without adequate public transport of forbidden to drive thrifty microcars for such insulting reasons as they are TOO SLOW! My Strict Consequentialism states that we have an inalienable right to go wherever we wish in thrifty microcars but of course this logic is as alien to our masters as the principles of flight to unlettered aborigines. We must therefore FIGHT for our right to move thriftily from place to place.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library 19-3-2010
I am however bound to declare that when I rode scooters I was frequently obliged to stop so as to restore my circulation even in summer and I can NEVER NOW ride a scooter any distance because of the wind chill factor. For all of my adult life I have gone on strenuous Sunday hikes in beauty spots and this is a crucial element in my personal quality of life. The blue Aixam enabled me to reach Durness and climb remote mountains. Without it I can no longer reach most of the Highlands. It is the MEANS TO REACH the Highlands NOT an end in itself.
DVLA have long contested my right to drive Aixams which are in Britain “heavy quadricycles” but taxed at the same rate as Minis though weighing under 400 Kg and having 450cc GLOWPLUG engines (NOT repeat NOT diesel) which is sadly their Achilles heels. After about 2,000 miles the green Aixam became as much an extension of my body as my artificial leg. Apart from a few misjudgements I have now covered 17,000 uneventful miles at MODEST speeds at 100 mpg. I am acutely cognisant of such matters as the 3.5m turning radius and all that flows from the pig-headed refusal of the British to accept metrication such as misjudging how much fuel is left. We but fuel by the LITRE but it is still MILES from place to place! And yet Government maps are calibrated in km squares!
I was very in edge when I arrived at the SMART centre having been delayed on the bus ride. I was made to play with puzzles of the sort given to very small children. I identified road signs and had to read a passage about a Shrewsbury man as though I was a foreign immigrant required to locate English county towns. I had caused offence by wearing a smart jacket, clean white shirt but khaki home made Gripperbreeks that securely hold my false leg on WITHOUT NHS straps that come asunder. I continued to cause offence with my Daily Telegraph English. I was grilled about my personal habits and why I owned a funny foreign car. I was finally to cause the very utmost offence by saying that I NEVER INTEND to buy a full size car because it is too costly to run!
The Junta who were grilling me acted in a very Kafkaesque manner. One of them had heard about Asperger’s Syndrome and shut me up. I was forced to tell them why I had no job since 1971 and why I had been admitted twice to mental hospitals and something about my father’s constant denigrations that caused them to frown, then I had to admit that I suffer badly from bronchitis and in 1952 was admitted to hospital and in bed through the severe winter of 1953 and also how cigarette smoke and motor fumes made me ill. As thought I was admitting that I had convictions for sex offences! A Levantine-looking man with very badly accented English mixed up ULLAPOOL with LIVERPOOL when I was forced to confess that I had driven twice from Ullapool to Dunfermline taking 14 hours on each journey and they refused to accept that the largest city I had driven through is Dunfermline itself or that 95% of my journeys are to the Highlands. I could NOT satisfy them because I have no intention whatsoever of driving in to cities and all who take to the roads must in their eyes be capable of surviving the ordeal of driving through Edinburgh or London – which is the most squalid city in Europe? Perhaps Edinburgh. Britain is not France where octogenarian grandmothers drive sentry boxes on wheels happily up and down steep hills in Normandy (Not that I would expect my tormentors to know Normandy).
Then came the ORDEAL in a Vauxhall as heavy as a taxi. I was dumped in a seat where I immediately got itching and back pains, nowhere to park my false leg comfortably and above all else the steering wheel was so awkwardly placed that I ad the very utmost difficulty steering the car. The HORN was operated by a thing in the middle and I inadvertently operated it as I turned the wheel. I GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO MYSELF as my tormentors breathed down my neck and a woman repeatedly distracted me. I soon got hopelessly lost in the hospital grounds which have narrow rutted tarmac tracks as ill maintained as the road to the foot of Ben Hope with enormous potholes. I was soon in a state of acute panic and suffering progressive incapacitation due to the nagging pain in the back and SINISTER sensations of incipient cramp in both legs. My mental compass was spinning as if I was in a strange foreign city and I desperately wanted to stop and lie down as sensations in back and legs – as bad as my sporadic IBS – gripped me.
During the final Inquisition I was told basically that I was quite unfit to be on the road and one reason was that I GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO MYSELF. This reminds me of equally hurtful interviews where I was made to be worse than bad or mad because when provoked as I was most certainly on that occasion I “GO TO PIECES” and the act of TALKING TO ONESELF marked me out as a madman in the Victorian definition of “maniac”. So I left, shattered and later on Blackford Hill I was assailed by chest pains which have worried me ever since.
The imminent sharp rise in motor fuel prices will price many people off the roads and confine them effectively to corridors served by such public transport that still exists. It will pace large areas of Britain OUT OF BOUNDS unless people have vehicles as thrifty as the Aixam. I must now make observations on the behaviour of the Junta. I am drawing up a Civil Servants Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome in support of the O’Donnell Bill which will deal in depth with the ingrained prejudice so rife in high places.
We Aspies have NO HOPE of ever satisfying authoritarians because out autonomous fear related reflexes take over then confronted with people like the Junta at SMART. No mater how skilled we are at any given task when pursuing it unharassed we will break down sooner or later if people are breathing down our necks. As Debi Brown has explained so eloquently we with AS are readily overwhelmed by everyday input overloads. Consider me proceeding along the Mid-Clacks road even in driving rain. I have a mental map of its entirety which is instantly updated when I spot road works. I flow along it at 60 KPH in daylight or 40 KPH after dark as automatically as I walk down Dunfermline’s streets. I am alert and spot other road users and indeed stray animals. When I encountered football hooligans in Falkirk I assumed that they would deliberately leap into my path to provoke an accident or jump onto the bonnet and smash the windscreen. On that occasion I readily imagined being assaulted by successive groups of drunken hooligans and my Amygdalic Shunt was taking over as I crawled past fearful with every good reason that the hooligans would push the Aixam over and beat me to death. These actual incidents illustrate how I behave in the road. It is acting according to PRESUMPTIONS on the part of other road users in such a way that I an always in full control. When incapacitated by input overloads I show it by such ways as talking to myself and of course involuntary SWEARING. I recall a few incidents of this sort where I was in severe discomfort at the limits of language. My ordeal in the Vauxhall was a bad as these incidents. My tormentors could no more understand my pain than Arab terrorists who torture kidnapped Europeans nor can they accept that AS is NOT a moral failing NOR is it to be equated as they did with MENTAL DEFICIENCY but it is a differentness of brain function that most emphatically gives rise to such fail-safe behaviours on the road as the Falkirk incident where of course I gave the hooligans a wide berth. SO we Aspies are forced into collisions with the Heavy Hand of Authority or rather its steamroller and we are crushed and dumped by the wayside.
I could suggest a fair test whereby I would have been followed in my Aixam along FAMILIAR roads near my home by someone with a video camera. Now I have to underscore the absolutely fundamental difference between thrifty microbars and ordinary vehicles. Microcars will HAVE TO SUPPLANT ordinary cars simply because of their fuel economy! On the Continent NO PROBLEM as they are already ubiquitous. IF I can ONLY regain my licence by passing in a Vauxhall as heavy as a taxi I am doomed to fail and I will be denied access to the Highlands for the rest of my life. Countless thousands of elderly and disabled motorists will be denied access to places without adequate public transport of forbidden to drive thrifty microcars for such insulting reasons as they are TOO SLOW! My Strict Consequentialism states that we have an inalienable right to go wherever we wish in thrifty microcars but of course this logic is as alien to our masters as the principles of flight to unlettered aborigines. We must therefore FIGHT for our right to move thriftily from place to place.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library 19-3-2010
Wednesday 13 January 2010
Kelvinbridge
The second most hurtful experience of my life happened at Kelvinbridge on Glasgow's Great Western Road soon after I graduated. I was equipped to go climbing and I was waiting for a Glencoe bound bus when I was set upon by plain clothes police who dragged me into a van and dumped me in a cell at Partick police station without ANY explanation. Then driven to Woodilee mental hospital where I was injected with tranquilliser and put into a dormitory. I had fortunately a 10p on me and rang my old university tutor. About 2 days later I was driven back to my lodgings at Mrs Lesko's in Wilton St (Q.V. "Catholic Landladies account") where I promptly changed into my very smartest clothes and grabbed intelligent books but I HAD TO GO BACK TO WOODILEE! So 2 days later I left with a wad of handwritten material about my experiences and was given the bus fare back to Glasgow and a pair of slippers!
I rightly feared that I would be the butt of scorn if I disclosed anything but my father got to know and how he rubbed salt into ancient wounds by his inquisition into every pettifogging detail of the affair and why I wanted to go CLIMBING! As though it was in some way a CRIMINAL OFFENCE for a man of 30 to be dressed as a climber should and be waiting for a bus to Glencoe and be in possession of TWO cameras and the Hikers map of Glencoe!
I later attended meetings of fellow victims after the Herald disclosed that right across Strathclyde people were being picked up by the police and falsely incriminated. There was at that time (and may be still) a Section of the Mental Health Act that encouraged malicious people to get their HATED ONES "put away" in mental hospitals for flimsy reasons and SO BESMIRCHED ever after become disqualified from all but menial work. Now I had quite frequent clashes with Mrs Lesko and it appears that she lied to the police that I was using drugs. When I deal with her I will narrate all the ludicrous things that happened at 143 Wilton St between 1972 and 1975. I learn that in Strathclyde there have been many similar instances of the police abusing their powers. As with the Jews in Nazi Germany people are far too afraid to complain or deceive themselves that they have actually broken the law! This includes all those hapless people who would be very embarrassed indeed to recount pettifogging naughtiness as small children. Like myself they are convinced that they are dangerous sex-maniacs because they were curious about sexual matters whren they were young.
I draw upon "Kelvinbridge" for the Andrew Sinclair Stage Monologue, its narrative version, and a story called Mike Mellor's Mindquake where two men in my storyline are wrongfully detained in mental hospitals. Here the reader or viewer has to feel the leading character's pain and bewilderment whilst the climax disclosures prod the reader into thinking why cruelties meted out to innocent people in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia are permitted to happen in so called free Britain.
I rightly feared that I would be the butt of scorn if I disclosed anything but my father got to know and how he rubbed salt into ancient wounds by his inquisition into every pettifogging detail of the affair and why I wanted to go CLIMBING! As though it was in some way a CRIMINAL OFFENCE for a man of 30 to be dressed as a climber should and be waiting for a bus to Glencoe and be in possession of TWO cameras and the Hikers map of Glencoe!
I later attended meetings of fellow victims after the Herald disclosed that right across Strathclyde people were being picked up by the police and falsely incriminated. There was at that time (and may be still) a Section of the Mental Health Act that encouraged malicious people to get their HATED ONES "put away" in mental hospitals for flimsy reasons and SO BESMIRCHED ever after become disqualified from all but menial work. Now I had quite frequent clashes with Mrs Lesko and it appears that she lied to the police that I was using drugs. When I deal with her I will narrate all the ludicrous things that happened at 143 Wilton St between 1972 and 1975. I learn that in Strathclyde there have been many similar instances of the police abusing their powers. As with the Jews in Nazi Germany people are far too afraid to complain or deceive themselves that they have actually broken the law! This includes all those hapless people who would be very embarrassed indeed to recount pettifogging naughtiness as small children. Like myself they are convinced that they are dangerous sex-maniacs because they were curious about sexual matters whren they were young.
I draw upon "Kelvinbridge" for the Andrew Sinclair Stage Monologue, its narrative version, and a story called Mike Mellor's Mindquake where two men in my storyline are wrongfully detained in mental hospitals. Here the reader or viewer has to feel the leading character's pain and bewilderment whilst the climax disclosures prod the reader into thinking why cruelties meted out to innocent people in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia are permitted to happen in so called free Britain.
Tuesday 12 January 2010
Stirling Green
This is an account of by far the most hurtful experience of my life. It took place on 11-9-1997 when I went to Stirling to photograph a pageant to commemorate the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. I went by bus from Cumbernauld on a dour wet day and I had on me 5 cameras including a Zenith which was to land me in court. I also had an auxiliary lens that when attached to the Zenith gives an effective focal length of about 18mm, and spare films and HIKER’S COMPASS attached to an Agfa Silette’s ever ready case.
My goal was to take a comprehensive set of the pageant so as to create work for people with mental problems. Masterprints of people in period costume would be recopied by the workforce and the images attached to a wide range of goods sold at a stall in Stirling and that would provide TRAINING IN SHOPKEEPING for people with mental problems. I am bound to declare that I discovered that the target beneficiaries of my shoestring philanthropy lacked the intelligence to perform tasks I had accomplished in primary school. They had no motivation to improve themselves.
Stirling Green between the bridges is where in former times the people of Stirling gathered for sadistic entertainments. The King’s enemies – chiefly religious dissidents known as the Covenanters – were hurled off the old Bridge to drown and the public hurled missiles called stirls – dead cats, manure, rotten vegetables – at the drowning victims. This is how Stirling got its name but Roman geographers named it Mangiodunum.
It was about 5pm and the light was poor, the o only dry spot at Stirling Green was next to the New Bridge. There I had to rewind the Zenith inside a Changing bag. Now readers the Zenith was the bottom-of-the-range Single Lens reflex and I believe that it is still in production. It was often a 21st birthday gift for young men. Despite its design faults it can yield photographs of exemplary quality. The rewind mechanism on this one was inoperative so the procedure STILL IS to put the camera inside the Changing bag and zip up the bag and undo the back and wind the film into the cassette by hand twiddling. I had done this very often with any number of cameras in such very public places as outside Westminster Abbey and in aircraft and in trains and in a taxi and even in Red Square Moscow and in the shade of the Parthenon’s columns. As I undid the back there was a commotion from behind and I was surrounded by police personnel. I said that I was rewinding a film inside the changing bag. A policewoman picked up the £50 auxiliary lens and threw it in the air and it landed in the mud. I can’t exactly remember what I said but I had the tone of an irate schoolmaster.
I was dressed in a pair of smart home made Gripperbreeks that hold the false leg on securely a white shirt and a tweed jacket. I was NO TRAMP but looked like a well dressed Edwardian landowner. I carried a rucksack with food and other impedimenta just as I do when abroad at some historic site.
I stood my ground I was doing nothing unlawful whatsoever. The operation of rewinding a camera inside a changing bag cannot under any circumstances harm anybody. I wanted to reload the Zenith and photograph the pageant before the light faded. I was seized from behind and fell over. The arresting constables laughed as my false leg became detached inside and I rolled in the mud screaming with pain. I was called a paedophile to my face and dragged into a police van in front of a huge crowd. Then driven to the police HQ in the Glasgow Road where a man at the desk recognised me as the amputee hillwalker from Cumbernauld.
On the journey the 2 policewomen who had played with my equipment made lucid smutty jokes which did not connect, then I was asked which mental hospital I had absconded from! My tormenters jabbered away in a Low German dialect larded with unspellable noises, which passes for English in Stirling and nearby towns. I had my spectacles confiscated and I was dragged into an office where splodges poked instruments at me. After that I was DEBAGGED and thrown into a cell. I lost track of time and eventually had my clothes returned but all my impedimenta was confiscated. I dressed and put on my glasses and managed to get the very last bus of all to Cumbernauld. My return ticket was NOT honoured because it was another company’s bus. I remember telling a senior policeman that I suffered from PHOBOGENY which is Greek for Born with Fear (It is MY neologism!) and being questioned at great length over the Hikers Compass and the Auxiliary lens which they thought was a TELEPHOTO lens but if any of them had the sense to look through its back they would have seen an upside down view equivalent to 18mm – exactly the opposite of a telephoto lens and it is clearly marked “X 0.42 Supersize Converter Lens”. I had caused the very utmost offence by describing every item of photographic equipment as an auctioneer or camera sales man would. I got the impression that the Stirling police have the intelligence of 10 year olds and that was underscored on other occasions when they made howlers that caused me to gasp like mislocating Balquhidder in the Borders and transposing DUNS with DOUNE and above all else calling me Mr CHRISTOPHER after my derelict middle forename.
Following a sleepless night I went straight to the Charlie Reid Centre in Glasgow where the manger was very helpful and put me in touch with a solicitor. I was later charged with MASTURBATION IN PUBLIC. I frequently thought of suicide before successive court appearances and repeated adjournments. I particularly remember how I decided to walk myself to death in the Cairngorms. I was too ashamed to talk about the affair to even my sister until quite later and my brother predictably made cruel crassly dismissive remarks when I eventually told him what had happened.
The solicitor had also been given a Zenith on his 21st birthday and was very au fait with the Zenith’s foibles. I had submitted a letter of explanation to the Procurator Fiscal and enclosed at least a dozen Zenith views of the old Bridge taken through the auxiliary lens at an effective focal length of about 8mm which show the bridge grotesquely banana shaped. These I believed would be sufficient proof of my good faith and innocence but these photographs were NEVER RETURNED.
The Hearings all took place in the Sheriff Court and I bumped into a reporter there and I called myself a successor to Franz Kafka with every good reason. Eventually the charges were thrown out but I had a hefty legal bull which I contested and I don’t want to dwell on the ultimate outcome. Later I tried to piece together why my innocent behaviour brought on the affair. Two people from High Wycombe were said to have complained about my act. NOBODY EVER MADE AN ISSUE about Changing-Bags in London, Moscow, Athens and in trains and aircraft in full view of many bystanders.
I had corresponded with one John Dow, manager of the Stirling university bookshop who was once in charge of the Stirling Model Railway Club. I had sent him monochrome enlargements of my unique model rains with my name and address on each, but they were never returned. In 1997 he and others were charged with offences to do with boys and a teenage boy who was a male prostitute was caught with Dow in central Stirling. Round Britain model railway clubs were raided and a whole ring of culprits were brought in justice. The hobby became so besmirched by this affair that anybody professing an interest was liable to be tarred with a very dirty brush indeed. I can surmise that when the police raided Dow’s home they found my photographs and of course they could no more make sense of the Lorn and Lochaber Railway’s engines with their Hornby couplings than understand how an aeroplane files.
I had been a frequent participant in CND marches all round Britain. Dressed in my smart Gripperbreeks I would be at the head of marches taking photographs and been FILMED so would have been readily identified by my costume and role as a photographer. A reliable source stated that a NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONVOY was due to pass over the New Bridge bound for an army camp near Comrie. It had been delayed on the Great North Road but would have reached Stirling at precisely the time I was arrested... i.e. somewhere near St Ninian’s Roundabout as the reliable witness had tracked its movements and it in fact crossed the New Bridge and took the byway that branches from Dunblane North Junction onto the road through the Military Restricted Zone north of Braco. It was seen at Greenloaning by another observer. In the fading light it would have been technically possible for me to photograph the Convoy at 1/30 sec at f2.
We read of political activists being falsely incriminated for such offences as shoplifting to banish them from polite society and all too often this comes to light when their NAMESAKES are excluded from employment. Now what better way of discrediting any strident activist than to get him convicted for masturbation in public! There would be my likeness on footage of almost every march since the one in Lewes/Sussex in 1981. I dropped out of CND after suffering FOOD POISONING at the Faslane Peace Camp. I have every good reason to believe that somewhere there is a file about me that describes me as a Threat to Society! Since there have been equally scandalous reports on recent years about the so called subversive activities of now deceased artists and musicians and film producers.
There were two previous clashes with the police in Stirling in my student days. Once I was marooned in the town after missing a bus and the police said that they would find something to charge me with after I was found shivering on a seat in the small hours of a March morning. The second occasion was when I had to start my Vega scooter by bump starting after it had shed its kickstart pedal. I freewheeled it down a steep street until the engine burst into life and the headlight lit up. I managed to keep the engine running during the period of detention and so ride back to Glasgow.
I approached the Herald, Stirling Observer, Scotsman and photographic magazines with accounts of the affair but got no joy. The Manager of the Charlie Reid Centre drew my attention to previous crass incompetence in the Stirling Force and of course the terrible tragedy at Dunblane arose entirely because of the CRASS CRIMINAL DERELICTION OF DUTY on the part of the senior policeman who allowed Thomas Hamilton to acquire an arsenal. In the recent past I was harassed by police at Dollar for wearing shabby clothes on a SUNDAY and being in possession of a fixed-focus semi-adjustable camera that can ONLY operate outdoors in daylight. On that occasion I met a couple who disclosed that a female relative had been burdened with a criminal record mark my words after MISSING THE LAST BUS FROM STIRLING and being found sheltering somewhere in the town! They said, there is an anonymous greysuit with MILITARY RANK who overlords the Stirling police force and is the arbiter of “public decency”. He decides what is “offensive” so anybody with noticeable peculiarities is picked upon. After the Dollar incident I am fearful that I shall be arrested anywhere within the Stirling police area stretching from Clacks to Tyndrum and the Trossachs simply for my necessary riding attire and old cameras and oh GOVERNMENT MAPS and a HIKER’S COMPASS.
The Queen’s Peace is a very tattered cloak. Scotland increasingly resembles Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia in that our liberties have been stolen from us for flimsy pretexts and we are required to submit to UNWRITTEN LAWS made up by such anonymous people as the Sturmbahnfuhrer in charge of the Stirling police force. The “Amateur Photographer” chronicles police harassment of photographers right across Britain such as of the Austrian father and son flung into prison for photographing London buses! YET the tragedy in Barwell arose because CHILDREN ARE SACRED COWS ABOVE THE LAW and I now read of an elderly lady born in Germany who is burdened with a criminal record merely for TOUCHING her schoolboy tormentor. Now if I describe Stirling as a social cesspool where 2,000 heroin addicts menace innocent people and the residents speak a Low German dialect larded with unspellable noises, then I am sure that there will be uproar but I would do anything in my power to move people with distressing peculiarities RIGHT OUT OF STIRLING and that is the subject of further proposals to set up an Aspie community in Dorset.
As a writer it is my DUTY to describe exceedingly unpleasant events in all their distressing detail so I am submitting stories and perhaps a PLAY based on the most hurtful experience of my life – MY Nine Stroke Eleven of 1997 at Stirling Green.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library 2-10-2009
My goal was to take a comprehensive set of the pageant so as to create work for people with mental problems. Masterprints of people in period costume would be recopied by the workforce and the images attached to a wide range of goods sold at a stall in Stirling and that would provide TRAINING IN SHOPKEEPING for people with mental problems. I am bound to declare that I discovered that the target beneficiaries of my shoestring philanthropy lacked the intelligence to perform tasks I had accomplished in primary school. They had no motivation to improve themselves.
Stirling Green between the bridges is where in former times the people of Stirling gathered for sadistic entertainments. The King’s enemies – chiefly religious dissidents known as the Covenanters – were hurled off the old Bridge to drown and the public hurled missiles called stirls – dead cats, manure, rotten vegetables – at the drowning victims. This is how Stirling got its name but Roman geographers named it Mangiodunum.
It was about 5pm and the light was poor, the o only dry spot at Stirling Green was next to the New Bridge. There I had to rewind the Zenith inside a Changing bag. Now readers the Zenith was the bottom-of-the-range Single Lens reflex and I believe that it is still in production. It was often a 21st birthday gift for young men. Despite its design faults it can yield photographs of exemplary quality. The rewind mechanism on this one was inoperative so the procedure STILL IS to put the camera inside the Changing bag and zip up the bag and undo the back and wind the film into the cassette by hand twiddling. I had done this very often with any number of cameras in such very public places as outside Westminster Abbey and in aircraft and in trains and in a taxi and even in Red Square Moscow and in the shade of the Parthenon’s columns. As I undid the back there was a commotion from behind and I was surrounded by police personnel. I said that I was rewinding a film inside the changing bag. A policewoman picked up the £50 auxiliary lens and threw it in the air and it landed in the mud. I can’t exactly remember what I said but I had the tone of an irate schoolmaster.
I was dressed in a pair of smart home made Gripperbreeks that hold the false leg on securely a white shirt and a tweed jacket. I was NO TRAMP but looked like a well dressed Edwardian landowner. I carried a rucksack with food and other impedimenta just as I do when abroad at some historic site.
I stood my ground I was doing nothing unlawful whatsoever. The operation of rewinding a camera inside a changing bag cannot under any circumstances harm anybody. I wanted to reload the Zenith and photograph the pageant before the light faded. I was seized from behind and fell over. The arresting constables laughed as my false leg became detached inside and I rolled in the mud screaming with pain. I was called a paedophile to my face and dragged into a police van in front of a huge crowd. Then driven to the police HQ in the Glasgow Road where a man at the desk recognised me as the amputee hillwalker from Cumbernauld.
On the journey the 2 policewomen who had played with my equipment made lucid smutty jokes which did not connect, then I was asked which mental hospital I had absconded from! My tormenters jabbered away in a Low German dialect larded with unspellable noises, which passes for English in Stirling and nearby towns. I had my spectacles confiscated and I was dragged into an office where splodges poked instruments at me. After that I was DEBAGGED and thrown into a cell. I lost track of time and eventually had my clothes returned but all my impedimenta was confiscated. I dressed and put on my glasses and managed to get the very last bus of all to Cumbernauld. My return ticket was NOT honoured because it was another company’s bus. I remember telling a senior policeman that I suffered from PHOBOGENY which is Greek for Born with Fear (It is MY neologism!) and being questioned at great length over the Hikers Compass and the Auxiliary lens which they thought was a TELEPHOTO lens but if any of them had the sense to look through its back they would have seen an upside down view equivalent to 18mm – exactly the opposite of a telephoto lens and it is clearly marked “X 0.42 Supersize Converter Lens”. I had caused the very utmost offence by describing every item of photographic equipment as an auctioneer or camera sales man would. I got the impression that the Stirling police have the intelligence of 10 year olds and that was underscored on other occasions when they made howlers that caused me to gasp like mislocating Balquhidder in the Borders and transposing DUNS with DOUNE and above all else calling me Mr CHRISTOPHER after my derelict middle forename.
Following a sleepless night I went straight to the Charlie Reid Centre in Glasgow where the manger was very helpful and put me in touch with a solicitor. I was later charged with MASTURBATION IN PUBLIC. I frequently thought of suicide before successive court appearances and repeated adjournments. I particularly remember how I decided to walk myself to death in the Cairngorms. I was too ashamed to talk about the affair to even my sister until quite later and my brother predictably made cruel crassly dismissive remarks when I eventually told him what had happened.
The solicitor had also been given a Zenith on his 21st birthday and was very au fait with the Zenith’s foibles. I had submitted a letter of explanation to the Procurator Fiscal and enclosed at least a dozen Zenith views of the old Bridge taken through the auxiliary lens at an effective focal length of about 8mm which show the bridge grotesquely banana shaped. These I believed would be sufficient proof of my good faith and innocence but these photographs were NEVER RETURNED.
The Hearings all took place in the Sheriff Court and I bumped into a reporter there and I called myself a successor to Franz Kafka with every good reason. Eventually the charges were thrown out but I had a hefty legal bull which I contested and I don’t want to dwell on the ultimate outcome. Later I tried to piece together why my innocent behaviour brought on the affair. Two people from High Wycombe were said to have complained about my act. NOBODY EVER MADE AN ISSUE about Changing-Bags in London, Moscow, Athens and in trains and aircraft in full view of many bystanders.
I had corresponded with one John Dow, manager of the Stirling university bookshop who was once in charge of the Stirling Model Railway Club. I had sent him monochrome enlargements of my unique model rains with my name and address on each, but they were never returned. In 1997 he and others were charged with offences to do with boys and a teenage boy who was a male prostitute was caught with Dow in central Stirling. Round Britain model railway clubs were raided and a whole ring of culprits were brought in justice. The hobby became so besmirched by this affair that anybody professing an interest was liable to be tarred with a very dirty brush indeed. I can surmise that when the police raided Dow’s home they found my photographs and of course they could no more make sense of the Lorn and Lochaber Railway’s engines with their Hornby couplings than understand how an aeroplane files.
I had been a frequent participant in CND marches all round Britain. Dressed in my smart Gripperbreeks I would be at the head of marches taking photographs and been FILMED so would have been readily identified by my costume and role as a photographer. A reliable source stated that a NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONVOY was due to pass over the New Bridge bound for an army camp near Comrie. It had been delayed on the Great North Road but would have reached Stirling at precisely the time I was arrested... i.e. somewhere near St Ninian’s Roundabout as the reliable witness had tracked its movements and it in fact crossed the New Bridge and took the byway that branches from Dunblane North Junction onto the road through the Military Restricted Zone north of Braco. It was seen at Greenloaning by another observer. In the fading light it would have been technically possible for me to photograph the Convoy at 1/30 sec at f2.
We read of political activists being falsely incriminated for such offences as shoplifting to banish them from polite society and all too often this comes to light when their NAMESAKES are excluded from employment. Now what better way of discrediting any strident activist than to get him convicted for masturbation in public! There would be my likeness on footage of almost every march since the one in Lewes/Sussex in 1981. I dropped out of CND after suffering FOOD POISONING at the Faslane Peace Camp. I have every good reason to believe that somewhere there is a file about me that describes me as a Threat to Society! Since there have been equally scandalous reports on recent years about the so called subversive activities of now deceased artists and musicians and film producers.
There were two previous clashes with the police in Stirling in my student days. Once I was marooned in the town after missing a bus and the police said that they would find something to charge me with after I was found shivering on a seat in the small hours of a March morning. The second occasion was when I had to start my Vega scooter by bump starting after it had shed its kickstart pedal. I freewheeled it down a steep street until the engine burst into life and the headlight lit up. I managed to keep the engine running during the period of detention and so ride back to Glasgow.
I approached the Herald, Stirling Observer, Scotsman and photographic magazines with accounts of the affair but got no joy. The Manager of the Charlie Reid Centre drew my attention to previous crass incompetence in the Stirling Force and of course the terrible tragedy at Dunblane arose entirely because of the CRASS CRIMINAL DERELICTION OF DUTY on the part of the senior policeman who allowed Thomas Hamilton to acquire an arsenal. In the recent past I was harassed by police at Dollar for wearing shabby clothes on a SUNDAY and being in possession of a fixed-focus semi-adjustable camera that can ONLY operate outdoors in daylight. On that occasion I met a couple who disclosed that a female relative had been burdened with a criminal record mark my words after MISSING THE LAST BUS FROM STIRLING and being found sheltering somewhere in the town! They said, there is an anonymous greysuit with MILITARY RANK who overlords the Stirling police force and is the arbiter of “public decency”. He decides what is “offensive” so anybody with noticeable peculiarities is picked upon. After the Dollar incident I am fearful that I shall be arrested anywhere within the Stirling police area stretching from Clacks to Tyndrum and the Trossachs simply for my necessary riding attire and old cameras and oh GOVERNMENT MAPS and a HIKER’S COMPASS.
The Queen’s Peace is a very tattered cloak. Scotland increasingly resembles Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia in that our liberties have been stolen from us for flimsy pretexts and we are required to submit to UNWRITTEN LAWS made up by such anonymous people as the Sturmbahnfuhrer in charge of the Stirling police force. The “Amateur Photographer” chronicles police harassment of photographers right across Britain such as of the Austrian father and son flung into prison for photographing London buses! YET the tragedy in Barwell arose because CHILDREN ARE SACRED COWS ABOVE THE LAW and I now read of an elderly lady born in Germany who is burdened with a criminal record merely for TOUCHING her schoolboy tormentor. Now if I describe Stirling as a social cesspool where 2,000 heroin addicts menace innocent people and the residents speak a Low German dialect larded with unspellable noises, then I am sure that there will be uproar but I would do anything in my power to move people with distressing peculiarities RIGHT OUT OF STIRLING and that is the subject of further proposals to set up an Aspie community in Dorset.
As a writer it is my DUTY to describe exceedingly unpleasant events in all their distressing detail so I am submitting stories and perhaps a PLAY based on the most hurtful experience of my life – MY Nine Stroke Eleven of 1997 at Stirling Green.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library 2-10-2009
Tuesday 5 January 2010
Hurtful Experience Taxonomy of Brian Brodie
I'm Brian Brodie, and following the Taxonomy of Hurtful Experiences that David posted, here is a similar taxonomy of my own. This is to back up that taxonomy another one on how Aspies can be vulnerable to hurtful, even mindquake experiences. Apart from my innate vulnerability, I appreciate sometimes it's due to theory of mind.
1. Housing/neighbours. Biggest section and I think deservedly so, as time and time again I have struggled badly to cope with the housing I've lived in and the neighbours there, because of repeatedly ending up beside antisocial neighbours. Usually the sort of neighbours, indeed, who get evicted or are in danger of it.
Take the last four addresses I lived at:
Address 1: Here I had a next door neighbour who didn't like me very much. For some reason he was always saying I was standing outside the Playhouse early in the mornings, when I was never near there in the mornings. He must have thought I was hiding something, and so I was a liar. (Given the location perhaps there was a suspicion - and intolerance - of homosexuality?)
Then one night I went to the pub across the road and said next door neighbour was me. He assumed a threatening manner of approach towards me, starting to manhandle me, causing me to fear assault, and accusing me of everything under the sun. Including a paedophile - which is what sticks out in my mind. Everyone else in the pub could see he was being out of order and was trying to stop him. But I was so traumatised I put my flat up for sale, and bought another one (address 2) to move to.
Address 2: Had to put up with extremely noisy neighbours below, and them and their friends loitering in the stair using drugs almost every day. This and other desturctive behaviour went on until they were evicted. After that I lived in a period of peace, unique to the period under discussion, until moving on because I was trying to trade up the property ladder.
Address 3: Again, extremely noisy neighbours above, groups of youths often loitering outside, my windows regularly being panned with stones. Again I was living in very little peace. That family was then evicted but replacement neighbours were not much better.
Address 4: Where I am now, and by far the most traumatic living experience I have had. Again, a neighbouring flat is home to a very antisocial family, and youths are loitering beside my flat (residents of neighbouring flat plus friends) almost every night, often drinking/smoking/drug using, usually committing horrendous disturbances. Vandalism on many occasions, even urinating in stair. I have had people waiting outside my flat with a baseball bat. I am suffering severe mental health problems due to living here, especially as this situation has not improved in 2 years. Hoping to sell up and move soon. Apparently the household concerned is in danger of eviction though.
Much of the above has happened due to intense pressure from parents and church members (taxonomies of their own) for home ownership, despite my better judgment and freedom of choice (above experiences speak of how limited my options have been), but being unable to resist in the face of how heavy people's persuasion has been.
2. Parents: Ever since adoption as a young child I have been scared of them, due to the tendency of aggression of my father especially. Serious emotional and verbal abuse, even sometimes physical. Even as an adult I may be sometimes prone to that (e.g. I have been physically assaulted on account of not having had children).
It's not that there aren't good times with them, but overall I'm very scared.
3. School bullying. Out of several primary schools I attended, one in particular (in Perth) was especially bad. At high school there were times it was particularly horrendous and traumatic.
4. Work experiences. Most jobs I have had have featured hurtful experiences. First job after graduation from university saw me coerced into working at least 13 hour days every single weekday (at least I got weekends off) and then sacked for alleged non-performance and forced to sign a gagging clause. I was, of course, burned out. Another job saw me experience over 4 years of emotional and verbal abuse from the owners, two brothers with whom I had to work very closely, which decimated me emotionally. Fortunately my current job, while it still has its social problems, is a far better environment and I'm happy, content and settled there.
5. My love-shyness could be identified as leading to problems and hurtful experiences. For example it's no doubt responsible for some of the trauma from neighbours.
6. Church life. Something I was really into for a period, and I won't deny it really helped me in life for a period, but it's an area where I've often felt betrayed too. For example, I was humiliated by my minister at a Christian conference over my Asperger's, as he harassed me into a healing session on account of AS. It didn't work and rightly so. I am on edge with many church members as I sense I'm being patronised by many of them. Many are disparaging behind my back (so I'm told by a friends) about my Asperger's.
7. I went through a phase where I was very into attending nightclubs, hoping it would be a way to meet females. I attended them alone as I didn't really have any social circle at that time, but that must have led to problems. I didn't seem to be popular with many females - hardened female clubbers who would tell me to fuck off etc., and thought a love-shy like me should get a life. My clubbing phase ended when a group of guys targeted me wishing to assault me, because they assumed I was a paedophile. I was taken (part of the way) home by police for my own safety.
These are the main things I can think of for now, though this can be expanded more.
Brian Brodie
1. Housing/neighbours. Biggest section and I think deservedly so, as time and time again I have struggled badly to cope with the housing I've lived in and the neighbours there, because of repeatedly ending up beside antisocial neighbours. Usually the sort of neighbours, indeed, who get evicted or are in danger of it.
Take the last four addresses I lived at:
Address 1: Here I had a next door neighbour who didn't like me very much. For some reason he was always saying I was standing outside the Playhouse early in the mornings, when I was never near there in the mornings. He must have thought I was hiding something, and so I was a liar. (Given the location perhaps there was a suspicion - and intolerance - of homosexuality?)
Then one night I went to the pub across the road and said next door neighbour was me. He assumed a threatening manner of approach towards me, starting to manhandle me, causing me to fear assault, and accusing me of everything under the sun. Including a paedophile - which is what sticks out in my mind. Everyone else in the pub could see he was being out of order and was trying to stop him. But I was so traumatised I put my flat up for sale, and bought another one (address 2) to move to.
Address 2: Had to put up with extremely noisy neighbours below, and them and their friends loitering in the stair using drugs almost every day. This and other desturctive behaviour went on until they were evicted. After that I lived in a period of peace, unique to the period under discussion, until moving on because I was trying to trade up the property ladder.
Address 3: Again, extremely noisy neighbours above, groups of youths often loitering outside, my windows regularly being panned with stones. Again I was living in very little peace. That family was then evicted but replacement neighbours were not much better.
Address 4: Where I am now, and by far the most traumatic living experience I have had. Again, a neighbouring flat is home to a very antisocial family, and youths are loitering beside my flat (residents of neighbouring flat plus friends) almost every night, often drinking/smoking/drug using, usually committing horrendous disturbances. Vandalism on many occasions, even urinating in stair. I have had people waiting outside my flat with a baseball bat. I am suffering severe mental health problems due to living here, especially as this situation has not improved in 2 years. Hoping to sell up and move soon. Apparently the household concerned is in danger of eviction though.
Much of the above has happened due to intense pressure from parents and church members (taxonomies of their own) for home ownership, despite my better judgment and freedom of choice (above experiences speak of how limited my options have been), but being unable to resist in the face of how heavy people's persuasion has been.
2. Parents: Ever since adoption as a young child I have been scared of them, due to the tendency of aggression of my father especially. Serious emotional and verbal abuse, even sometimes physical. Even as an adult I may be sometimes prone to that (e.g. I have been physically assaulted on account of not having had children).
It's not that there aren't good times with them, but overall I'm very scared.
3. School bullying. Out of several primary schools I attended, one in particular (in Perth) was especially bad. At high school there were times it was particularly horrendous and traumatic.
4. Work experiences. Most jobs I have had have featured hurtful experiences. First job after graduation from university saw me coerced into working at least 13 hour days every single weekday (at least I got weekends off) and then sacked for alleged non-performance and forced to sign a gagging clause. I was, of course, burned out. Another job saw me experience over 4 years of emotional and verbal abuse from the owners, two brothers with whom I had to work very closely, which decimated me emotionally. Fortunately my current job, while it still has its social problems, is a far better environment and I'm happy, content and settled there.
5. My love-shyness could be identified as leading to problems and hurtful experiences. For example it's no doubt responsible for some of the trauma from neighbours.
6. Church life. Something I was really into for a period, and I won't deny it really helped me in life for a period, but it's an area where I've often felt betrayed too. For example, I was humiliated by my minister at a Christian conference over my Asperger's, as he harassed me into a healing session on account of AS. It didn't work and rightly so. I am on edge with many church members as I sense I'm being patronised by many of them. Many are disparaging behind my back (so I'm told by a friends) about my Asperger's.
7. I went through a phase where I was very into attending nightclubs, hoping it would be a way to meet females. I attended them alone as I didn't really have any social circle at that time, but that must have led to problems. I didn't seem to be popular with many females - hardened female clubbers who would tell me to fuck off etc., and thought a love-shy like me should get a life. My clubbing phase ended when a group of guys targeted me wishing to assault me, because they assumed I was a paedophile. I was taken (part of the way) home by police for my own safety.
These are the main things I can think of for now, though this can be expanded more.
Brian Brodie
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