Days Of Gratitude - Hoop Dancing, Cardinals, Cafes, Art And A Little Revelation

The gratitude diary continues into the ninth month of the year.  Two-thirds of the way through.

These were four days in Newcastle between a time away that was wanted and a time away that in so many ways isn't wanted.  As I write this I am still away for that time away and look forward to being home.  It's a necessary time away but a sad and difficult one and it got more sad than expected.  It's all part of life, and I am now gaining a life that I want to live and live to the full.  That's not something I could have said not too many years ago.

Four days.  A lull.  A time that felt a bit unreal.  And a time that demonstrates my current zeal to live.  Days of trying new things and going to new places.  Some of them got listed in the diary.

The day after this I left home for Sussex to help with the final clearing and selling of what was the home of my parents and which was my home too - my only childhood home.  On the day that this post is published I will be leaving that house for the last time.  It's pretty empty now and doesn't feel like my parents' house now.  Contents have gone to the tip, to family, to charity shops, and some to refugees.  More will be taken for family and refugees very soon and the remainder will be cleared by a house clearance firm.

I hope that the new owners and/or residents love it there.  My parents moved there just a few years after getting married and never moved even though they considered it several times and there were a couple of periods of looking at lots of other houses.  We came quite close to moving once but the house we wanted was taken off the market.  My mother said it was good that we didn't move.  Finances wouldn't have worked out well if there was any larger mortgage to pay off.  So they stayed in that house and made it a good home, filled with the things they loved.

So.  Four days, between the joy of Greenbelt and the non-joy of the job-nobody-really-wants-to-do-but-most-people-have-to-at-some-point.

September 1st

Grateful to have taken the plunge.

Grateful to have tried something new.

At Greenbelt I stood and watched a guy play with a hoop. Returning home I find notice of a hoop dance workshop once more.

I have heard of these workshops since they began. I wanted to try. I couldn't.

This time I went for it in full knowledge of my unfitness, lack of balance, stiffness, and of having not really played with a hoop since I was six and was pretty ridiculed at school for being so crap at it.

Yep. Ridiculed. And wounded.

One more kick towards the darkness.

I am grateful that tonight I played again.

One more caress back into the light.

Yeah. I can't do it. Or much of it. I could begin to do a couple of things.

But I can't set a hoop spinning round my middle without it falling to the floor.

Yet.

Yet is a word I didn't used to use of my lack of a skill.

Yet.

I will play with a hoop again. And see what happens.

Does anyone have nice hoops they don't want? I think regular play would be excellent for me physically and mentally.

So Clare had a good time. And if she hadn't? Well that would have been okay too.

September 2^nd

Grateful for the meeting in Broadacre this morning. It may lead to good things.

Grateful for a free evening of meditation even though it all felt a bit cultish possibly. I enjoyed it but my inner siren said "Danger, Will Robinson."

Before the evening, Blob met this priest. A man from Ampleforth, a place currently embroiled in further accusations of sexual abuse and of cover ups, this time unrelated to Basil Cardinal Hume.
Grateful for another priest today - the Anglican Bishop of Grantham. He has publicly stated that he is in a gay relationship. A brave thing for a bishop to do.

Hopeful for a church future - if the church has any worthy future at all - in which neither sexual abuse nor loving sexual relationships are ever covered up.

A future in which churches aren't so twisted in doctrine or practice.

September 3^rd

Grateful for street logos and art.

Grateful too for cheap clothes in Byker and a superb toastie in a Byker cafe.

Also grateful for a moment of revelation in a discussion with one of the evangelical praying people in town.

September 4^th

Grateful to be able to buy just the right kind of liquorice for Amanda. I went to Tynemouth just to buy it.

Grateful to have got the best seat on the Metro.

Days of Gratitude - The Music of Greenbelt, Belts and Beliefs

Some more gratitude to take me to the end of August.  Eight months of keeping a gratitude diary every day apart from the nine that I missed.  Nearly 250 days to look back on and see the happy things in the good days and the hard days.

These three days cover the later parts of Greenbelt and then a day of being back home after all the excitements and sleeplessness of being away.  I'm looking forward to Greenbelt 2017 even though I still don't do that theistic God.  I wasn't converted by the God festival but enjoyed all the nice people who do God in a pleasant way.  Possibly this week I'm going to attend a humanist meeting.  I'm not sure how that will go.  It might clash with dancing though and if that's the case then dancing might beat secular humanism.  It'll be a tough decision - both events are happening in the same building, a building where lots of good things happen and where I should probably be more often.

Onwards!  Greenbelt.  As the Bible would put it - in my basic Hebrew lessons at college:

And it came to pass that ...

29^th August

Grateful for even more freebies - including ones from some people who knew my mother. The first from them came (this belt) on the second anniversary of her death.

Grateful for a storytelling workshop.

For three trips to the theatre which were the best three of the weekend.

Grateful to relax at The Wee Sing - songs from The Wild Goose people from Iona.

Grateful to have accidentally found myself right by the stage for more loud music. This time from Tankus The Henge. Awesome. Again. With more point, click and hope photos.

Grateful for the music question. And to experience some of the answer. I was incredibly smiley and happy flappy afterwards when meeting Amanda afterwards - she had been making an icon - and heading to see a cabaret show by Bourgeois and Maurice on how to save the world. Hilarious. I actually cried laughing at one point.

And grateful for a day of lots of noise, lots of people, lots of unknown things - but almost zero panic or meltiness. Yay!

30^th August

Grateful for the all night cafe not far from us in the festival campsite. Cheapest place on site for tea - including spicy chai that we drank lots of. At 6am after a night in which the temperature attempted winter and zero sleep was gained, it was so much appreciated.

Grateful to have spotted Kate by the entrance as we left. She's an MCC minister and volunteers there with the access team. Turns out that we qualified, because we had signed up for access to the access team, even though we hadn't actually remembered to do it!, for a free taxi to the shuttle bus back to Kettering station. Very grateful for that. And for the nice shuttle bus driver who waived the fee because we pleaded bus pass with him.

The weekend was brilliant. But:

Grateful to be home with my bed. With that luxury of a shower. After so little sleep and a ten hour journey - via Manchester - I was very happy for comforts.

No photos were taken of the day. But that only partially compensates for the ones I've shared from the festival.

So much happened. So many good people. So many stories. So many blog posts to write! And we plan to return next year. Grateful for an offer of easier transport in 2017.

31^st August

Grateful to have woken up in my own bed. Because it was my bed. And because "woken" implies sleep.

Grateful that the GP did everything I wanted her to do. My posture is awful and I often have rotten pain and have just gained a new determination to sort it. The NHS may be able to help. Or maybe there is a good yoga for people with almost zero flexibility, bad posture and pain and muscle knots gained over years of holding everything in. The yoga must be VERY cheap. Rather than the cheap most people talk about which is generally more than I can afford with a personal income of zero.

Grateful to be able to look back on Greenbelt and spot that Clare can do more than she believes. Sometimes.

The height difference between my normal standing and my standing up with better (but still very imperfect) posture.  It's a bit more than two inches.

Days Of Gratitude - Storms, Survival and Songs in The First Days of Greenbelt

Just two days of gratitude this time.  These days were the first half of the Greenbelt Festival.  I was very worried about going to that but it turned out that I loved it.

I'll probably blog about the festival properly at some point.  Blob Thing has been writing his own diary of the festival which unsurprisingly sticks quite closely to the kind of things I was doing.  He is writing many thousands of words about his experiences and his thoughts.  I'd have posted the whole festival as one gratitude post but I included so many pictures in the Sunday Assembly group that it would have made for a long blog post.  Ah yes, the Sunday Assembly group.  The person who began it points out that I am the one keeping it going.  I'm certainly the only one who posts daily in a group for daily posts.  There should be 125 posts a day.  There are not.  I plan on keeping up my posts until the end of the year even if by that time I am the only person who posts out of those 125 people.  It's good for me!

27^th August

Grateful to have got up early and travelled with Amanda to Greenbelt. It's a sort of Christian festival. But it's the sort of Christian festival for more progressive types and is a place where atheists are happy too.

Grateful that we successfully put the tent up before the over-the-top storms of the afternoon. Grateful that only tents and fences blew away, not people.

Grateful for story cubes, the first of the freebies, the forest church movement, and for the atmosphere in both the goth & steampunk eucharist (at Greenbelt even those can work together!) and the queer eucharist, totally packed out at 11.30pm. Also for the first night of post-midnight carrot cake.

28^th August

Grateful to have survived the night!

Grateful for something to do while steadfastly not going to the main communion service at which Justin Welby spoke and answered questions well.

Grateful for finding more freebies and lots of nice people to talk to.

 
Grateful that nothing is forever. At about 3.30 my brain gave up and much time was spent in a quiet haven tent. Grateful for quiet havens. For the two theatrical things we went to. Grateful to be with Amanda for as much as we wanted.

A late service run by people from Iona was too much. I sat at the back of the tent and gathered up a few leaves and twigs by me and then had to leave.

And then the melty, overwhelmedness, can't cope sensations left as I wandered in the dark and then left my normal character behind and spent an hour after midnight right at the front in the main stage dancing like crazy and attempting stage photos. Awesome.performance by Ella and The Blisters.

Sorry! I'm infodumping about some parts of Greenbelt. But it was a bloody great weekend and outside of normal Clare experience - my first ever festival. A minister I know in Sunderland was very surprised because "I look the festival type!" Grateful to have met him too - on the Sunderland walk for refugees this year.

Days Of Gratitude - Street Logos, Memories, And Quiet Betwen Adventures

Yes, a few more days of being grateful.  The quiet days between Autscape and Greenbelt.  I am typing this from the home of my uncle and aunt in Wiltshire.  Life is slightly surreal right now and there are lots of things going on that we would rather not be going on.  I haven't made time to post on my blog in a while - and for quite a bit of the last few weeks I haven't had a WiFi connection or even an old fashioned modem.  Using my pay-as-you-go phone as an internet hotspot is something else that I'm grateful for but it does get expensive if you want to use the internet too much or play with photos.

Anyway.  Here are four days.

23^rd August

Grateful that although I forgot about electrolysis and shaved the previous day there was just enough hair length that I didn't waste an appointment.

 Grateful for a couple of friends to look after me through the appointment.

Grateful too for laughter with Kit in the evening.

24^th August

Grateful for books found in Oxfam.

In this house we like street logos and regularly take photos of them if we see them.

I confess that theopraxy is a new word for me. The book looks fascinating. God is the good we do.
Another non-theistic god version.

25^th August

Grateful today that I didn't have to go to hospital. I thought for a while I might have to. On a day of my head misbehaving and finding life very difficult indeed that kind of worry wasn't appreciated.

But grateful that hospital was avoided. Also grateful that if a hospital had been needed there would have been one available because no government has yet succeeded in destroying the NHS.

Grateful too for memories. Blob Thing has been blogging about a trip out in June and it gives me an excuse to see photos containing sunshine, sea and smiles.

26^th August

Grateful to have traveled to Manchester for a few days with Amanda.

We are going on an adventure.

Facebook has updated so I can't post photos. Stupid Facebook! Stupid software!  (but thanks to the wonders of blogging this weeks later here are a couple.  A street logo from Newcastle and a point-and-hope photo from the coach.)

You'll Be Amazed At This Woman Who Can't Love Someone More Than They Deserve

Recently I attended a meeting of a not-church. I call it a not-church anyway. It's a meeting for people who are “guided by the life and teachings of Jesus” and who meet “in the presence of a God whose love is freedom, whose touch is healing, whose voice is calm.”

The people at the meeting are good people, seeking their God and I find it less difficult than most meetings. It's still hard though because every word in the little bit of the liturgy prepared for each meeting is phrased with theism in mind. It's a language that takes theism as a presupposition of a shared belief in an interventionist deity. I don't believe in that deity. I'm not sure that everyone there believes in the deity either. But the language, like the language of a church, is theistic.

It's not exclusive though and it's not evangelistic so usually I've been able to cope with it and just miss out what I couldn't say at all and translate the rest into my own meaning. That day I couldn't participate at all. Just as the meeting began my brain decided it had had enough of things and I spent the whole time wanting to walk out and sit in the sunshine. Perhaps that's what I should have done. Afterwards I left very quickly and couldn't speak even when grabbed for conversations, including one with a person who offered to buy me a ticket for an event in October.

The subject of the not-church this month was kindness. As always, the liturgy includes some quotations about the subject and after they are read there is an open group discussion – something that I can't participate in at all vocally because I can't deal with group discussions. My head just doesn't know the rules and can't process everything quickly enough. By the time it has something worthwhile to say the topic has moved on and even if I have something to say at what might be the right time I don't know how to break into the group and say it. Never mind. That's just how things are and they're not likely to change. The diagnostic criteria for autism still mention a triad of impairments. My inability in group situations is part of one of those impairments. It truly isn't my favourite part of my autism and it's one in which this so-called very high functioning autistic person is pretty severely impaired.

One of the quotations struck me:

A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.

Joseph Joubert

Joubert was a French moralist who died nearly 200 years ago. His Penseeswere published after his death. I haven't read them – I hadn't heard of Joubert at all. Then again I never managed to finish the Pensees of Blaise Pascal either. I guess I will probably never read Joubert. But I guessed I would never read a lot of things that I have since read.

One of the members of the not-church discussion really liked that Joubert quotation. She talked about it. I wasn't able to speak and was rapidly sinking into a state in which it's quite difficult to even get myself home. If I had been able to speak I might have talked about this quotation too. Because I didn't like it. I still don't like it.

Joubert says “loving people more than they deserve.”

I take issue with that and ask a question:

How much love does a person deserve?

I believe that every single person on this planet deserves more love than they give themselves. They deserve more love than other people give them.

Basically, whatever is happening, whatever the situation, whatever a person has or hasn't done, a person deserves more love not less.

However they feel, however they dress. Whatever their gender or sexuality or race or height. Whether they are disabled or not disabled. Whatever their politics. Whatever their religion. They deserve more love not less.

Even if they treat us badly or treat others badly they deserve more love not less.

And for ourselves. We deserve more love not less. Always and at every moment.

My belief is not an original idea. I've inherited from others, most especially from a spiritual teacher who has been known to use “more love not less” as a kind of mantra and as part of a liturgy. It's pretty powerful to look at a person we don't like and tell ourselves that they deserve more love not less. It's even more powerful to look at ourselves when we unfairly criticise ourselves and say “I deserve more love, not less.”

More love, not less. In fact I would say that we deserve total love. All of us. Total love. Constantly.

Joubert said “loving people more than they deserve” and I sit here typing about it two hundred years later. And I type this: Joubert's thought was nonsensical.

You cannot love any person more than they deserve.

You just can't. It's impossible.

What we need to aim to do is to love each person as much as they deserve. Total love. Always. If anyone lived according to that aim it was Jesus, a teacher of the way of love.

Unpacking that is hard. It raises many questions of howto love people as much as they deserve. It raises questions for what to do when we fail to love people that much. It raises questions of how best to love ourselves, and how to keep loving ourselves when we fall short of the aim of a life of total love. I am not even going to begin to attempt grappling with those questions in this post.

I think Joubert is not to blame for getting it wrong. He was living in a society with a Christian based morality. Even those Frenchmen who killed priests in various revolutions were really only removing a Christian establishment and morality and replacing it with what, beyond story, was just another Christian establishment and morality.

The Catholics of Joubert's day believed in original sin. They believed that God loved them but that loving them was in itself an act of mercy because they didn't really deserve the love of God, let alone to have God as a friend. The Church taught that each person deserves to go to Hell and suffer for eternity, separated from God in fire and torment and damnation. That's what humans deserve. Anything about that is mercy. It's true that the mercy story was rich – the loving, merciful God finding a “just” way to rescue the fallen, sinful humans from hell if they followed him and his son. But it's also true that the Church had a very negative view of human beings. Gee, thanks Augustine for developing that doctrine so well.

Every now and again you might have heard that we're all fearfully and wonderfully made or heard about the dignity of human beings. But the Catholic liturgy was based on the idea that we need to repent – and that one sin of the wrong type leads to Hell without that repentance and reliance on mercy. The Protestants of the day weren't much better and sometimes were much worse. Thanks Calvin, for outdoing Augustine – the very first point Calvinism makes is that every single one of us is totally depraved. It's not a good starting point for developing a healthy, loving view of the human race.

I confess that I used to go along with all this. Original sin. The fallen nature of human beings thanks to Adam and Eve eating some fruit. There was a time I even believed in the literal truth of that story, that there really were two people wandering around a pretty garden being tempted by a wily serpent. I believed that we were fully reliant on God for salvation, hope and anything that might be nice. I believed in a literal Hell once. And in literal human souls burning for eternity. I believed that the Bible taught it so it must be true. The preachers in my churches taught it too, straight from Scripture and you wouldn't want to go against what God wrote in his book, would you? Yeah, I believed people were fundamentally sinful. I believed I was fundamentally very sinful. I was a worm – as Scripture puts it. I was a wretch – as John Newton said in the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

I don't believe any of that now. It's been a long journey to get from there to where I am now, which is a much more free place. And I don't like that hymn any more because I am not a wretch. I was not a wretch. I just believed in my own wretchedness and acted accordingly.

Now I believe that humans are fundamentally good. It's a statement of faith. It would be easy to look at newspaper headlines and see the suffering we inflict on each other and to despair, to see the obvious faults – and let's face it, the way humans act is sometimes particularly awful and the way I act falls short of the way of love. But we're fundamentally good. And we're fundamentally deserving of more love not less. Yes, even those of us we see as monsters. To prove Godwin's law because it's fun to prove Godwin's law: Even Hitler!

Human beings deserve total love.

So. A rewrite of Joubert's thought is in order, removing all the nonsensical stuff about deserving or not deserving love.

“A part of kindness consists in loving people.”

But hey, that's not right either.

It's backwards.

I want to rewrite it again:

“A part of loving people is showing kindness.”

Yeah, that's better.

Love people. And in that love, show kindness.

Here endeth the lesson!

Those final words could have come from Jesus who said to “love one another.” He didn't say anything about deserve did he? Just “love one another.”

Sometimes it's good to be like the people at not-church. And as an ex-Christian I can say this too: Sometimes it's good to be “guided by the life and teachings of Jesus.”

[1694 words and a clickbait style title!]

Days of Gratitude - Autscape, Friendship, And Finding Freedom In A Cemetery

I am posting this on August 25th.  Today would have been my mother's 72nd birthday.  She died a few days after reaching her 70th birthday.  Facebook keeps giving me memories to share each day and most of them have been status updates about the events leading up to my mother's death.  Every day I am given the option to share some painful circumstance.  I haven't been sharing.

The morning after my mother died I had to return from Sussex to Newcastle, leaving my brother to deal with everything for a while.  On returning to Newcastle I attended the appointment at which I was officially diagnosed as being transgender.  It's tempting to wish that my mother had lived to see that day and the two years that have passed since then.  But no amount of wishing would make it a reality.  After that appointment I returned to Sussex.  I wrote the address for my mother's funeral and reading it was a privilege - and quite a challenge to not fall apart at certain points in it.  I posted the address in a post on this blog and it also appears here, the final ever post on my mother's blog which she lovingly wrote nearly every day for quite a few years and filled with family and friends and many photos.

That all happened two years ago.  This is now.  And these are five days of memories for this month, to add to the memories Facebook keeps on recommending I share with the world again.


18^th August


Grateful for Autscape. A lot could be said about that.

Grateful though to spend much of the afternoon not at Autscape!

Amanda and I walked into Settle, relaxed together, ate ice cream and then walked a little by the river.

We found a great rock to sit on in the middle of the river and I even had a free thirty seconds for stone stacking, reminding me that I want to take myself off for a quiet day doing it.

19^th August


There is much I will miss. Much to think about too.

But I am grateful that tonight I will sleep in my bed.

Farewell Autscape for another year. Tomorrow I have to attempt to think about food again.

Grateful too that this time round only a week will go by before I see Amanda again - for a Christian festival!

20^th August


Being looked after when arriving at the meditation group in a state. Sitting alone in silence helped and then good people and lunch.

Grateful for the people who set up that group and for the way the enterprise will be expanding very soon. There will be a meditation centre in the city centre and there are great plans for the future.
Also grateful to look out of the window.

21^st August

Grateful for missing the bus home after the Sunday Assembly social and going a different route back to the Metro that turned out to be interesting even though totally an incorrect route.

This led on to becoming sidetracked in a cemetery I have been meaning to visit almost since we moved here.

Also very grateful that a year ago today I met a very wonderful woman. I couldn't be more grateful than I am.

22^nd August


Grateful that one year ago tonight I danced, played and sang barefoot in a big thunderstorm.

She had encouraged me to do so. She didn't accept my refusal.

A year on and we have a most marvellous and undefined relationship centred on a stunning magic friendship.

A Little More About Autistic Pride And The Sometimes-Desire To Be Cured

I am mainly posting this so that I don't lose it.  I posted this a while ago in a Facebook group that celebrates and embraces neurodiversity.  I've made a couple of changes to post it here, but it's sustantially what I posted on Facebook.

 

I'll just make clear.  Autism is part of the neurology of autistic people.  It isn't a thing to be cured.  It's a complex beast - and isn't really a single beast at all.  It is something that contributes to making me the person I am, and that's not a bad thing.  I guess I'm not alone in the feelings I express.  I guess most people with a disability of whatever kind will have had days when they just want it taken away from them.  They may fully accept themselves but still, when passing through fire it's hard to say "Hoorah, I am being burned!"  I accept myself more than I have ever done before.  I do.  As a result I am happier and more content than I have ever been before.  But:

Self-acceptance is compatible with wishing for change.

The Facebook post:

 

Please read this before clicking the link at the bottom. It contains explanation and a couple of warnings about what I've written in the post the link leads to.

I posted one of my recent blog posts in a group subtitled. "We have our own views too! Autistics speaking for OURSELVES!" I posted it as an autistic person, speaking for herself, an autistic person who at times would love for it all to be taken away.

It was accepted by a moderator and appeared. Then it vanished again within five minutes, deleted by another moderator presumably. I guess that in that group only some view from autistic people are allowed. I guess that autistics are only allowed to speak for themselves if they have a particular opinion.

Otherwise they aren't allowed to speak up. The question was raised by a speaker at Autscape as to whether the autistic community is truly inclusive of all autistic people. Do we really accept ALL autistic people even if they're difficult, no matter how disabled they are, or if (shock!) they dare to have different beliefs, frustrations and worldviews to our own?  A good question, posed by someone who has been a very active part of "the autistic community" for twenty years.  He knows his onions!

On the basis of my experience today I have to say that it can be exclusive and we can cast autistic people into the outer darkness when they don't fit a narrow view of acceptability.

I'm going to share my post here. I know that most will disagree with it. I know it's not a popular view. But that's okay. I expect comments. I expect discussion. I expect both appreciation and distaste. That's fine. It may even be deleted by moderators who feel it's not the kind of thing they want an autistic person to be saying in their group. That is their privilege.

Warning: This post does talk of cures. Of the times when things deteriorate for me so much that quite frankly a cure would be a lovely thing.

Warning two: I do swear in this post. I try not to swear much but I was free writing everything and strong feelings were arising and some language fell out that isn't for sensitive ears.

But of course I'm proud too, and positive and know that a cure is an impossibility and that being autistic is a part of my identity, my human personhood. Sometimes I can celebrate that. Embrace the whole of what it means to be me. I wear an autistic pride badge and an autistic pride bracelet pretty much every day. Because I am proud.

But on the bad days, honesty compels me to say that I would prefer it if all those disabling things could be taken away just as much as I did before I had the word "autism" to help me understand me. On some days, to say it's "a different way of being" or to say "I'm differently abled not disabled" just doesn't do justice to how much of a struggle it is. I am disabled. I am. Yeah, I am different not less. We all are. And I've blogged about that in the past. But sometimes the difference feels overwhelmingly dreadful. And oftentimes it is disabling and no amount of accommodations would ever mean that it isn't.

So that's me. Being honest.

 

My previous post:

https://reborn-as-woman.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/in-which-clare-says-something-unpopular.html



Extra to the Facebook post:

A link to the talk at Autscape, by Martijn Dekker, with a link there to all the slides shown during the talk:

http://www.autscape.org/2016/programme/presentations#martijn

Head to the homepage there to find out more about Autscape.  It's the only event of its kind in Europe and I am completely thankful that I was told about it in time to get there last year for the first time.  Next year it will take place at a different venue.  There won't be all the gorgeous scenery we've experienced for the last couple of years when it was held in Giggleswick, near Settle, North Yorkshire.  I'll be blogging some pictures of the area eventually.

 

Next year it is, I understand, taking place in Northampton.  So I won't be able to escape for a couple of hours by going up a hill.  But I will be able to escape by popping into the centre of a town where I used to live and seeing whether it has changed at all.  I may even take a picture of the plaque that commemorates the school for dissenting ministers run by Philip Doddridge - some of whose words appear in the pages of The Sacred Harp.  Maybe next year I could do a lightning talk about shape note singing.  No.  That's not quite right:  Definitely I could.  But maybe I would!  Because everybody should know about shape note even though many of them will learn that it's something they strongly dislike.

Days of Gratitude - Art And Autscape And Sparklies In The Dark

Five more days of gratitude.

The first of them really did go wrong.  I had good plans - to go and sing shape note music in a chapel at Beamish Museum.  Due to a miscommunication they didn't come to fruition and I was left at home with a packed bag for the day.  I could have stayed at home.  But decided that they would be another plan.  So I went out and let the plan develop as it happened.  The replacement plan didn't go to plan either in many ways.  But I was still able to have a really good day and visited somewhere I've never been to before.  The art looks great on the walls of this room I'm sitting in.  The cheap art.  Very cheap.  The total cost of the five pictures was £4.50.  I'm actually quite proud of finding the bargains.

The five days ended at Autscape, the conference/gathering of autistic people that runs each year.  I must point out at this point that the friend mentioned who couldn't get to Autscape was not a Dalek.

13^th August

Today's plan went completely wrong. An excuse for inventing another plan.

I walked on Hadrian's Wall.

I sat by a river.

And I bought cheap pictures.

14^th August

Tynemouth Market

Grateful for a poetry book and a few pretty stones from Tynemouth followed by a short wander.

The gateway to Tynemouth Priory.  We didn't go inside.

I was too tired to actually walk by the sea as planned.  But that didn't matter.  Seeing the river was good and those two obviously enjoyed it.



15^th August

A half cheat.

Grateful for socks. Grateful that in the last year I have stopped wearing black socks every day and now wear all sorts of colours. And sometimes giraffes.

 Grateful (and this is the cheat half) that within the next 24 hours (tomorrow) I will be at Autscape for a few days of autistic space, something that is a very rare thing in an allistic majority world. Last year's Autscape changed things for me in unforeseen ways.

16^th August


We are at Autscape.

This year I know some people already, have child with me, and a friend from Newcastle.

Two pictures from the day.  The first was taken at the informal badge decorating.  The second was taken at Sparklies.  Photo credit to @quarridors

Check out this Vine video of what the lights look like through my heart glasses.  Through my difraction glasses they look even more crazy.

17^th August


Grateful to be at Autscape.

Maybe most grateful for the hours spent NOT at Autscape.

Amanda and I went to spend a couple of hours in Settle with a friend who couldn't make Autscape this time.

 And then we paddled in the river.