A Little Of Nothing

Author: Pete Little

  • The Surprisingly Bearable Lightness of Being Alone

    The Surprisingly Bearable Lightness of Being Alone

    My wife and I can happily spend an entire evening in the same room, each doing our own thing. She’s reading, knitting, or crocheting. I’m probably tinkering with something, researching some obscure Minecraft modpack code on my tablet, or catching up on Mastodon. The cat is supervising, as befits her position as Supreme Leader of the Household.

    We’re together without constantly demanding each other’s attention.

    Our cat has very clear rules about social interaction.

    She wants company.

    Until she doesn’t.

    She wants affection.

    Until she doesn’t.

    She wants to sit on your lap.

    Until she suddenly remembers she’s an apex predator and bites you.

    In many ways, she’s taught me something rather profound about companionship. It’s perfectly possible to enjoy company without needing it every waking moment.

    I do, however, usually manage not to sit in people’s laps and bite them.

    Growing Older (Or How I Learnt to Stop Socialising and Love Solitude)

    From my mid-twenties to my mid-thirties, I lived alone in a flat in Aberdeen. I had an extensive movie collection, back when films came on gloriously space-hungry VHS cassettes instead of DVDs. I had my PC, my World of Warcraft account, and my hamster, Quark.

    Also I had a group of ex-university friends who regularly dragged me out to clubs, pubs, Sunday morning greasy fry-ups, and parties.

    I went because I thought that was what people were supposed to do.

    Don’t get me wrong. I had fun… ish.

    I didn’t know I was autistic back then. That particular bombshell hadn’t even been manufactured yet, never mind dropped from an overhead B-52.

    But most of the time I was on my own. I’d spend evenings watching films, playing games, or trying to work out where Quark had managed to roll his exercise ball this time.

    I was content.

    I enjoyed my own company.

    Even then, I instinctively understood there was a profound difference between being alone and being lonely.

    I’m now in my mid-fifties, and that feeling hasn’t changed.

    As I’ve written before in Growing Old without Growing Up, getting older hasn’t made me feel old. If anything, it’s made me more comfortable ignoring society’s expectations.

    I genuinely enjoy my own company.

    That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy spending time with my wife. Quite the opposite. She’s my companion, my best friend, my soulmate, and the person I most enjoy sharing life with.

    But we don’t live in each other’s pockets.

    She has her allotment. While I greatly appreciate eating what she grows, that’s her thing. She’ll happily disappear there for hours while I disappear into my home office to write code, build a new Minecraft mod, or update this blog, as I’m doing now.

    She’s even been known to disappear to Greece for a fortnight on one of her spiritual retreats while I stay at home, work, look after the house, and consume quantities of junk food that would never pass Wife Quality Assurance.

    Two Whole People

    I’ve never liked the expression “my other half”.

    It suggests we arrive in the world as unfinished jigsaw puzzles, wandering around until someone finally turns up holding the missing piece.

    I don’t believe that.

    When my wife and I married, we were already two complete human beings, each with our own interests, quirks, ambitions, and ways of spending our time.

    We simply chose to walk through life together.

    Sometimes our paths overlap completely.

    Sometimes they briefly diverge.

    Most of the time, they run happily alongside one another.

    Healthy relationships aren’t two halves making a whole. They’re two complete people choosing to share their lives. Otherwise we accidentally make relationships responsible for fixing problems they were never designed to solve.

    Alone Is Not Lonely

    I’m not antisocial, and I certainly haven’t given up on people.

    I just don’t need quite so many of them.

    I’ve stopped mistaking constant interaction for happiness.

    It turns out the old saying “quality over quantity” applies to friendships as much as almost everything else.

    Being alone is a description while being lonely is an emotion.

    One tells you who’s in the room, the other tells you how you feel about it.

    You can feel desperately lonely in the middle of a crowded pub.

    You can spend an entire weekend by yourself without feeling lonely for a single moment.

    They’re completely different states.

    We often assume one causes the other.

    It doesn’t.

    Why We Fear Solitude

    Modern life seems oddly suspicious of solitude.

    There’s an unspoken expectation that adulthood should involve an ever-expanding network of friends, colleagues, networking groups, WhatsApp chats, neighbourhood associations, social media platforms, and community events.

    As though popularity can somehow be measured by unread notifications.

    But relationships aren’t Pokémon.

    Collecting more doesn’t necessarily improve your life.

    You certainly don’t need to catch them all.

    Learning to Enjoy Your Own Company

    If you can’t enjoy an afternoon by yourself, adding another person doesn’t magically create contentment.

    Sometimes it simply creates another person to disappoint.

    There’s a quiet confidence in being able to entertain yourself, pursue hobbies, disappear down strange rabbit holes of curiosity, spend an afternoon wandering around a museum, sit beside a river watching the world go by, or simply think.

    Many of us have felt far lonelier surrounded by people we couldn’t truly be ourselves around than we ever have sitting quietly on our own.

    Company is wonderful when it’s shared with people who let us be authentic.

    Company simply for the sake of avoiding silence can feel surprisingly empty.

    I’m not suggesting we all become hermits.

    Please don’t finish reading this article, delete all your social media accounts, and move into a cave somewhere in the Highlands.

    We’re social creatures, and spending time with people we care about can be deeply rewarding.

    Some of my happiest memories involve my wife.

    Others involve good friends.

    But some involve nobody else at all.

    Cycling through the countryside.

    Sitting in a park watching deer run across a field.

    Heading into London with absolutely no plan beyond wandering wherever curiosity takes me.

    Looking at things.

    Really looking.

    Watching boats drift along the Thames.

    Eating an excellent burger.

    Drinking great coffee.

    Spending far too long in a bookshop.

    Simply sitting and watching the world move around me without feeling any obligation to join in.

    Bliss.

    Maybe the goal isn’t to spend less time with people.

    Maybe it’s simply to stop measuring the health of our lives by how many people happen to be in the room.

    Being alone isn’t the opposite of belonging.

    Sometimes it’s simply the place where you finally belong to yourself.

    As I finished writing this, Spotify decided to shuffle on All By Myself by Eric Carmen.

    I laughed out loud.

    Not because it proved my point, but because somewhere inside the vast collection of algorithms analysing my listening habits, a computer had spectacularly misunderstood me.

    Then again, perhaps that’s the whole point.

    Being alone and being lonely aren’t the same thing.

    Spotify still hasn’t worked that out.

    Besides, the song got one thing wrong.

    I wasn’t by myself.

    My wife was in the next room.

    The cat was almost certainly plotting something.

    And, perhaps most importantly, I was already exactly where I wanted to be.

  • The Wondrous View from the Top of Mount Stupid

    The Wondrous View from the Top of Mount Stupid

    We All Start Somewhere

    Although it may be hard to believe, I wasn’t born a mathematician. I wasn’t gifted thirty-plus years of software development experience the moment I took my first breath on this large, strange planet outside my mother’s womb. Just like everyone else, I had to learn. I had to learn numbers, the alphabet, and how to manipulate fiendishly complicated things… like shoelaces and buttons. My brain was plastic and malleable. It soaked up new knowledge like a sponge.

    Then, of course, one day I knew EVERYTHING!

    At least, I thought I did.

    In reality, all I’d done was climb the north slope of Mount Stupid.

    It’s OK. I’ve stood there, and I’ll confidently say that you probably have too. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that every one of us has stood on that summit at some point in our lives, breathed in the rarefied air, looked out over the vast landscape ahead and suddenly realised just how much more there was still to learn.

    “Oh…”

    Actually, I’m here to tell you that the view from the summit isn’t depressing.

    It’s breathtaking.

    Not just because of the thin air, not because of what lies beneath you, but because of what lies beyond.

    The Internet Gets Dunning–Kruger Wrong

    An idea originally published as the Dunning–Kruger effect has, sadly, been adopted by the internet and transformed into the meme-worthy “Why Do Dumb People Think They’re Smart?” Usually it’s written with an irritating mixture of upper and lower case letters, “mUcH lIkE ThIs”, to convey a sense of superiority over people who simply haven’t yet learned enough to realise how much they still have to learn.

    I don’t like that interpretation.

    It’s cruel, and it mocks people who simply haven’t yet reached the point where the world suddenly opens up in front of them. I’d argue that every one of us has to climb Mount Stupid before sliding down the far side into the so-called Valley of Despair. That’s simply part of learning.

    Making fun of somebody for standing on Mount Stupid is rather like mocking a toddler for proudly taking their first steps because they can’t yet run a marathon or land a perfect triple-twisting backflip.

    Go on.

    Google “Dunning–Kruger”.

    See how many articles contain words like idiot, stupid, moron, or dumb.

    As I’ve already said, none of us are born with the knowledge and skills we possess today.

    It’s a journey we all take.

    The View Gets Better

    I have stood at the top of this mountain.

    The brief excitement of thinking I’d reached the summit quickly gave way to the realisation that I’d merely climbed the first hill in an entire mountain range. At first that’s a sobering thought, but once I realised just how much there still was waiting to be discovered, the journey became exciting rather than intimidating.

    Oddly enough, the further I’ve travelled from the summit of Mount Stupid, the less certain I’ve become. Thirty-plus years into software development I’m far more comfortable saying, “I don’t know,” than I ever was after my first year.

    The mountain didn’t make me arrogant.

    The rest of the journey made me humble.

    These days I’m genuinely delighted when somebody shows me something new. I’ve learned far more from making mistakes than I ever have from getting things right the first time. I don’t see those moments as failures of intelligence. I see them as opportunities to expand my understanding of the world.

    The Valley of Despair

    Unfortunately, this is also the point where imposter syndrome quietly creeps into the conversation.

    After more than thirty years in software it’s remarkably easy to think:

    “Who am I kidding? I know nothing.”

    But that’s simply untrue.

    There’s a profound difference between knowing nothing and not knowing everything.

    The first is ignorance.

    The second is simply the natural consequence of continuing to learn.

    The Valley of Despair isn’t merely the moment when I realise I know less than I thought.

    It’s the moment I start believing I’ll never know enough.

    That’s where many people quietly abandon a hobby, a career, or a subject they’ve genuinely fallen in love with. They mistake the size of the journey for evidence that they aren’t capable of completing it, when in reality they’ve simply reached the point where genuine learning begins.

    Sometimes pushing through that valley is hard.

    I’ll freely admit that I’ve occasionally turned around.

    I’ve started new hobbies, enthusiastically bought the books, the equipment and all the shiny new gadgets, learned everything I could as a beginner and then, with growing horror, realised just how much mountain still lay ahead of me.

    At that point I’ve quietly muttered:

    “No… perhaps this isn’t for me after all.”

    And turned around.

    Sadly, I’ve done that rather more often than I’d like.

    AuDHD doesn’t exactly help.

    Looking back, though, I’m grateful I climbed Mount Stupid.

    The view really was wonderful.

    Not because I could finally see how much I knew, but because, for the first time, I could see just how astonishingly much there still was waiting to be discovered.

    I rather hope I never reach the end of that journey.

    One Final Irony

    Of course, before somebody points it out…

    There’s a delicious irony in writing an article explaining the Dunning–Kruger effect.

    It immediately raises the uncomfortable question of whether I’m demonstrating the very phenomenon I’m attempting to describe.

    Fortunately I’ve spent enough years studying mathematics and software engineering to know, with absolute certainty, that I understand almost nothing.

    Which, oddly enough, is probably the closest thing to a qualification I have for writing this article.

  • The Curious Freedom of Pretending to Be Somebody Else

    The Curious Freedom of Pretending to Be Somebody Else

    (Or: How Dressing as a Victorian Ghostbuster Became the Most Authentic Version of Me.)

    I’ve spent most of my life pretending to be somebody else.

    Every day I slip into the role of a “fully functioning adult”, whatever that’s supposed to be. I mask, I moderate my behaviour, I soften the rougher edges of my personality and generally do my best impression of somebody who has absolutely everything under control.

    At weekends, however, the mask begins to slip. I’m far closer to my authentic self and considerably less restrained by the image I’m expected to project in the office. That isn’t to say I suddenly become a different person. It’s more that I stop spending quite so much energy trying to look like everybody else.

    Masking takes a tremendous amount of mental effort. It’s one of the biggest contributors to the autistic burnout I’ve written about previously, which is probably why people find it rather odd when I tell them one of my favourite hobbies involves dressing up as a Victorian Ghostbuster.

    Surely, if I spend all week performing one role, the last thing I’d want to do for fun is perform another?

    Well… not quite.

    My Everyday Performance

    I’ve written before about masking, about my “stage voice” developed to hide my stammer, and about the burnout that often follows from constantly monitoring my behaviour. I won’t repeat all of that here, but it essentially boils down to one simple observation.

    To some extent, Everyday Pete is a carefully rehearsed performance.

    I monitor how loudly I’m speaking and pay attention to my body language. I’ll try to maintain the right amount of eye contact. I avoid wandering too far down conversational rabbit holes, no matter how desperately I want to explain why TCP handshaking is the perfect analogy for small talk or why slide rules are infinitely more interesting than calculators.

    It’s a performance I’ve become very good at.

    It’s also exhausting.

    Enter the Ghostbuster

    You’d therefore think that taking this daily performance and turning the dial up to eleven would be the last thing I’d choose to do for enjoyment.

    Oddly enough, the exact opposite is true.

    Before I explain why, let me introduce the character.

    Not the costume.

    The personality.

    He’s confident, bombastic, friendly, outgoing, slightly pompous, and considerably larger than life. He’ll happily wander up to complete strangers, pose for photographs, chat to children about ghosts, and generally behave as though the world is one enormous stage.

    In other words, he’s the sort of chap who cheerfully says hello to strangers.

    I generally hope strangers haven’t noticed me.

    Even his name is rather revealing.

    He’s called Professor Mycroft Spengler, which, if you’re familiar with my literary and cinematic tastes, tells you almost everything you need to know about me.

    He’s a shameless fusion of Mycroft Holmes and Egon Spengler.

    Mycroft Holmes is hyper-intelligent, analytical, quietly formidable, happiest solving problems rather than socialising, and far more comfortable working behind the scenes than standing in the spotlight.

    Egon Spengler is a scientist, collector of obscure knowledge, enthusiast of spores, moulds and fungi, socially awkward, endlessly curious, and gloriously unconcerned with appearing “normal”.

    Neither of them are conventional action heroes.

    Nor are they particularly charismatic.

    Neither are especially loud.

    So naturally my subconscious looked at those two characters and thought:

    “Yes… let’s combine them.”

    Apparently, given complete creative freedom, my brain built a character whose defining qualities are intelligence, curiosity, scientific obsession, and spectacular social awkwardness…

    …and then gave him brass goggles and a wooden proton pack.

    When I stop and think about it, that probably says something important about my personality!

    The Tax

    Let’s clear one thing up, though.

    For years Comic Con terrified me. I’d travel all the way there, reach the entrance, see the crowds stretching off into the distance and quietly turn around and go home. On the occasions I did make it inside, I’d often become overwhelmed within twenty minutes and leave feeling thoroughly dejected.

    Mycroft changed that.

    He’s become a form of armour. Not armour that hides me, but armour that allows me to function in an environment that would otherwise overwhelm me. He gives me a role to play, a script to follow and, perhaps most importantly, permission to interact with people in ways that everyday Pete would normally avoid. I no longer worry about whether I should talk to strangers because, quite frankly, that’s exactly what a Victorian Ghostbuster ought to be doing.

    It works.

    But it isn’t free.

    I can never manage more than one day at a convention because afterwards I have to pay the bill I’ve quietly been running up. I’ve hyper-masked for most of the day. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people, posed for countless photographs, answered questions, smiled, joked, improvised, stayed in character and absorbed the noise, lights, crowds and sheer intensity of the event. By the time I get home my social battery isn’t merely low, it’s running on fumes.

    The following day I usually disappear. I’ll spend it quietly reading, listening to music, tinkering in the workshop or simply enjoying the blissful absence of people. Not because I didn’t enjoy Comic Con. Quite the opposite. I loved every minute of it. I’m simply paying yesterday’s invoice. It’s worth every penny, but it’s an expensive hobby in ways most people never see.

    The Subtle Difference

    I should probably correct myself slightly because calling cosplay a form of masking isn’t entirely accurate. It’s a useful analogy, particularly as I’m technically wearing a physical mask of one sort or another, but the two things are fundamentally different.

    Masking, at least for me, is about hiding parts of myself. I minimise my differences, smooth away the rough edges and quietly blend into the background. The aim is to become less noticeable, less awkward and, if I’m honest, a little more forgettable.

    Cosplay does exactly the opposite.

    Instead of hiding my differences, it exaggerates them. It takes my enthusiasm, curiosity, theatricality and love of the absurd and turns the volume right up. It’s the difference between whispering and standing on a table shouting:

    “THIS IS ME. I’M WEIRD, AND I’M PERFECTLY HAPPY ABOUT IT.”

    There’s something wonderfully liberating about that.

    Why Ghostbusters? Why Steampunk?

    People occasionally ask why I chose Ghostbusters.

    My usual answer is simply:

    “Why not?”

    Ghostbusters has always been one of my favourite film franchises because, when I stop and think about it, none of the characters are conventional heroes. Ray Stantz is wonderfully enthusiastic and endlessly curious. Egon Spengler is socially awkward, intellectually brilliant and entirely unconcerned with appearing “normal”. Peter Venkman presents himself as confident and charismatic, but I’ve always suspected the sarcasm and bravado are simply another form of armour. Whenever life becomes complicated, he deflects it with humour.

    They’re not superheroes.

    They’re underdogs who accidentally become heroes.

    I find that strangely reassuring.

    Steampunk satisfies a completely different part of my personality. If you’ve read my article about museums you’ll already know I have an enduring fascination with discovery, invention and curiosity. The Victorian and Edwardian periods were full of people pushing at the boundaries of science and engineering, trying to understand how the world worked and asking, “What if?”

    Now, before the historians reach for their keyboards, I’m well aware that Victorian Britain had more than its fair share of problems. Steampunk isn’t history. It’s alternative history, a world where Babbage’s Difference Engine really did work, where Jules Verne reached the Moon. A fantasy world where Wells and Poe somehow became engineers instead of novelists. It’s a world of steam-powered computers, impossible inventions and outrageous imagination, but without the poverty, colonialism, misogyny and social inequality that accompanied the real Victorian era.

    Put Ghostbusters and Steampunk together, add a dash of amateur dramatics and an unhealthy enthusiasm for brass and mahogany panelling, and out walked Professor Mycroft Spengler.

    In Closing

    The funny thing is that my Ghostbuster costume isn’t really hiding who I am. It’s revealing parts of me that everyday life quietly encourages me to keep folded away. He’s louder than I am, more confident than I am, and considerably more theatrical than I am, but none of those qualities are fake. They’re all me.

    Just with a proton pack.

    Eventually the goggles come off, the proton pack goes back on its stand and Mycroft quietly disappears until the next convention. The exhaustion arrives shortly afterwards and, as always, the masking tax has to be paid. For a few glorious hours, though, pretending to be somebody else allows me to stop pretending to be somebody I’m not.

    That’s a trade I’ll happily keep making.

  • Why I Love Museums.

    Why I Love Museums.

    I have yet to visit a museum I didn’t like.

    Some have been better than others, certainly, but I have never walked out of one thinking, “Well, that was a disappointing collection of fascinating things.”

    Large or small, broad or niche, I love museums. When I’m in London they’re some of my favourite places to spend time, and in London we’re really spoiled for choice. Clustered together in South Kensington you’ve got the V&A, the Natural History Museum, and, just around the corner, the Science Museum. Up in Bloomsbury there’s the OG GOAT, the British Museum, containing some of the very best purloined and, ahem… “enthusiastically acquired” artefacts from the four corners of the globe. (Hey, let’s not get political here. – Ed.)

    Further afield there’s the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and not forgetting my old stomping ground, the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, complete with its famously overstuffed walrus.

    Those are just a few of my regular haunts.

    I don’t really go to museums to “learn” in the formal sense. I go because they’re one of the few places left where curiosity doesn’t need to justify itself. Nobody asks what you’re going to do with the information you’ve just discovered. Nobody expects it to improve your productivity or advance your career. Sometimes it’s enough simply to stand in front of an object and think, “Well… that’s fascinating.”

    I can happily spend hours wandering around a museum on my own. Not only do I find them endlessly fascinating, but they’re also havens of calm, quiet, and peace. Unlike the busy, bustling streets or shopping centres, nobody has ever stood next to me in a museum shouting into their mobile phone about printer cartridges.

    Well… not usually.

    There’s always the annoying exception.

    Museums Are Libraries for Things

    Books preserve ideas and knowledge.

    They also preserve some truly dreadful plots, improbable narratives, and larger-than-life characters, but I digress.

    Museums preserve objects.

    Every exhibit has a story.

    Every exhibit has a history.

    Every exhibit has a purpose.

    Every exhibit has a journey.

    A Roman coin isn’t just a coin. It may have been somebody’s wages. It may have paid for a meal, a night’s lodging, or a particularly good mug of mead. Perhaps it was dropped and lost in the mud, or perhaps somebody carefully buried it for safekeeping and never returned.

    A steam engine isn’t just a collection of iron and brass. It represents the Industrial Revolution in miniature. It may have pumped water from a mine, powered a textile mill, or hauled ore from Cornwall to London while quietly transforming the world around it.

    Objects are never just “things”.

    They’re tiny windows into somebody else’s life.

    I’ve often thought that museums are what happen when humanity collectively decides, “We probably shouldn’t throw this away. It might be important later.”

    In many respects, a museum is simply a much larger, considerably better organised version of every family’s junk drawer.

    The difference is that somebody has already rummaged through the drawer and decided which objects tell the best stories. Museums don’t really preserve things. They preserve curiosity. Every display case is an invitation to ask, “Who made this?”, “Why did they make it?”, and “What was life like for the person who used it?” I don’t always need the answers. Sometimes the questions are the interesting part.

    Curiosity Without Purpose

    Modern life sends us some rather contradictory messages.

    On the one hand we’re expected to keep up with the latest technology, the newest trends, and whatever today’s fashionable productivity hack happens to be. On the other, we’re encouraged to own less, declutter our lives, and throw away anything that doesn’t “spark joy”.

    The trouble is, in my case, almost everything sparks joy.

    Museums quietly reject the entire premise.

    Modern life constantly asks:

    “What’s the point?”

    Museums simply reply:

    “Because it’s interesting.”

    And, for me at least, that’s more than enough.

    I can happily spend twenty minutes studying a fossil, a Viking comb, or a display of Victorian kitchen utensils. Not because they’ll help me earn more money or make my day-to-day life more efficient, but because they’re fascinating. Sometimes they’re educational. Sometimes they’re beautiful. Often they’re all of the above.

    The Peace and Quiet Is Underrated

    One of the things I appreciate most about museums is something people rarely mention.

    They’re quiet.

    They’re orderly.

    They’re predictable.

    There’s an almost reverential atmosphere about them. People naturally lower their voices, slow down, and actually pay attention to what’s around them.

    For me, that’s the complete opposite of a shopping centre.

    Shopping centres are frenetic, noisy, crowded, brightly lit, and full of people apparently engaged in some sort of competitive speed-walking event. I find them exhausting.

    Museums have the opposite effect.

    They calm me down.

    They centre me.

    I’ve quite happily spent the best part of an entire day in a museum, especially if it has a decent café and an excellent bookshop attached.

    Every Object Has a Story

    The larger museums cover an astonishing breadth of human experience. One minute I’m looking at Egyptian artefacts thousands of years old, the next I’m staring at inventions from the late twentieth century.

    There’s something distinctly unsettling about visiting a museum to look at ancient history and suddenly finding the exact same Trimphone your parents had sitting proudly behind glass.

    As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m something of a collector myself. I have numerous collections of things I find interesting, quirky, or simply too fascinating to leave behind.

    Museums do exactly the same thing.

    Just on a considerably larger scale.

    Every object once belonged to somebody.

    Somebody designed it, made it, used it, valued it, then sadly lost it.

    Then, somehow, it ended up behind glass because somebody else recognised that it was worth preserving.

    There’s something deeply human about that.

    Whenever I visit a museum I find myself thinking less about the objects themselves and more about the people behind them. Someone sat at a workbench and made this, carried it, repaired it when it broke. And then much later someone else decided it was too important to throw away. Long after they’ve gone, a small part of their life survives behind a sheet of glass, quietly telling its story to complete strangers. I find that oddly comforting.

    We Preserve What We Value

    Museums aren’t simply rooms full of old “stuff”.

    Because every museum is curated, every museum accidentally reveals what a society believes is worth remembering.

    Sometimes that’s kings, queens, great battles, famous paintings, or technological breakthroughs.

    Sometimes it’s kitchen utensils, railway tickets, children’s toys, wine goblets, or obscure calculating devices.

    If I’m honest, it’s often the ordinary objects that fascinate me the most.

    Civilisation wasn’t built solely by kings and generals.

    It was built day by day by ordinary people.

    People who packed lunches.

    People who worried about warm clothing.

    People who needed decent shoes.

    People who wrote shopping lists on clay tablets and prayed to pantheons of strange gods.

    Those are the people I find myself wondering about.

    Permission to Wonder

    This is probably my favourite reason for loving museums.

    Somewhere along the line many adults stop asking, “What does this do?” or “Why does it work that way?”

    We lose something of our childlike curiosity.

    Museums quietly encourage exactly the opposite.

    In fact, they almost insist upon it. They invite adults to behave like children again, in the very best sense of the word. To point at things. To ask daft questions. To become excited by a beautifully engineered clock, a dinosaur skeleton, or a collection of eighteenth-century spoons that nobody has thought about for two hundred years. Curiosity, after all, isn’t childish. It’s one of the most profoundly human qualities we possess.

    Every display case seems to say:

    “Go on. Be curious. Ask questions. That’s what I’m here for.”

    If you ask me, and seeing as you’re reading my blog I’ll assume you do, that’s rather lovely.

    My Perfect Day

    My perfect museum visit involves wandering around without a map.

    I don’t think of it as aimless wandering.

    I prefer to call it exploring.

    I’ll spend far too long reading information boards, become unexpectedly fascinated by a single fossil, discover something I didn’t even know existed, and then inevitably wander into the gift shop.

    There I’ll buy a book.

    Then another book.

    Perhaps a T-shirt.

    Then realise I’ve bought too much and purchase a tote bag to carry everything.

    At which point I’ll probably buy another book because, well, I’m already there.

    I may as well make the most of it.

    The museum gift shop is where my wallet quietly resigns itself to the inevitable.

    Closing Thoughts

    Perhaps that’s why I love museums so much.

    They aren’t really buildings full of old objects.

    They’re quiet celebrations of human curiosity.

    Every display case says:

    “This mattered.”

    “Somebody made this.”

    “Somebody discovered this.”

    “Somebody thought this was worth keeping.”

    In a world obsessed with the newest thing, museums gently remind me that old things still have stories to tell, and that knowledge doesn’t need to earn its keep to have value.

    More than anything else, museums give me permission to remain curious. To keep asking questions. To keep learning. To keep wondering how things work and why people made them in the first place.

    Growing older shouldn’t mean becoming less curious.

    If anything, I rather hope it means becoming more so.

    Besides…

    Where else can I spend an afternoon looking at medieval surgical instruments, Roman pottery, steam engines, dinosaur skeletons and an alarmingly overstuffed walrus without anybody questioning my life choices?

  • The Slow Creep of Autistic Burnout

    The Slow Creep of Autistic Burnout

    One of the more irritating things about autistic burnout is that it rarely arrives with the theatrical flourish I imagine. There is no dramatic collapse, no warning klaxon, and no helpful message from my brain politely informing me that I’m running critically low on mental resources and should pull over at the next convenient lay-by for a recharge. That would be far too convenient. Instead, burnout usually sneaks up on me.

    It’s less like falling off a cliff and more like gradually walking into the sea. I don’t notice the water reaching my ankles because I’m too busy concentrating on the horizon. Then the water is up to my waist and I’m still too busy focusing on my destination. Before I realise it, I’m out of my depth, floundering slightly, unable to feel the bottom, and wondering which direction the shore lies.

    My day involves a surprising amount of invisible effort. There’s the social masking, the “stage voice” I wrote about in my stammering article, filtering background noise, monitoring facial expressions, trying to remember whether I’ve made enough eye contact to appear interested without accidentally crossing into “slightly unsettling”, keeping track of conversations, and trying not to infodump about slide rules, cravats or my nihilistic theory of human existence. None of those things are particularly difficult in isolation, but together they’re like dozens of little computer programs quietly running in the background. Each one consumes a little memory, a little processing power, and a little battery until, eventually, I simply run out of something to give.

    I’ve started thinking about burnout less like stress and more like a battery. Most people notice when their phone reaches five per cent. My autistic battery has the remarkable ability to leap directly from sixty per cent to, “Why am I irrationally irritated because somebody stacked the dishwasher incorrectly?” Looking back, the warning signs are actually fairly obvious. The world seems louder than usual, conversations start feeling like hard work, and even simple questions such as “What do you fancy for dinner?” suddenly require the computational resources of a AI server farm. Eventually I reach the point where I no longer want to see or speak to anyone, not because I dislike people or because I’m depressed, but because my brain has quietly put a little sign on the door saying, “Capacity reached. Please call again tomorrow.”

    This is perhaps the biggest misconception about burnout. It isn’t laziness, a lack of motivation, or “not trying hard enough”. If anything, it usually arrives because I’ve been trying too hard for too long. I often picture it as carrying a rucksack while somebody quietly drops another pebble into it every day. One pebble isn’t a problem. Neither are ten, or fifty. The trouble is that one day I realise I’m carrying several thousand of the things and I’ve become so accustomed to the weight that I’ve forgotten life wasn’t always supposed to feel this heavy. That’s what burnout feels like to me. It isn’t one dramatic event. It’s the cumulative effect of hundreds of tiny demands, each insignificant on its own, quietly adding up until my brain eventually decides it’s had enough.

    The frustrating thing is that I already know what helps. The solutions are spectacularly uninteresting. More sleep. Less noise. Fewer demands. Time with people I trust. A walk somewhere green. Music. Noise-cancelling headphones. A mug of coffee. None of this is revolutionary, and none of it would sell many self-help books, but it works. The difficult part isn’t discovering the solution. The difficult part is giving myself permission to stop before my brain makes that decision on my behalf.

    At fifty-something I’ve become slightly better at recognising the warning signs. Not because I’ve become particularly wise, but because I’ve ignored them often enough to recognise the consequences. These days, if the world suddenly seems louder than usual, if every conversation feels like hard work, and if the thought of another Teams meeting fills me with existential dread, I know it probably isn’t the world that’s changed. It’s me. That’s usually my cue to slow down before my brain pulls the emergency brake and does it for me.

    Sadly, I do not always pull the emergency cord in time, and sometimes I get so overloaded that I am barely capable of leaving the house. The most banal tasks become Herculean, and routine things I do every day suddenly take on a distinctly Sisyphean quality until it all becomes, well, too much. I have been in that stage fairly recently. Instead I ignored the warnings, went on against my brain’s better judgement, and then promptly fell over. Naturally, I paid the price and am now trying to pick up the pieces. At least I noticed it fairly early in the burnout process and had not sunk too deeply into the depressive mire that can accompany it. I am still close enough to the edge to grab a low-hanging branch and haul myself back out. Muddied, exhausted but still in one piece.

    Perhaps the biggest lesson burnout has taught me is that being autistic or having ADHD isn’t just about the things other people notice. It’s also about the invisible effort that nobody sees. The conversations that looked effortless. The office that seemed manageable. The shopping trip that appeared uneventful. The social gathering everyone assumed I enjoyed. Sometimes my greatest achievement on any given day is convincing everyone else that I’m coping effortlessly. Burnout is often the bill arriving several weeks later.

    I’ve finally stopped thinking of myself as a machine that ought to run continuously. Batteries aren’t defective because they eventually need recharging, and neither am I. Every time I’ve ignored the warning signs and tried to keep going, my brain has eventually overruled me anyway. These days I try to recognise when my own battery is running low and quietly plug myself back into the charger before the screen goes completely black.

    Even if, occasionally, I don’t manage. At least I tried.

  • The Universe Doesn’t Give a **** About You!

    The Universe Doesn’t Give a **** About You!

    I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but the universe really doesn’t care a **** about you.

    It doesn’t care about your job, your bank balance, or the fact that Steve from Accounts got promoted ahead of you. It remains magnificently indifferent to all such concerns and, indeed, to most concerns in general. Entire stars explode with alarming regularity while I’m trying to remember where I left my reading glasses. The universe appears to regard these events as being of broadly equal insignificance.

    Oddly enough, I find that rather comforting.

    Many of us grow up with the idea that we’re here for a reason. Somewhere, hidden amongst the cosmic paperwork, there is supposedly a grand purpose waiting to be discovered. A destiny. A calling. Perhaps an ancient prophecy involving dramatic music, a glowing sword, and an unnecessarily complicated family tree.

    As far as I can tell, this is nonsense.

    You are not the chosen one.

    Neither am I.

    No great celestial bureaucrat sits above the clouds assigning each of us a special mission, a five-year plan, and an accompanying orchestral soundtrack. The universe has outsourced all personnel decisions and no longer answers correspondence.

    The good news is that if there is no grand cosmic plan for your life, then you cannot possibly fail to achieve it.

    You don’t have to become a billionaire (it’s trillionaires now – Ed) , a celebrity, a genius, or a historical footnote in order to justify your existence. You don’t need to leave a legacy, build an empire, or optimise your personal brand. Existing is not a performance review. There is no cosmic HR department quietly assessing your quarterly progress against strategic objectives.

    You are here.

    That is already enough. You already have worth and value.

    Of course, this brings us neatly to money.

    Now don’t get me wrong. Money is useful. Food, shelter, heating, books, bicycles, and the occasional cup of coffee all require money. The universe may be indifferent, but the electricity company certainly isn’t.

    Beyond a certain point, however, our relationship with money starts becoming a little strange. Financial security is sensible. Accumulating enough wealth to buy a small island, three yachts, and a solid-gold toilet while still worrying that you don’t have enough begins to resemble a dragon sleeping on a pile of treasure. Alas even some people on the planet at the moment would give Smaug a run for his money!

    At some point “more” stops meaning “enough” and starts meaning “because the spreadsheet said so”.

    That seems a very poor use of our limited time.

    Because time, not money, is the thing we’re actually running out of and no matter how much money you have… you cannot buy yourself more time.

    Here’s the great paradox.

    Cosmically speaking, we are insignificant. Ridiculously so. The observable universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. Against that backdrop, the entire history of human civilisation barely registers as a rounding error.

    And yet there has never been another person exactly like you.

    There never will be again.

    The particular combination of memories, experiences, fears, hopes, talents, flaws, interests, favourite songs, terrible decisions, and peculiar habits that constitutes “you” has never existed before in the history of the universe. Every human being is both utterly insignificant and completely unique.

    The universe may not care.

    That doesn’t make you unimportant.

    It simply means your importance exists at a different scale.

    People spend an extraordinary amount of effort dividing themselves into tribes. Wealth. Religion. Nationality. Politics. Class. Social status. Favourite operating systems. Human beings seem unable to resist inventing categories and then arguing about them.

    Underneath all of that, however, we’re remarkably similar.

    We’re all temporary.

    We’re all fragile.

    We’re all making it up as we go along.

    We’re all trying to get through the week with some combination of dignity, optimism, caffeine, and luck.

    The labels we use to separate ourselves are often far less interesting than the things we share.

    Eventually every one of us will be gone.

    The kings.

    The billionaires. (Ahem trillionaires I said! – Ed)

    The influencers.

    The politicians.

    The people who spend all day arguing with strangers on the internet and who make “spreading hatred and misery” their mission.

    Especially them.

    One day the universe will forget every empire, every nation, every corporation, every social media platform, and every argument ever conducted online. Given enough time, all the works of mankind will vanish without trace. Even this great magnus opus you’re reading now will vanish (not a bad thing if you ask me – Ed)

    And honestly?

    That’s fine.

    I don’t find that depressing.

    I find it liberating.

    If our time here is brief and the universe has no grand plan for us, then we’re free to decide for ourselves what matters. We can learn interesting things. We can read good books. We can listen to great music. We can collect ridiculous objects. We can fall in love. We can build friendships. We can help one another where we can and, as a general rule, try not to make somebody else’s brief existence more difficult than it needs to be.

    We are all mayflies on a small rock hurtling through an indifferent cosmos.

    We may as well make the experience pleasant.

    So make the tea.

    Take the walk.

    Read the book.

    Listen to the music.

    Buy the absurd thing if it genuinely delights you and doesn’t bankrupt you.

    Laugh often.

    Be kind.

    Learn things.

    Share things.

    Help people.

    The universe doesn’t give a **** about you.

    Which is precisely why we should give a damn about each other.

  • Smell Is Basically a Superpower

    Smell Is Basically a Superpower

    People often ask me what it’s like not being able to smell.

    The honest answer is:

    I haven’t the faintest idea.

    If that sounds odd, then consider this: I’ve never experienced life with a sense of smell, so how can I possibly say what life is like without it?

    To me, smell occupies roughly the same category as telepathy, X-ray vision, and flying.

    I understand the theory.

    I simply have no frame of reference for the experience.

    What Exactly Is Congenital Anosmia?

    Put simply, anosmia is the lack of a sense of smell.

    Anosmia is to smell what blindness is to sight, or deafness is to hearing.

    Congenital means I was born this way.

    I didn’t lose my sense of smell later in life.

    I never had it in the first place.

    Technically, anosmia is the complete absence of smell. There is actually a spectrum of smell-related conditions, of which anosmia is just one.

    Anosmia

    The complete absence of any sense of smell.

    Hyposmia

    A reduced sense of smell. Think of it as turning the detection volume down.

    Phantosmia

    Smelling things that aren’t there.

    I hear this one can be pretty awful for sufferers.

    My brain obviously never generates imaginary smells. It has enough trouble detecting real ones.

    Parosmia

    Distorted smells.

    Coffee may smell like burning rubber. Perfume may smell acrid or unpleasant.

    Unfortunately, following COVID, cases of parosmia, hyposmia, and anosmia all became significantly more common.

    So now you know what the various smell disorders are.

    How is congenital anosmia different?

    You Can’t Miss What You Never Had

    Well, I’ve never had a sense of smell.

    Never experienced what smell is.

    To me, the sense of smell is effectively a fictional experience.

    Someone who acquires anosmia later in life, through illness, infection, head trauma, tumours, or simply old age, experiences a genuine sense of loss.

    They remember smell.

    They miss smell.

    They know what coffee smelled like.

    Freshly baked bread.

    Cut grass.

    Rain.

    Those memories remain even after the sense itself has gone.

    In some ways, being born without a sense of smell is easier.

    That may sound strange, but it really doesn’t bother me.

    That’s not to say it isn’t serious.

    Depression among people who lose their sense of smell later in life is sadly quite common.

    I do not envy them their memories.

    People often ask whether I feel I’ve missed out.

    It’s a bit like asking how I cope with losing £100 billion on the stock market.

    I haven’t lost £100 billion on the stock market.

    I never had £100 billion on the stock market.

    I’m aware that both smell and £100 billion exist.

    My emotional relationship with either is somewhat limited by their complete absence from my life.

    Smell as a Superpower

    I’ll tell someone I’m anosmic and can’t smell, and invariably I get variations of the same conversation.

    “What? You can’t smell coffee?”

    “No.”

    “What about burnt toast?”

    “No.”

    “What about aftershave?”

    “No.”

    At this point the conversation starts descending into that famous scene from BBC’s Red Dwarf.

    “Everybody’s dead, Dave.”

    “What, Captain Hollister?”

    “Everybody’s dead, Dave.”

    “What, Peterson?”

    “Everybody’s dead, Dave.”

    No.

    I can’t smell coffee.

    I can’t smell toast.

    I can’t smell aftershave.

    I can’t smell anything.

    Funny as it is, it becomes a little tiring after the hundredth repetition.

    These days, when someone asks:

    “So you can’t smell roses?”

    I sometimes reply:

    “Can you see through walls?”

    Both questions are equally unhelpful to understanding.

    I then explain that I know smell exists and I know Superman can see through walls.

    I understand the theory.

    I simply don’t, and never will, understand the experience itself.

    I understand smell intellectually in much the same way I understand quantum mechanics.

    I accept that it exists.

    I can even comprehend some of the details of the process.

    Beyond that, things become rather fuzzy.

    Things People Forget Smell Does

    Once people understand that I can’t smell, I occasionally get this sort of response:

    “Ooh, lucky you. You’ll never have to experience a hot, sweaty Tube train.”

    I usually have rather less patience with this one.

    My response is generally something along the lines of:

    “And blind people never have to experience what passes for modern art these days.”

    Smell is an important sense.

    Not only is it heavily linked to flavour, but it also contributes significantly to memory and environmental awareness.

    Taste itself is largely handled by the tongue and remains unaffected. We can detect sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami flavours, as well as sensations like the cooling effect of menthol and the burning sensation of capsaicin.

    Smell, however, contributes enormously to the richness and complexity of flavour.

    It’s also closely connected to memory.

    The olfactory bulb has direct connections to parts of the brain involved in emotion and memory, particularly the amygdala and hippocampus.

    There’s a reason certain smells can instantly transport people back to childhood and why senses are important in laying down new memories.

    My memories simply use different triggers.

    Smell also provides environmental awareness.

    It helps detect danger.

    It warns of fires, gas leaks, spoiled food and other hazards.

    I’ve had so many cases of food poisoning over my lifetime that I’ve genuinely lost count.

    So yes, there are disadvantages.

    Detecting spoiled food.

    Detecting smoke.

    Detecting gas leaks.

    These are all things I have to think about differently.

    That said, there are advantages too.

    I grew up on a dairy farm.

    Without going into too much detail, I’m sure you can imagine at least some of them.

    Summing Up

    Do I wish I could smell?

    Of course.

    Curiosity alone would make it worthwhile.

    I’d love to know what coffee smells like.

    Or petrichor after rain.

    Or my wife’s perfume.

    Or whether everybody has been telling the truth about bacon all these years.

    But congenital anosmia isn’t really a story about loss.

    You can’t lose something you never had.

    It’s simply a different way of experiencing the world.

    Besides, the only thing I know for certain that stinks is my sense of humour.

  • The Internet Was More Interesting Before Everything Became a Platform

    The Internet Was More Interesting Before Everything Became a Platform

    I remember the early days of the internet.

    I remember the terrible websites with flashing green text on red backgrounds, animated GIFs in abundance, JavaScript visitor counters at the bottom of the page, MIDI tunes that started playing when you accessed the site, and entire websites dedicated to someone’s hamster.

    (Guilty as charged, m’lud.)

    And you know what?

    It was GLORIOUS!

    Don’t worry, this isn’t an “old man yells at cloud infrastructure” post.

    The old internet wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t ideal, and it certainly wasn’t always safe.

    However, what it was, was quintessentially human.

    THE INTERNET USED TO FEEL GEOGRAPHICAL

    The actual internet was a highway.

    It wasn’t the destination, but the means of travelling between weird towns, villages, and hamlets, each of which specialised in… well… something.

    Much like the towns in the Mad Max universe, where you have Bartertown, Gastown, Bullet Farm, and Tomorrow-morrow Land, the internet had Hamsterville, Catopolis, Conspiracy Creek, and Anosmia Acres.

    I was a serial website owner.

    I ran an anosmia support forum which, somehow, got me on television for my fifteen minutes of fame.

    Its design may well have made visitors’ eyes bleed, granted, but as it was a support group for people with no sense of smell, it was perhaps appropriate that my design stank. (See featured image from The Internet archive above!)

    I ran a joke conspiracy PHPBB forum called the UK Conspiracy Nexus, where every “member” was another character I had created and all the posts, arguments, and discussions were written by me.

    I deliberately invented ridiculous conspiracy theories, such as the connection between Toblerone and Illuminati mind-control dentistry.

    It’s the triangular shape, you see.

    It was all good fun… until I noticed my posts being shared non-ironically on more “serious” conspiracy sites.

    Dear God.

    What did I spawn?

    I also created a maths and general nerdiness site dedicated to things geeks might find “sexy” (that is to say, cool).

    In hindsight, calling it Sex4Geeks was perhaps inviting exactly the sort of dubious attention it received.

    That site was short-lived.

    It did, however, end up becoming a joke in my best man’s wedding speech.

    Pete?

    Naive much?

    Heck yes.

    But the internet was full of things like this.

    BBSs.

    Usenet.

    Forums.

    IRC.

    Personal webpages written in hand-crafted HTML.

    It wasn’t one place.

    It was thousands of interconnected little places, each with their own personality, culture, and rules.

    You didn’t live there.

    You visited.

    You travelled between them.

    You discovered them.

    You got lost.

    Wonderfully so.

    NOBODY NEEDED A BUSINESS PLAN

    The majority of the internet back then existed for one reason.

    Someone cared about something enough to make something about it.

    Not because they wanted followers, subscribers, sponsorships, or monetisation.

    It was because somebody cared enough about model railways, their collection of Tamagotchis, or the history of the China tea trade.

    They had passion and they wanted to share it.

    There was a website for every niche interest and most of them looked as though they had been assembled during an environmental catastrophe and built entirely in the dark.

    THE GREAT CONSOLIDATION

    Of course, initially seen as a fad, the internet proved it wasn’t going anywhere.

    People realised its potential.

    You could now order a pizza online.

    Such a technological breakthrough is something we take entirely for granted nowadays.

    Companies with ideas and dollar signs in their eyes jumped in.

    Slowly, giants emerged from the chaos.

    Where once there had been millions of random amateur websites, suddenly you had Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

    Then YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok.

    These places acted like magnets, drawing in the weird from the satellite towns, villages, and hamlets, and housing them instead in vast digital metropolises.

    THE ALGORITHMS THAT ATE DISCOVERY

    Finding things used to be an adventure.

    There were a few basic search engines, reciprocal links, blogrolls, and web rings connecting like-minded sites together.

    You would wander around them feeling as though you were forging your own path through a strange and fascinating landscape.

    You discovered what people made.

    You sought out things that interested you.

    Now we no longer discover what people made.

    We discover what the algorithms, working on behalf of the platforms, want us to see.

    Want your site to appear first in search results?

    Just pay lots of money.

    It’s even worse now with AI-generated summaries appearing above the sites that originally created the content.

    In the pursuit of making things easier, we lost something human along the way.

    THE DEATH OF WEIRD

    The old internet was eccentric, amateur, and personal.

    Websites now look polished, optimised, branded, and laden with “smart” features.

    The old internet may have looked like a terrible hodgepodge mess, but it looked like somebody.

    It was human.

    Much of today’s internet looks like a corporation.

    A polished, focus-grouped, metrics-driven corporation.

    A CONFESSION

    Nostalgia is a terrible historian.

    As Baz Luhrmann famously said:

    “Nostalgia is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

    The old internet had its fair share of problems.

    Awful design.

    Scams.

    Misinformation.

    Toxicity.

    Every village conspiracy nut could find a like-minded community and build little echo chambers where the worst ideas fed off one another and grew.

    I’m not arguing that the old internet was perfect.

    I’m simply saying it was more human.

    We still have scams, misinformation, and toxicity.

    Now it’s just run by a handful of billionaire puppet masters.

    WE LOST MORE THAN WEBSITES

    The real loss wasn’t the technology.

    That grew.

    Who would have imagined we’d one day carry around access to the sum total of human knowledge on a small device that fits in the palm of our hand?

    We lost individuality.

    Experimentation.

    Curiosity.

    And yes, weirdness.

    The internet became a consumer space for selling content rather than a creative space for sharing ideas.

    IN CONCLUSION

    Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I reincarnated this blog.

    Not because I expect thousands of readers.

    Not because I have a monetisation strategy.

    Not because some marketing consultant told me to build my personal brand.

    No.

    Because I miss people having little corners of the internet that belonged to them.

    Places where we could be knowledgeable, enthusiastic, eccentric, or even completely wrong about something.

    Places that felt human.

    The internet may have become a platform, but there’s still room for the occasional strange little website.

    Or should I say, in my case, the occasional strange Little website.

    This is my own weird nest on the web.

  • The Difference Between Sound and Noise.

    The Difference Between Sound and Noise.

    I’m a bit of a contradiction when it comes to my autistic sensibilities.

    I cannot tolerate noise.

    Office chatter, traffic noise, dripping taps, ticking clocks, snoring, eating sounds (misophonia), or other people’s phone calls and conversations in general.

    This would lead you to think I am sensory avoidant and, to some extent, I am.

    However, My autistic noise sensitivity has an exception, I adore music.

    Music is one of my great pleasures in life.

    My noise-cancelling headphones are rarely off my head. I wear them as soon as I leave the house or office and listen to music constantly.

    My musical tastes can best be described as:

    “Yes.”

    On any given day I might listen to progressive rock, punk, heavy metal, opera, film soundtracks, musical theatre, dad rock, classical music, or, on particularly unusual afternoons, Mongolian throat singing.

    Spotify’s recommendation algorithm has long since given up trying to profile me and now simply appears to be selecting tracks using a random number generator and mild panic.

    In the world of sound there is a profound difference between music and noise.

    Music is controlled, predictable, and chosen.

    Noise is intrusive, random, unwarranted and, in most cases, unavoidable.

    I live in London.

    It’s hardly a haven of peace, calm and quiet serenity and not a place for someone with autistic noise sensitivity!

    Well, bits of it can be. More on that later.

    But the city isn’t designed to be noisy. It’s not even designed to be quiet. Noise is simply an unavoidable side effect of being a large, bustling metropolis.

    London is a loud place.

    Then again, it’s not always about volume.

    It’s about the inescapable wall of sound and its chaotic, unpredictable nature.

    Noise Fatigue

    Being constantly immersed in a sea of sound is draining.

    Much like Chinese water torture, it slowly chips away at my calm and increases my cognitive overload. External noise increases my internal static and makes my stammer worse.

    This results in difficulty concentrating, feeling worn out, exhaustion and an increased likelihood of meltdown.

    Death by a thousand auditory paper cuts.

    The Survival Equipment

    In order to get through the day with minimal fuss, I have an everyday carry survival kit.

    • My noise-cancelling headphones (a battered pair of Sony WH-1000XM3s held together with duct tape)
    • Loop Quiet earplugs
    • A spare set of fallback Bluetooth earbuds (some cheap brand, as I keep losing them)

    My morning routine as I leave the house is:

    Headphones.

    Keys.

    Wallet.

    Usually in that order.

    I’d rather discover I’d forgotten my wallet or my keys than my headphones, which probably says something quite worrying about me.

    More worrying, perhaps, is that I’ve frequently forgotten the latter, but as long as I have my headphones I’m fine.

    I may not be able to get back into the house.

    I may not be able to buy lunch.

    But hey, at least I’m not exposed to noise.

    Havens of Calm in the Chaos

    As mentioned above, not all of London is a hellish soundscape.

    For all its flaws, London has an astounding number of parks, museums, churches and galleries.

    When I’m in the middle of London I can often find much-needed respite by nipping into one of the many parks and listening to birdsong, or by popping into a museum or gallery to calm my inner turmoil.

    And although I’m not a religious person, I do love the peaceful calm of a church or cathedral.

    I can understand why those of a more spiritual nature feel something in such places.

    The peace is almost palpable.

    Like a comforting presence.

    Closing Thoughts

    So yes, I love sound.

    At least, I love music and the sounds of nature.

    I love birdsong, babbling brooks, complex harmonies, soaring orchestras, distorted guitars, operatic voices and whatever noise Mongolian throat singers have somehow persuaded their anatomy to produce.

    What I don’t love is my brain trying to process every single noise in the environment simultaneously.

    The difference between music and noise isn’t volume.

    It’s consent.

    One I invited in.

    The other kicked the door down and started defecating on the furniture.

  • Pride Month and the Anxious Asexual

    Pride Month and the Anxious Asexual

    This is a post I thought I might not write.

    Not because I’m ashamed or anything, but mainly because I wasn’t sure I could do it justice.

    It’s LGBTQIA+ Month (June), coinciding with and commemorating the Stonewall riots. It’s a month of marches, festivals and parades celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community, promoting equality and acceptance, and remembering the activism that laid the bedrock for many of the rights we enjoy today.

    Every June, my social media fills with rainbow flags, Pride events, celebrations and discussions.

    And every June I find myself wondering the same thing:

    Am I allowed to be here?

    The Invisible Letter

    I’ve always carried a nagging feeling that perhaps I shouldn’t.

    Maybe if I expand the acronym from LGBTQ+ to LGBTQIA+, I feel a little more comfortable including myself. It’s that all-important A at the end.

    A for Asexual, Aromantic or Agender.

    I am, for my sins, asexual.

    One of the main reasons I struggle to include myself in LGBTQIA+ festivities is what is often called passing privilege.

    Nothing about me, save perhaps my asexual flag pin or rainbow lanyard, immediately singles me out as “different”.

    My autism is invisible.

    My congenital anosmia is invisible.

    My asexuality is equally invisible.

    I’ve never been picked on, abused, beaten up or discriminated against for things people couldn’t see.

    Most people assume I am straight, and unless I choose to disclose my asexuality, I can move through the world without attracting much attention.

    That can create a feeling of awkwardness, or even guilt, when engaging with LGBTQIA+ spaces.

    I feel as though others have fought battles that I have largely been spared.

    Yet invisibility brings its own challenges.

    Asexuality is frequently misunderstood, dismissed or erased entirely.

    The result is a curious sense of standing both inside and outside the community at the same time; connected to its struggles and history, while sometimes feeling hesitant to claim a place within it.

    The Feeling of Not Being “Queer Enough”

    I often wonder whether I should even be here.

    Am I taking up space meant for others?

    Do I really belong?

    Am I part of the community or merely an ally?

    Should I even describe myself as LGBTQIA+?

    These questions are surprisingly common among asexual people.

    I and those like me spend so much time being overlooked that we can end up overlooking ourselves.

    Pride Isn’t Actually About Sex

    One of the reasons asexuality can seem confusing to people outside the community is that many assume LGBTQIA+ identities are fundamentally about sex.

    Mention Pride and some people’s minds immediately jump to attraction, relationships and sexuality.

    Viewed through that lens, asexuality appears to be an odd fit.

    After all, how can someone who experiences little or no sexual attraction belong within a community that many outsiders mistakenly define by sexual attraction?

    The answer is simple.

    Pride has never really been about sex.

    At its heart, Pride is about identity.

    It’s about authenticity.

    It’s about visibility and community.

    It’s about recognising that human beings don’t all fit neatly into society’s expectations and that nobody should be shamed for existing outside those expectations.

    Asexual people understand that experience all too well.

    Many of us grew up feeling different without quite understanding why.

    We watched friends develop crushes, navigate relationships and talk about attraction in ways that simply didn’t resonate with our own experiences.

    Some of us spent years wondering whether we were late bloomers, broken, repressed or somehow missing a piece of ourselves.

    The journey may look different from those of other LGBTQIA+ people, but the underlying themes of self-discovery, acceptance and belonging are often remarkably familiar.

    The Ace Spectrum

    It’s also worth remembering that asexuality isn’t a single, uniform experience.

    The ace umbrella encompasses a wide spectrum of identities, including demisexual and grey-asexual people whose experiences of attraction may be infrequent, conditional or significantly different from what society considers typical.

    In my own case, I’ve been very happily married for seventeen years, which often surprises people when they learn that I’m ace.

    One of the most persistent misconceptions about asexuality is that it somehow excludes relationships, intimacy or deep emotional connections.

    It doesn’t.

    Being ace isn’t necessarily about the absence of love, companionship or commitment; it’s about the way attraction is experienced.

    The ace spectrum is broad enough to include people who never experience sexual attraction, those who experience it only rarely, and those for whom it emerges primarily from strong emotional bonds.

    Human relationships, as it turns out, are rather more nuanced than simple tick-box categories.

    Why Pride Matters

    Pride celebrates the freedom to exist honestly.

    It celebrates the right to be seen as who you are rather than who society expects you to be.

    Those are things asexual people share completely with the wider LGBTQIA+ community.

    You don’t need to experience sexual attraction to understand the importance of authenticity.

    And you certainly don’t need to experience sexual attraction to deserve a place at Pride.

    In Closing

    Perhaps that’s what I’ve slowly come to realise over the years.

    Pride isn’t a competition.

    It’s not awarded based on visibility, hardship or how obvious your identity is to strangers.

    It’s not about proving you’re “queer enough”.

    It’s about recognising that people come in many different forms and that none of them should have to hide who they are.

    Including those of us whose differences are invisible.

    Including those of us who sometimes stand at the edge of the parade wondering whether we should even be there.

    We do.

    And maybe that’s reason enough to celebrate.