Please Forward

This short story is now available in audiobook form as the first episode of the Unlimited Story Podcast.


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Talking shit

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One of the things people say about me is that I'm quiet. Sometimes this is a criticism, other times not. I've already explained that part of the reason for this is because I find small talk difficult . Well, not just difficult, I find it pointless. If there's something worth discussing, I'm quite capable of amputating the hindquarters of a member of Equus africanus asinus with my garrulousness. Some people just can't help themselves though. As Douglas Adams once said " if they don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working ". I usually come across them whilst I'm out and about, on public transport or in shops. You can hardly call it eavesdropping; to avoid overhearing these types you really have to be listening to Napalm Death on your iPod. Its incredible just how much you can overhear without picking up any genuine content. It's all filler, conversational fluff designed to prevent the other person getting a word in edgeways a
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Altiora in Votis

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GILES IS A NAZI MOTHERFUCKER These words were sprayed in two foot high white letters along the redbrick fascia of my school on a major trunk route through North London. I would imagine that tens of thousands of people saw this heartfelt statement, because even though the school authorities did their best to scrub away the obscenity, the letters remained visible as ghosts on the brick beneath the tall Victorian classroom windows for many years afterwards. I often wondered about the motivation for this graffiti. "Giles" was the Headmaster and an inoffensive figurehead whom I always thought of as a bit like a cut-price version of a minor member of the royal family. I didn't consider such an ineffectual individual worthy of such bile. Furthermore the words had been written, so it was whispered, by a boy who had been expelled for some misdemeanour or other. I really didn't understand this. As far as I was concerned being at the school was a nightmare, the claustrophobic
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The Selfishness Paradox

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It turns out that there are a number of very real autistic traits which are not "textbook" at all – in other words recognised by mental health professionals in the official literature – but nevertheless are very familiar to anyone who has experienced them. None of these are official diagnostic criteria, but they are nonetheless real. When I was part of a group of autistic people who met regularly to share our experiences we discovered several of these that we all had in common but which hadn't even occurred to the group's NT facilitator. One was an aversion to the overuse of names in conversation. It's fine when there's a group of people as of course you need to be able to know who is being addressed but when it's one to one it just feels... unpleasant and sinister. No matter how illogical that may actually be. Another of these non-textbook traits is what I think of as the Selfishness Paradox. During our group discussions we all discovered that we had a te
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