Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

You may well see me on the allotment and think I look reasonably fit, but it takes it's toll and in the evenings, and often the mornings too, I am none too mobile. Sitting at my computer does not do me any better than walking to and fro on my plot, digging and weeding and whatever, because that does my back in as well.

None of it is getting any better, my years (I was 58 last week) and the turn of the year hardly help. It's a wonder I don't go down with seasonal affective depression too, now the nights are longer. Indeed it maybe a bite from the old black dog that has brought this particular post on.

Whither am I going, and how much of a hurry am I to get there?  Well truth be told, I have prevaricated and excused and put off and procrastinated for too long to the point where I am not even concerned about reaching the end of the academic journey.

My priorities are all mixed up. To say that I am (literally) building a hedge against a Government that has managed to survive for too long (unlike me) about whom if one were to say (in lengthy peroration and nesting parentheses (see I can't help my prolixitiy any more than my lax joints (and perhaps bowels, (look you another nest of brackets) , ),),) about whom I will say, that to say they have little regard for the common people is taking litotes and understatement a little far, they have a positive hatred of us, to say that I am building a hedge against them is what I have been doing on my allotment and it has been more relaxing for me than the academic grind.

(or from trying to understand that last paragraph, which I shall dedicate to Frankie Happé and Kristina Chew)


I am not quite losing my marbles, though I did lose a black lens cap amongst the fallen leaves in Wappenbury wood on Sunday. However I have lost my enthusiasm for the academic project. I no longer have any desire whatever to pursue another set of grandiose post nominals.

I do feel however, that the write up of the Thesis is the boring part, and difficult too, when I run away with my own prose, (or it runs away with me, how strange this language, allowing such chiasmus)

I feel it is a stage I am not in a hurry to complete, and I feel the prize at the end, of wearing a silly hat in a big hall in front of lot's of others in similar Monty Python outfits is not the real prize at all.

I feel that the real end product, is the Autonomy journal. That is what has been made possible by this academic journey, it is the contacts I have made, and the learning, and research, learning not just how the peer review system and literature works, but figuring out how to make the new opportunities of open publishing and software work for me. I hope the internet will do the rest and that it will eventually take on a life of it's own ever further from mine.

And what has autism to do with all of that? Well for as much as autism is embedded into my being, for good or ill, I am embedded in the wider phenomenon of autism. Themes for Autonomy to explore, as we go a stage yet beyond self narrating zoo exhibits, a stage beyond so called "self advocacy" a term I have come to profoundly dislike for reasons I shall go into another time, but a stage where we take our proper place on the stage and get to challenge those core assumptions and assumed rights that we are always the subjects and never the originators of the ideas that have come to be included in the field of "autism studies".