When I am out and someone approaches me unexpectedly, as with a lot of people with Aspergers, I sometimes find it very difficult to fully understand what they are saying to me. I usually get the beginning few words and the end few words but anything in between is noise. With most people, this doesn’t matter in the slightest as they usually garble incoherent nonsense anyway. Where a response from me seems to be called for, I tend to have a few stock replies and “Yes, absolutely”, seems to work in almost all cases. But not always. Let me give you an example.
I was recently at an industrial museum looking at a huge model railway set-up and wondering how anyone could be so interested in tiny trains doing loops around mock-ups of trees and cows that they could devote their sad little lives to building it. Odd. So when I spotted railway-nerd approaching, I dived through the nearest doorway. Unfortunately, it was to a private area. This did not deter railway-nerd who, it turned out, worked at the museum and was responsible for building the entire railway edifice.
“Do you want to see the workshops,” he asked, indicating the cavernous interior of the room I had blundered in to.
“Er, well, er, yes, absolutely.”
So he led me through and into railway hell.
Now I know that everyone with autism is supposed to be railway mad but I’m not one of them. True, I did enjoy the odd Thomas the Tank Engine story when I was young but my favourite was the book where they retired Thomas from service and bricked him up in a tunnel. That’s where I would have wanted to be if I was a train with a face. I must have been the only child who cried when he was let out. That left teachers thinking I was odd and this was later confirmed when I drew a detailed picture of the plumbing system to my home, starting at the toilet and ending at the sewage works. I like to remember that the assignment was to draw a picture of your house, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but I have a terrible feeling it was to draw a picture of your family.
Anyway, railway-nerd was busy telling me in intricate detail how they plan each model set-up before crafting it out of all the rubbish that sane people would throw away. He asked me if I would like to know how they build the platforms, “yes, absolutely”, the bridges “yes, absolutely”, the landforms “yes, ABSOLUTELY”. This was hard.
Several hours later, we had covered every aspect of model railway building it is humanly possible to imagine and railway-nerd had moved on to advising me how to build my own set up. A two-foot base board is where you start, apparently. By now, I was silent, wondering which of us would die from old age first. Finally, railway-nerd announced that because the museum was about to close for the winter, he had better finish but would I like a few magazines to take home with me? “Yes, absolutely”. It was a good job I didn’t have far to stagger to the car with the amount of paper he thrust upon me. He then asked if I fancied a coffee in the café as it would stay open if he asked. “Yes, ab…er, no, thank you.” His whole body seemed to slump. I needed a softer approach, “Er, I just want to go and see that model tram you have in that pit over there.” I indicated to a rusting heap of metal in a large hole with a sign that read, optimistically, ‘Tram’.
Railway-nerd let me go and I quickly found the fire exit and made a break for it. Unfortunately, my route led straight past the café. I pulled my hat low, raised my collar high and went past as fast as I could manage without actually sprinting. I had almost reached the sanctity of the car park before a loud voice sailed after me “Start with a two-foot base board now,” I froze, paralysed by the horror it would start all over again. What the hell should I do? In the end, I did the only thing that occurred to me. I turned, waved, and shouted back, “Yes, absolutely.”
