What is the difference between an AS person and a shy person? Shy people know when to make eye contact and when not to, people with AS don't in most cases. Shy people don't have poor physical co-ordination or obsessions or routines.
Neither do people who suffer from "Shyness" make remarks like I did on the evening of Thursday, 10th February 1994. That evening my mum's friend Diane was at my house. I came in and said "Hello Diane". She replied "Hello". I inquired, "Diane do you mind if I ask you a question?". She replied 'No. What is it?'. I asked "How old are you?". She answered "Forty, Why?". I said, "I was asking because I think you look a lot older than that". I received a furious, angry glare from my mum. I didn't mean anything wrong. I had just said what I thought. When Diane went my mum lost her temper and said "I have never heard anything as rude in my entire life". Diane looked 70 when she was 40. I thought it then and I still think it now. End of story. I bet she looks about 90 now!
It is possible that you may read this and ask "Yeah, well fair enough. You did say that and it was embarrassing, but that was then. February 1994 was a long time ago. You wouldn't do it now would you?".
Well I have done it more recently, and it wasn't intentional either. In February 2008 I was talking to a woman who was born in May 1978 and I asked her if she was with her grandmother. This woman remarked that it was her mum who was born in April 1944! I felt terrible and apologised.
On Saturday 6th August 1994, I went to a wedding. The pair who were married split up four years later and were divorced within five. Everybody was saying that it was meant to be and that they were the perfect match etc. I never buy into all that bullshit. Nobody knows how a marriage is going to turn out. I don't believe in fairies and fantasy, I believe in reality and truth. I showed that my obsession with politics hadn't left me, which I developed in early 1991, by rambling on about it to someone that evening.
Three weeks later, on Saturday, 27th August 1994, I was on a boat on an holiday in York with my mum and dad, two aunts and their husbands and a few others, and we stopped at a caravan nearby. I remember talking to my Uncle on the boat about the 1960's, where things went wrong in the 1970's and the riots of 1981 and unemployment of that time.
An amusing thing, or amusing if you find it funny, depending on what your sense of humour is, happened exactly nine months after the Diane age incident, on Thursday, 10th November 1994. My uncle was fifty years old, two days later, on Saturday 12th November 1994. In Britain if you are 100 the Queen sends you a congratulatory telegram. On Thursday 10th November I printed off on a computer a 100th birthday card I designed, and cut it in half. On his birthday I took it to his house and said he would get the other half in 50 years time!
Between September 1994 and June 1996 I studied for a GNVQ Advanced course in Business studies at a college in my town. I didn't like it. There was too many people around me at once, like at Secondary School. I didn't like the noise, and I lost my temper once or twice due to feeling overloaded and stressed. I snapped at someone once, calling them "Self-centred" because they wouldn't lend me some work that I had missed because I was ill. If I could go back in time I never would have done that. I wasn't suited for it.
Another time, I was doing a presentation. I think this was in late 1994, and it was the first time I had ever stood up in front of a room and spoke. Two people were quietly speaking amongst themselves, and muttering. I stopped, glared straight at them, and when they stopped, I looked down and carried on. One of the people who ran the course even spoke to me in private in December about my conduct, and he said something like "Look, I know you want to do well. The work you have produced has been very good, but could you just relax a bit more and calm down".
