Bloody hell, between this and Astrid et Raphaëlle: Brilliant Minds you can't move for Autistics on the tellybox these days.....    

  Thanks to Matt Roberts for compiling this calendar of Neurodivergent shows at this years Edinburgh Fringe .    

 Blatant work-type post here so apologies in advance. You may have read here about top music-type fella - and all round nice bloke - Paul Laird's new book - The Birth and Impact of Britpop - which I was lucky enough to do the illustrations for - and guess what?  It's out now.     And the reviews are rather good: And with that I strongly suggest you go order a copy from here right now, if not sooner. End of plug.

  BOTD 1957 - the saviour of my turbulent teen years (and beyond!), Marc Almond! And you can read how he did it here .

With school holidays, prepping for the girls going to college, trying to book a trip away and attempting to write a film-based paper (again) it's been a wee bit busier than normal around here - I mean seriously I'm only one episode into season 4 of Stranger Things at the mo! - I've had precious little time to pop anything new up here (that makes sense anyway) for a while. Saying that tho' something struck me recently that I found fairly interesting and that's the fact that a fair few folk when talking to me about 'the Autism' seem to 'file' everything into separate boxes depending on what the conversation is. No, really. For example, if I'm chatting about parenting I'm a parent of Autistic kids, folk seem to forget that I'm Autistic too like it doesn't actually register. Same if I'm talking about relationships - folk seem to think that being Autistic doesn't factor into it. And when talking about being an Autistic parent, you ...

 Autitude Issue 17 - out now!   Illustrated & curated by me and filled with wonderful poetry, reflections and artwork.    Read it here .

Was chatting to a group of 'the young people' (yes I hate that phrase too) t'other week about social interaction/pubs/clubs and the like and how to navigate such things if you're Autistic and it reminded me of one of the probably only two occasions I've ever been drunk - I mean really, really drunk - in my entire life. So obviously I thought I'd share it here because there aren't enough reasons to take the absolute piss out of me as it is. Take yourself back, if you will, to the heady days of 1995...a pre-DX me has planned a Clockwork Orange themed night out for my 26th birthday to - hopefully - cap off a fairly eventful albeit slightly shitey year where a massive group of us Droogs (well 6 of us) were going to spend the nochy out for a slap-up pischa-fest followed by much drinking with a wee bit of dancing thrown in. No Synthmesc or Drencrom tho' as I was booked in to work the next day. This may be important later.   I must just add tho' that anyone...