When I started school at four, I was already reading my parents’ books. At six, my mum, upon telling the teacher that I was currently reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and could I carry on with that instead of Billy Blue Hat, was sneered at by a parent-governor and told, “don’t worry, we’ll bring her down a peg or two”. At 11, following comprehensive psychiatric and cognitive assessments, an educational psychiatrist appointed by my high school recommended that I attend a school for “gifted and talented” children. There was no further information given, and I thought no more about it, until I was sitting in my doctor’s surgery three years ago following a breakdown.
“I can’t cope with noise, light, crowds, people, new situations, surprises, T-junctions” – the words just fell out of my mouth – “and I feel like my head is full of angry wasps and sometimes I get so overwhelmed by the world I just want to die. I don’t want to die, I’m not suicidal, but I just want the wasps to be quiet.” I cried, as I had never said this out loud before and I thought I sounded insane. The doctor looked back through my notes and asked me if anyone had ever told me I was autistic. I sat and stared at her as she passed me a handful of resources to research.
I have always been an oddball. I was a loner at school, and largely still am, preferring to shut myself away with my work and books than go to parties. I am frequently told by men that I am aggressive and difficult, awkward, and unapproachable, traits I put down to being a bit butch and a lot gay – but perhaps there is more nuance to it than just fragile masculinity. I know, too, that I can be wild, intense and distant, methodical and chaotic all at once.
Yet there is clearly something about bold, neurodivergent women and girls that prompts powerful men to scrape the sides of their own putrid barrels of opinion to attack this “terrifying” otherness. Last week, as she came to Britain and addressed the Houses of Parliament on climate change, the brilliant 16-year-old campaigner Greta Thunberg was attacked by Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill as a “millenarian weirdo” with a “monotone voice” about whom there was “something chilling”.
A piece on Guido Fawkes delighted in pointing out that Thunberg’s mother was a Eurovision contestant, using this as killer evidence of her “incredibly privileged background”. The piece was promptly tweeted by Toby Young (propelled into Oxford on a catapult crafted from the pursestrings of a baron). If anyone deserves the description “monotonous” and “chilling”, it is these hyper-entitled, narrow minds and their view of everyone who does not look or behave as they do.
I doubt very much they will deter Thunberg. As Chris Packham, the Springwatch presenter, said last week after waking to find two dead crows hanging on nooses outside his family home: “People like me [with Asperger’s syndrome] are not affected by this sort of thing. It doesn’t weaken our resolve. We’ve seen it this week with the trolling of Greta. It’s a complete waste of time.” Packham’s offence was to have led the Wild Justice campaign against the shooting of birds, angering farmers and gamekeepers.
It took 24 years for me to harness my autistic traits into something useful, and I have grown to regard them as a kind of superpower. Cooking, to me, is akin to algebra, and my mind a pocket calculator. Readers send me photos of the insides of their kitchen cupboards, and I will instantly send back a menu plan. Like Matilda in the Roald Dahl book, the component parts simply fall into place in my head in a way that is impossible to describe.
I started off putting tinned peaches in a curry in place of another sweet base, as it was all I had from the food bank at the time. I didn’t consider my approach unusual until years later, working alongside established chefs and cookbook authors, who repeatedly expressed surprise and delight at what they called “my method”.
I was surprised. I don’t have a method, I would say, bewildered. I simply take one thing out of a recipe, if I don’t have it to hand or am feeling mischievous, and replace it with another. It sounds simplistic on paper, but has led to using black tea in place of red wine in a casserole, a marie-rose semifreddo with pickled prawns as a literal starter for 10, and a sweet, slow-roasted garlic jam.
On days where the world is overwhelming and the wasps return to roost in my wild and saturated mind, I return for comfort and perspective to my favourite quote, by the mathematician Alan Turing: “Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”