Autism at The Ashmolean
Going on a day out en famille is nowadays no mean feat. There being five of us, it is not an insignificant amount of people suddenly to enter a small café or shop. Add into that mix a thirteen year old with autism and all the associated bag of tricks, then the fun really begins.
We are actually very lucky and, it seems, uniquely blessed in that our three secondary school age daughters appear still to want to spend time with their mum and dad. Our eldest and youngest are always impeccably behaved, which is not to say that Andrea — our daughter with autism — misbehaves, just that her behaviours are noticeably different and sometimes difficult to deal with, both by us and those around us.
Finding somewhere for lunch is always one of the first challenges; cafés immediately appear to be the smallest and quietest place in the world when we walk in. Andrea carries her various gadgets and ‘must haves’ in a rucksack, which suddenly takes on mammoth proportions. Her dyspraxia and her apparent lack of any spatial awareness send most of the patrons of the café diving for cover, clinging desperately to their lunch plates, lest they are swiped unceremoniously to the floor. The likelihood of finding a table for five is very slim, which means that invariably we sit at separate tables, necessitating sign language across the room. This is a useful skill and one which serves to highlight to the assembled spectators that there is a difference about Andrea and that this is not her simply being naughty. As it was, we were well catered for with grateful thanks to the people at The Buttery in The Broad, Oxford. The scene did, however, remind me of an extract from Alan Bennett’s diary, which I’d recently read:
“The other tables are taken — at one a woman and her daughter, at another a man and his daughter. I don’t twig, as R. does, that they’re all one family and since the child sitting with the man is making a bit of a din, which he indulges, I take it he’s a divorced father out for Sunday with his daughter. I whisper this to R. who shakes his head, the child now actively disruptive, giving a running commentary on the game she is playing. I chunter a bit at this noise, unstilled by R. and I’m sure overheard by the woman at the other table — and it’s only when we get outside R. explains that the child was obviously autistic. Obvious — though not to me, who’s supposed to be the sensitive observer of the human condition.”
Bennett goes on to say that he finds the thought of having added to the woman’s burdens as unbearable and irretrievable. If our perseverance in taking Andrea into such tea rooms and small shops adds a little to general autism awareness, then all is to the good.
Gluttons for punishment that we are, we decided to round off the day with a trip around the Ashmolean, where Andrea could have caused all kinds of disruptions to the museum visitors, so it was not without some element of dread that we entered the building. Andrea now has a developing sense of how to give herself a feeling of security and safety and so had opted to use her wheelchair, which, we feel, helps contain her in her own world — iPad in hand — whilst looking out of the corner of her eye at ours, somehow still spotting out of this corner more than we see with eyes wide open. As it was, we were all pleasantly surprised. The museum was far from the stuffy, silent place we thought it might be and we all able to enjoy the pieces of art we chose to look at, the uncluttered and plain layout lending itself well to autism friendliness.
In my observations I was sure that I witnessed one of the museum attendants having a little autistic ‘stim’ at one point, but then nowadays I tend to see autism wherever I look!