Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can fly

Oh dear, the air turned blue this afternoon! A bird decided to wish Robbie good luck from a great height - and it scored a direct hit. Thankfully he wasn't wearing a suit but he was wearing a new top and to say that he wasn't amused would be an understatement. He was more than usually eloquent, well maybe not eloquent but certainly verbal. He lapsed into alliteration on a theme of 'B'; he has been practicing practicing on the cats so he is fairly good at it now and he produced a string of expressive but not exactly original 'B' words. I don't know what type of bird it was, but judging by the mess it created it certainly wasn't a sparrow!

Anyway, back to more important matters, Robbie made his announcement on facebook today, so I am now free to reveal his new ventue

Burgess Rail Solutions Ltd

Least Said Soonest Mended

Photo by BJN

Life with Robbie has it's challenges as well as many pleasures and there are many occasions when I struggle to hold my tongue, but as a parent I have a lot of experience when it comes to counting to ten and keeping my thoughts to myself. I am sure my children would say that I nag, but I am careful to choose my battles. My son and I had a bit of a spat the other day, we had arranged to have a pre Christmas family day with my parents and my brother's family. 'The nameless one' was adamant that he had not been told about it and he was not happy about having his routine changed. He came with us and he had a great time, but he was still deeply annoyed about our spat mostly because Robbie had joined in and had told him several times that family comes first. I think what Robbie said was true, but you don't always achieve the best results by stating the obvious and this was one of those occasions when it would have been better to let my son calm down with as little argument as possible. When he spoke to me about it a couple of days later I told my son that I was glad that he had removed himself from the situation rather than making the argument worse. He said "Mum, do you know how often I hold my tongue? I could have written War and Peace with all the words I haven't said to Robbie!" The way he expressed it made me smile but I recognised the truth in his statement. Robbie and I argue more than may be good for us, and I there are times when I give him his answer loud and clear, but I am careful that I don't say anything I would regret later. I don't like the arguments, the making up is fun!

What Did You Say?

Having a family member with Asperger Syndrome has taught me many things. One of the most important is to be very clear when giving information or instructions because there is a good chance that the aspie person will take my words literally or focus on just one part of what I said and miss the deeper meaning. Of course I sometimes get it wrong and it leads to some surprising misunderstandings like the time not so long ago when my son was asked to put the bin bag outside. I intended him to take the bin bag from the kitchen and put it in the wheelie bin outside but I didn't say that, so when I went out to the car I found the bin bag sitting in splendid isolation in the front garden. Luckily I found it before the local cats got their claws into it.


Last night I was chatting to Robbie about one of our children and I said "he seems to have taken umbrage because I told him off ......" The look on Robbie's face told me that he was no longer listening to me. After a few moments he repeated the word 'umbrage' several times as if he was exploring the shape and sound of the word. Then he looked up with a satisfied expression and asked if the word had something to do with a humpback bridge. I told him that it was just a phrase that meant the person was displeased because they felt slighted in some way. I had to look up the exact meaning of umbrage in order to tell him that the word had a Latin root and it meant shade, shadow or darkness. The word only survives in English now as the phrase to 'take umbrage'. Robbie told me to stop, he said that I had given him far too much information (now he knows what I have to put up with!) and anyway he preferred his own definition of a humpbacked bridge. No wonder it is so hard to understand him sometimes! 

Finding The Right Words

Those of you who know Robbie will know that words are the one thing he is never short of. If fact the opposite is true, it is almost impossible to get him to shut up, he can talk endlessly about anything under the sun and you can rely on him to lower the tone whenever there is the slightest opportunity. He talks and talks and talks - he can fit more words into a minute than anyone else I know.

Being lost for words is a new experience for Robbie, but in the circumstances I am not surprised that he is struggling. He has been asked to speak at his friend's funeral, there is so much that he wants to say, but putting the feelings you have deep inside into words is not so easy, and finding exactly the right words to express how much Chris meant as a friend and colleague is difficult. It is almost impossible to sum up the qualities of a close friend in just a few brief sentences, but one thing is undeniable Chris knew how to live well. He loved his work, but it didn't rule his life, he filled his leisure time with all the things that were important to him. He packed a lot of living into not quite 40 years. I don't know if Robbie's words will adequately paint a picture of his friend, or express how keenly Robbie feels his loss. I can't do much to help, but I can at least make sure everyone will understand his words - I have be making him practice speaking slowly!

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit.

Has anyone noticed how many wild rabbits there are this year? I counted more than fifty in a ten minute journey recently. This population explosion was the subject of a discussion in the car several weeks ago, Sam couldn't work out how the boom in the bunny population had occurred. In the course of the conversation Robbie had to explain the meaning of the term 'at it like rabbits'. Sam found this new insight hilarious, he is 12 after all. Like me Sam is an avid collector of words and sayings and he has managed to weave his new found knowledge about the prodigious reproductive capacity of rabbits into almost every conversation. I will have to find him another word or phrase to take his mind off rabbits, you can have too much of a good thing!