A few days ago my wife and I were in the garden admiring our chickens, like you do, not to mention laughing at our two guinea pigs which, put for the day in an outside pen on the lawn, were running around at great speed and occasionally leaping in the air emitting noises that sounded very like ‘Whoopee!’, when, at length, but no longer than this sentence is turning out to be, if only I could get down and finish it without mentioning any more animals, we turned to go inside, to find that a notice had been affixed to the back door. The notice read

NO GIRRAFES ON UNICYCLES BEYOND THIS POINT

Yes, I know, more animals. Apart from the obvious misspelling (I’m entirely aware of it, so please don’t write in), what struck me most about this notice was the qualifier ‘beyond this point’—as if giraffes on unicycles are entirely acceptable elsewhere, or that dismounted giraffes (or giraffes employing some other mode of transport, such as skateboards or roller blades) might be exempt from this proscription.

To summarize, I was struck by the ambiguity inherent in this declaration – are giraffes the primary subject of this ukase, or unicycles? Or is it the particular combination of both? In the end, I have come to regard this notice as reflecting one of those juxtapositions on which surrealism is based – a statement as deliciously confrontational as Meret Oppenheim’s tea-cup made from fur

or Magritte’s painting Threatening Weather

The author of this curious notice was our daughter (aged 9) who has taken to posting all sorts of notices around the house lately. She is one of those rare (or rarely diagnosed) girls with Asperger’s Syndrome. That is, she is paddling in the shallow end of the autism spectrum.

My wife (as wives will) realized this long before I did. I fought the label for ages – our daughter is just the way she is, I said. Such labels do nothing to help or hinder a person, and should be considered more as convenient devices that help teachers, health professionals and local education authorities ration finite resources. No, I said – recalling how much my daughter is like me, in many ways—she is just a chip off the old block. (“Not chip off block!” she protested, then aged three – “I’m a baby penguin!”).

Thus it was that my daughter, after many challenging outbursts and turbulent brouhaha in school playgrounds, managed to reach the age of 8 before being diagnosed formally. What finally convinced the paediatrician was the fact that my daughter had named her pet snake ‘Cabbage’.

Part of the delay was caused by the fact that Asperger’s is usually associated with boys. Work by Asperger’s specialist Tony Attwood suggests that even if Asperger’s (like autism) is more prevalent in boys than girls, many women and girls with Asperger’s remain undiagnosed.

People with Asperger’s syndrome typically have a creative focus that bears little reference to external social stimuli. My daughter is great in the classroom. Her talent seems to be literacy, in which she is almost always top of the class, and has been commended by her teacher for the richly unusual names she chooses for fictional characters (she has contributed one character name and one locale to my ongoing novel By The Sea – regular readers might have fun working out which ones).

It’s when she gets into the playground that things go to pieces, because she has almost no conception of the political niceties that allow ordinary people to get from one end of the day to the other without killing one another. Caring not a whit for convention, she has what one might charitably describe as a unique fashion sense, and is inclined to speak her mind – in perfectly articulated sentences betraying a vocabulary far in excess of her age – in situations where silence (or, at least, tact) would be more appropriate. To be confronted with a 9-year-old having a toddler tantrum while emitting complaints and insults worthy of Lady Bracknell can be a terrifyingly bizarre experience.

She is also inclined to take things literally – which is why the juxtapositions of surrealism exert such a fascination for her. Rather than laughing things off as simply silly, her mind starts to ask questions of a world in which, for example, giraffes might routinely ride unicycles to the degree to which notices are required for their regulation. She has begun to conceive an interest in surrealism. Starting off with the Surrealism 101 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (the Fish-Slapping Dance, the Ministry of Silly Walks, the Cheese Shop) and antique radio shows such as Round The Horne ...

(fight scene)
Horne, Master Spy: “Take that!”
Chou-En Ginsberg: “Aaah!”
Horne, Master Spy: ”... and that!”
Chou-En Ginsberg: “Aaah!”
Horne, Master Spy: ”... and that!”
Chou-En Ginsberg: “No thanks, I’ve already got two of those.”

... she has discovered (with a little help from me) the art of salmon-fisher, palaeo-nut and Alaskan surrealist Ray Troll. I’d say that Troll’s picture Rapture Of The Deep

is as good a portrait of the inside of my daughter’s mind as anything else one might imagine.

This aspect – a creative imagination, plus a fascination with strange juxtapositions which most people wouldn’t notice – suggests a predeliction for science (One of my daughter’s notices is simply a declaration of love … for Charles Darwin). After all, the best scientists, like the best surrealists, start by questioning inherent oddities in the world, oddities that everyone else takes for granted. Either that, or they achieve insights by looking at old problems in new ways – often ignoring the conventional approaches espoused by the herd for reasons of fashion or political expediency. It is no surprise that many of the most famous scientists of the past, such as Newton and Einstein, have been retrospectively diagnosed with Asperger’s (always owning that palaeodiagnosis is a risky business and not subject to test).

There is a cost, however. People with Asperger’s tend to have a profound sense of justice that brooks no compromise with such subtleties as mitigating shades of grey. While watching the film Ratatouille at the cinema at the weekend, my daughter was so outspokenly outraged by a scene in which two of the rats examine a rat-catcher’s shop window, the display full of exquisitely varied methods of rodent dispatch – that I had to calm her down.

This, together with an ability to produce devastatingly articulate insults, and a near-total lack of much appreciation of what might be deemed socially acceptable, is a dynamite combination.

Recent utterances by Richard Dawkins and James D Watson seem to be typified by the seeming inability of these famous scientists to understand that they had said anything offensive. How could they be, they might say, if they were only speaking what they saw as the bald truth? Perhaps a touch of Asperger’s is beneficial for the inquiring, independent scientific mind, an attribute that incurs its own costs.

I removed the sign about giraffes on unicycles and put it on the door to my study. Whatever else it might be, it’s certainly effective. I have not had any trouble with unicycling giraffes since, and calm and serenity have been restored.