This has been my third full year of long covid/ME/CFS, and my first full year since I left classroom teaching. It was the year I finally stepped down as Chair of AMASE, although I remain a committee member. The fifth Weird Pride Day happened in March, and I chatted with Robin Ince and Kate Fox live on YouTube, which was great, as was Weird Pride Edinburgh.
I go on working with kids online: tutoring in science, mentoring kids getting to grips with their neurodivergence, and running a science group for Autistic teenagers – we currently have space for new participants in that! Aside from that, I’m not really looking for new clients at the moment.
As described in my previous post Launches, 2025 (and trailed in last year’s roundup) it’s been a year of things coming to fruition, where most of the work had been done in previous years: I have chapters in four books that came out this year, with two more hopefully following in 2026. The latest book, It Takes All Kinds of Minds, is officially released next week! My chapter, co-authored with Helen ‘Autistic Realms’ Edgar, is titled ‘Embracing Monotropism and Flow‘. I’m excited to have a copy on hand; it’s beautifully produced, with illustrations by my partner Sonny, and the other chapters look great too.
Two animations that I helped to conceive and script have also been released: Discovering You’re Autistic, and Lightbulb Moments: Being Autistic. I am now working on two more with the same team, which are on the way next year. I made a short video riffing on a line from one of the animations, and will probably make more of these:
I took part in two book-related events this year, which you can watch back onling. Firstly the Scottish launch of Someone Like Me, together with Julie Farrell and very ably hosted by Elspeth Wilson; I read a condensed extract from my chapter, Monotropic Superdrive at Home. Secondly, I chaired a Weird Pride themed event at the Edinburgh Radical Book Fair, where I had a great chat with CJ DeBarra and Nish Doshi, who both had excellent, thoughtful and compelling answers to my questions (and several from the audience). I tentatively expect to do a couple more events next year.
Aside from book chapters, I published seven pieces of prose this year:
- Neurodiversity and Science
- Autism ‘symptoms’ are no such thing (these two were written to address misconceptions that showed up in arguments on Wikipedia – which, by the way, has much better autism coverage now!)
- Understanding Others: Other Minds; Strangers (a review of three books covering overlapping ground from very different angles)
- Weirdwashing (finished a little late for Weird Pride Day: on the parasitic relationship that capitalism has with diversity of thought)
- Autistics on Autism (on a third of a century of Autistic thinking about autism; this one came out of a presentation I gave at the launch event for AVATAR Borders, which you can listen to here with slides)
- Autism Understanding Time (for Bylines Scotland, to mark April)
- ‘Biological male’ is a pseudoscientific dogwhistle (the BBC is signalling that they’re on board with the anti-trans project; this must be stopped)
I also had a poem published in International Times, inspired by my one-time mentor and its former editor, Mike Lesser: Far From Equilibrium. I wrote another poem for a collection on neurodiversity and the more-than-human, which didn’t get in; I’m still hoping to get that published elsewhere. Kate Fox’s creative writing workshops helped give me the confidence (and the impetus) to write and share these; she’s very good.
Come to think of it, I was also on an episode of her podcast with Nic King, Neurotypicals Don’t Juggle Chainsaws, together with Sonny. I was also on Autistic.fm with my old internet friend Haje, and Sluggish with Jesse Meadows.
I went to Denmark in August, with Sonny. It was a great holiday – I like Denmark very much. It feels a bit like an alternative-reality Britain, where we took a different fork in time and now the government provides adequate funding for things like good roads and public transport, and everything is pronounced differently. We stayed in Bornholm, a gorgeous and sparsely populated island off the coast of Sweden, then went over to Jutland to visit the LEGO House in Billund, stopped in Odense and visited the Hans Christian Anderson House, then spent a few days in Copenhagen. I hope to go back one of these days.
My chronic fatigue goes on making physical activity difficult, with a danger that post-exertional malaise (PEM) will wipe me out for days, or sometimes weeks, if I over-do it, but I have managed to go bouldering a few times this year, which I enjoy very much. I have also continued doing tai chi with Harriet Devlin regularly, and had Alexander Technique lessons weekly for a good part of this year, with Greg Dyke in Joppa.
I finished fifteen books this year, and read a good portion of several others (including all the books I have chapters in). I definitely bought more books than that, which is largely BookBub‘s fault for regularly pointing out huge discounts on ebooks I like the sound of, but also because I like bookshops and want to support them – independent bookshops like Edinburgh’s Lighthouse, Argonaut and PortaLibri (formerly Tills) in particular. I made good use of Edinburgh Libraries’ ebook and audiobook collections, too although a couple of times I had to return an audiobook I hadn’t quite finished listening to, which is very frustrating. As a result I’ve probably done more audiobook listening through Libro.fm, which takes a regular subscription to give you one credit a month to download an audiobook that you get to keep, and gives money to a bookshop of your choice.
Some Top Threes of the year:
Books
- Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher, narrated by Jennifer Blom. T. Kingfisher is always an excellent read, and her writing particularly suits being read out loud. I thought Jennifer Blom did a notably excellent job with this one, which is the main reason I’ve chosen this over the other two T. Kingfisher books I read this year.
- Something in the Woods Love You, by Jarod K. Anderson, read by the author. A book about nature, depression, being human, being different… the author is a poet, known for his Cryptonaturalist podcast and microblogging. It’s not an easy book to pin down; I guess it’s sort of a self-help book, but not really. Stand-out chapters for me included the ones about masculinity (Fieldmouse), magic (Crow) and the dangers of safety (Virginia Opossum – read a gorgeous extract here).
- Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World, by Gemma L. Williams. This is one of the best books about neurodiversity that I’ve read; I’ll direct you to my review rather than getting into it in depth here. I have also been hugely enjoying her newsletter.
Podcasts
- Bold Politics, with Zack Polanski. I’ve been a member of one or more Green Parties since around 2013, but I didn’t maintain my GPEW membership for long after I moved to Scotland in 2014 and joined the separate Scottish Green Party. I rejoined the south-of-the-border party in order to vote for Zack Polanski, who embodies what I have always hoped for from the Greens. He is also a surprisingly good interviewer, who gets consistently interesting guests on.
- Love and Philosophy, with Andrea Hiott. Fascinating, in-depth conversations with philosophers, neuroscientists and others, orbiting around the theme of love (although sometimes at a considerable distance). A lot of this is really about what it means to be human. It’s intellectually rich, but doesn’t assume that the listener has a background in philosophy or relevant sciences.
- The Rest is Science, with Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens. They basically just infodump at each other about science for half an hour. It’s great.
TV Series
- The Residence. People, including me, really love their autistic-coded detective type characters. Uzo Aduba’s Cordelia Cupp might be my favourite yet, narrowly displacing David Mitchell’s Ludwig, whose series is similarly clever and funny. The Residence is just beautifully well-made on every level, with a similar vibe to the Knives Out films but a very different protagonist.
- Scavengers Reign. An intensely creative animation set on an alien world with a vividly realised ecosystem. A grungey, compelling series that I very much hope we get to see more of.
- Asterix & Obelix: the Big Fight. I wasn’t expecting this to be half as good as it is, but they’ve made something that is strikingly faithful to the aesthetic and energy of the source material, without sticking to it slavishly.
Live Music
- Grace Petrie, The Caves. Her gigs are always major highlights, inspiring hope and feelings of solidarity in the face of a largely hostile political situation. She’s a heck of a performer, and always attracts crowds of people who make me feel at home. I was able to sit down for the whole of this, having failed to realise last time how badly I need accessible gigs now. Much dancing in my seat.
- Dodie. I’ve been enjoying Dodie’s music (and vlogs) on YouTube ever since its algorithm brought her to my attention. It was fascinating to see what a large and wildly enthusiastic crowd she’s able to attract – I don’t think she’s exactly a megastar outside of YouTube, but then YouTube is absolutely enormous. It’s quite hard to get a grip on the platform’s role in our culture, because in many ways the crossovers with other platforms are quite limited. Anyway, Dodie put on an excellent show, and looked like she was having a great time doing it, and the audience absolutely lapped it up.
- Wait, did I really only go to two gigs this year? Damn. I miss live music.
Games
- Baba is You. An exceptionally satisfying game, when you can solve the puzzles. An extraordinarily frustrating one, when you can’t. It’s a low-graphics, technologically undemanding game of logic puzzles, based on pushing around tiles to form the rules of gameplay. I first picked this up a few years ago, but I got totally stuck on one particular level (Research Facility) and gave up. Then I did the same a couple of years later. This time I carried on solving levels I could make progress on, and eventually came back and completed that one too. I still haven’t quite finished it. There’s an even lower-res ‘demake’ here, but I recommend the full game.
- Outer Wilds. A science fiction adventure with some excellent storytelling and unusual gameplay elements. Very compelling, creative, and experimental in ways that don’t always entirely work, but that’s often the price of trying weird things.
- Celeste. This is also frustrating, but in a quite different kind of way from . It’s an aggressively difficult platform game, where you just have to get used to failing a lot, but it’s very quick to get back up and try again – there’s no navigating through boring screens you’ve already done before you can have another go, you just go straight back to the start of the bit you were doing. It’s also a very encouraging game, with a sweet underlying theme of mental health and self-acceptance. It makes me think of that quote from Worstward Ho, which feels like a good place to end this post:
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