Where I’m coming from
I was born in 1978, in London, to David and Dinah Murray. I have two brothers, Leo and Bruno, who both live in London with their families, but I live in Edinburgh with my partner Sonny and our dog Kifl, having first moved here in 2003.
Right now, I’m mostly working as a writer and science tutor. I’m not exactly an autism researcher, but I am co-author of various autism research papers, and I hope to do more in future.
In the past I’ve been a web developer, content editor and tea blender, among other things. I was a classroom teacher for over a decade.
I’m also queer, more-or-less vegan, and disabled; I realised I was hypermobile in my teens, autistic in my early 30s, ADHD in my mid 40s; I also acquired a post-viral fatigue syndrome in late 2022, which worsened in late 2023.
I’m leftwing in the sense that I believe that the world can be made better, especially for those disadvantaged by the way it’s currently run. I am an environmentalist in the sense that I have noticed what is happening to our natural environment, and I don’t think we should let it keep happening.
I don’t believe that politics can, or should, be separated from everything else (see Autism and the Politics of Everything Else). That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to come up in physics lessons, but I don’t think there is such a thing as apolitical education: teaching people about the world around them, and encouraging them to think critically, are political acts. This is all the more true when it comes to learners who are autistic, neurodivergent and disabled (my personal specialisms) and anyone else whose background or identity put them at a disadvantage in this society. There are good reasons why social justice is one of the values that teachers officially have to sign up to in Scotland.
My Family
My father, David Murray, was a music critic and philosophy lecturer. My mother, Dinah, was a pioneering autistic autism researcher and campaigner in her spare time. She obtained a PhD in psycholinguistics when my brothers and I were small children, and was a support worker for many years. We both came to realise we were autistic at around about the same time, and her thinking about autism has obviously shaped my own at a deep level – formulating the concept of monotropism in the early 1990s and adopting a neurodiversity perspective before she’d ever encountered the term. I maintain an online archive of her work.
My brother, Leo, is an animator and campaigner. He is co-author of Badvertising: Polluting Our Minds and Fuelling Climate Chaos, but is perhaps best known as the originator of the Trump Baby Blimp.
Bruno is less of a public figure.
My partner, Sonny Hallett, is an autistic writer, counsellor, artist and speaker. We constantly bounce ideas back and forth, so their thinking has informed just about everything I’ve done since at least 2013.
My dog, Kifl, is a Wauzer – a Westie/Schnauzer cross. She was born in 2015, and is very good. She occupies roughly half of my Instagram.
Why ‘Oolong’?
I started using Oolong as an online pseudonym some time around 1998, taking my name from the tea after I wrote a song about it. I decided to start moving away from it a couple of years ago, because I don’t want to imply more connection with China than a love of Chinese tea and an affinity with the Daoist classics, but I’m holding on to the URL, at least for now…
