Inner Geek

There’s a small autistic boy living in my head who can get very excited about things that no one else would be interested in. Occasionally, he will get fixated on something and I have to remind him that that thing is a waste of our time. Sometimes, I humour him for a bit to see where it goes but as he is only about seven, he’s unlikely to discover anything important.

Don’t get concerned. I haven’t had a childhood filled with recurring trauma that has caused me to develop multiple personalities as a coping mechanism, it’s just an observation about educational development.

The first time I named him (Fred) was when I was at the arcades with my children, a friend and her children. We were playing a horse racing game, where you had to bet on the colour of the horse that would win. My son and I were very interested in this game. We were both looking for patterns. He was only about 5, so he gave up before me.
“I could stay here all day, record the results and make bar graphs and pie charts,” I told my friend who looked at me with a look that said, ‘I’m glad you’re my friend but...seriously?’
I explained that it was Fred speaking.
She rolled her eyes.

Fred was formed during one long hot summer when I was seven. My mum was particularly tired that year,  having just recovered from a gall stones operation that caused an almost fatal infection. She had just enough energy to keep suggesting things we could do to stay out of her hair. Most of these activities involved data collection and looking for patterns. She was a very smart woman, my mum. She worked out that if she asked us to count types of birds that visited the garden, or the different coloured cars we could see from our bedroom window then it could last a significant amount of time. If she added a pattern to look for then it could take all day. Fred loved those days. Most seven year olds love their days.

That year was never repeated and so I didn’t develop my skills and grow up to be a statistician. The following summer I had started to play the flute but it was all about bike rides with picnics in the country and card games when it rained. The year after that was poetry and backgammon and the year after that we made magazines.

Obviously, I was very glad of Fred when I went to University. My classmates were all wandering round with a stunned expression, complaining that they had taken Psychology because they were interested in people and liked writing essays. No one had warned them that there would be so much maths. Fred was happy to be able to extend his skills. Chi-squared distribution became his new best friend. He wanted to sit in the garden and hypothesise that blackbirds would visit at 11am and 3pm, collect the data and then use his new found tool to see how well his hypothesis fitted.

Fred is quite a happy chap at the moment. Every day at 4.45 he turns on the TV to watch the daily briefing. He frantically notes the figures in his nature inspired notebook. Then he puts the figures into a spreadsheet and makes graphs. He compares his graphs to the government graphs. He makes theories and can’t wait for the data to unfold to see if his theories are correct.

Fred thinks that we will be in lockdown for a while yet but he is only seven, so maybe we should take the predictions of scientists and statisticians who developed their skills a bit further.