Interests

As time permits this section will expand to give a flavour of activities in which I have participated and those areas that I find interesting.

Being borderline autistic, or in today's jargon heavily Asperger's Syndrome, makes me prone to repetitive activities with intense concentration for extended periods of time alone. This is not always a disadvantage, however, and in my view it would be wrong to try to force children, or even adults, into radical change so they (we!) become pressed into someone's way of thinking or doing things.

In my teens I was a member of a local drum and bugle corps and played snare drum. I was very good at it, too! I tuned the drum by sanding smooth the inside and carefully layering shellac then varnish onto the wood. This made the drum resonate beautifully. Old style gut snares were similarly shellaced and varnished and strips of cloth placed under the top plastic head. I experimented with the thickness of the cloth and the number of strips and with the tension of the top and bottom heads until playing felt right. When it felt right it also sounded right. When I say it felt right I am referring to response. Drummers will know what I am talking about! Response is to drumming what elegance is to mathematics, if that helps. And I practiced five hours a day (never heard what the neighbours thought, however).

Swimming is also a lone activity. At Hart House and in the States at grad school I swam two or three miles a day. Because I have good muscle strength from weight training (this was years before weight training became accepted in swimming) I was a good sprinter.

Target shooting similarly is a lone activity. I am blessed with very fast reflexes and excellent vision (20/10 corrected) and that certainly helps. Concentration is everything and we Asperger's folk can hyperfocus when we want to! As long as the sights are aligned and you pull the trigger properly, when the gun goes off you will hit what you are aiming at. (Little lesson in life here!). Once you learn how to align the sights and squeeze the trigger, it is just a matter of banging off a thousand rounds or so and you become good.

Hart House

This is a target I saved from my shooting days at the Hart House Revolver Club at the University of Toronto. (Hover your mouse on it and a larger image will pop up) I was a member of the club for about ten years, a Committee Member, Range Officer and competed on Team One. During the Club's 50th anniversary year I won the Gold Ring, the Club's highest award for marksmanship. Now it is just called a 95 Spoon, I believe, and requires only 10 targets. When I did it, 20 were required, but I turned in 30. Two of us received this award and we were only the third and the fourth members to have won it in twenty-one years.

The gun I used for this target was my Model 52-2 Smith and Wesson .38 firing wad cutters (which is all the 52-2 will shoot, being a target pistol). I bought the gun from an older club member. It was factory stock except for a minor trigger job and custom wooden grips. I could usually clear out the centre of a target with ten shots but on this particular day I thought the pattern formed by the first five rounds was worth keeping. I am glad now that I kept it. The target shows five consecutive shots fired at twenty yards with one hand.

I found handgun shooting at Hart House thoroughly enjoyable and I do miss it. I sold my guns in 1988, after I returned to the UK.

Times change, however, and the university has now kicked out the Revolver Club. This is due to political correctness. This is a shame in my opinion. The Hart House Revolver Club is/was the oldest club in Hart House and, as I recall, is/was the biggest handgun club in Canada. It had an impecable safety and character record, which is more than I can say for some of the Toronto Police who visited to compete and participate in safety courses. During the coffee break in one match a police officer boasted about going down to the cells and beating up an Indian whenever he got bored. This didn't go down very well with me since I am the adoptive father of three North American Indian children and the natural mother of the oldest died in police custody after being beaten by three policemen. During one advanced safety course another idiot cop actually pointed a gun at me! (and said, if you can believe this, 'Don't worry, it isn't loaded') Who hires these guys?

I might well add, 'Who supervises these guys?'

Hart House is one of the most marvellous places on the planet! I suppose it is much busier now than when I was there (almost daily). I especially enjoyed the graceful swimming pool and the weight room. I continued weight training at grad school and eventually benched 330 pounds which was then twice my body weight.

I was a member of the University of Toronto Masters Swimming Club and competed at the 1985 inaugural World Master's Games in Toronto in the 50 metre freestyle, finishing well into the top half of my age group. This was with a painful shoulder I had pulled in training, so I was quite pleased. It was a great experience.