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.