As long as I can remember, I have been extremely interested in motorbikes.  I have had other “Special Interests” too, especially trains, computers, typhoons, weather, but the interest in motorbikes has always been there.  I never imagined that having an interest in motorbikes could have any sort of medical description or diagnosis, but I learned otherwise in the closing months of the twentieth century.  This is how it happened:

“Of course you’re autistic, Phil Smith! I had you figured out years ago when I first met you.  Why do you think you’re so good at fixing computers? Why are you so obsessed with typhoons and motorbikes? You’re a classic case of Asperger’s Syndrome!”

I was lying on my back poking cables into a computer under the desk in the lounge room of the home of Doctor Tim Trodd, an expatriate general practitioner in Hong Kong who was known as an expert in childhood Autistic Spectrum Disorders.  Doctor Trodd had called upon Doctor Disk many times over the years to repair his computers in both office and home and sometimes to supply new computers.  Tim’s verbal diagnosis confirmed for me what I had been suspecting for about a week: that I certainly had Autism Spectrum Disorder and was more than likely Asperger’s Syndrome.

A fortnight earlier, my younger son Benjamin had been officially diagnosed as Autistic and as probably being also Asperger’s Syndrome at the Matilda Childhood Development Centre located on The Peak on Hong Kong Island.  I had immediately begun researching both Autism and Asperger’s on the Internet.  As I began this research, I was immediately struck by how similar the symptoms being described on the web pages were to my own school days.

Memories of school reports came flashing back to me: “Phillip is always in a world of his own”, “Phillip is like an absent-minded professor”, “Phillip never seems to pay attention in school, but always tops the class in his exam results”, “Phillip is so obsessed with trains, that we get sick of hearing about them”, “Phillip seems to be able to focus on only one subject at a time.”

I began to think, “If Ben is autistic, then so am I!”

About a week into my research, I serendipitously stumbled upon a web site which carried an online test which could be used by web surfers to determine whether or not they had any autistic traits.  I had taken the test, answering each question as honestly and carefully as I possibly could, and when the results appeared, they confirmed that, according to the test, 100% of my answers had pointed towards my having autistic traits.

This had all been related to Tim while I was fixing the computer.  Tim’s response had hardly been a surprise.  My quotation of Tim’s words at the head of this article might not be literally precise, but this is essentially what he told me while I was repairing the PC.

The computer was fixed, the invoice and cheque were exchanged, and I headed the Suzuki back towards my home in Sha Tin – deep in thought.

I knew it was true that I could easily become exclusively obsessed in any topic that really grabbed my interest.

Today, as the turn of the millennium approached and computer users worldwide needlessly stressed themselves over the End of the World which would certainly occur when computer systems collapsed in an apocalyptic, planet-wide catastrophe of death and devastation, my interest in computers was at a peak.  I had been interested in computers on and off since about eight years of age when I had read about the first primitive electronic computers in a kind of kids encyclopaedia called The World of the Children. So computers became a subject that I studied enthusiastically and about which I had become very knowledgeable.

Throughout my school years one of my areas of special interest had been trains. Trains of all shapes and sizes. I could still recall that a Victorian Railways R-class steam locomotive had a weight of 187 long tons and 8 hundredweight (including the tender) while the B-class diesel-electric locomotive tipped the scales at 111 long tons and 17 hundredweight.  Now we live in a metric world so those figures should be quoted as approximately 190.4 tonnes and 114 tonnes respectively.  My mind could still recall every inch of all the tram tracks that had existed in Geelong before the trams were scrapped in 1955.  What use are all these facts and figures today?  My school teachers had nearly been driven out of their minds by my constant spouting of intricate facts and figures about trains and trams.

Yep.  Definitely Asperger’s!