All alone.

Becky has taken the boy off to see his grandparents in California (here). That means that I'm stuck here keeping things ticking over. Now obviously, that means I should be really busy - this is one of the times when we should be on the phone selling beer, but with herself away that job falls to me, and I really am rubbish at it. I find it terrifically stressful.

My mother was a primary school teacher and not naturally given to putting herself forward. Which was a pity really - as she had a lot of things worth saying which she often left unsaid. Now, I would find a classful of eager (or not) faces quite intimidating, to say nothing of the parents and the rest of the staff. I asked her how she did it, and she explained that for her, it was a kind of acting. You have your lines and your props to help you with the public performance aspect, and once past that you can concentrate on the part of your work that does come more naturally (if not more easily). This is, of course what teachers do, I know that - but I needed to be told it, before I knew that I knew it. Dig?

I'm sure that this is a fairly obvious strategy for coping with life - I'm sure that most people do this, either consciously or not. I believe that some of us fail to develop these strategies in a natural way at what I suspect is an unconscious level. So we have to laboriously construct coping mechanisms at some significant cognitive effort.

Becky does occasionally suggest that I might be a bit "spectrum", and while I suspect that there's an element of pot / kettle there, she might be right - there's something called hyperlexia which looks a bit familiar (oh, google it yourself), and while I seem to be quite dim nowadays, this wasn't always true (while you're at it google grep "giftedness"). Did I tell you I used to work in IT? I wasn't very good at it...

Co-inky-dinkily, Professor Tony Monaco (great name or what - how does he find time for all this smoking B3 playing?) at what I might (if I push it a bit) call my alma mater has done something or other about the genetics of autism

Fortunately, the beer has started to sell itself - we now have customers who call us. Thank you very much, phew.

There wasn't very much about beer in that was there?