Recent Blog Posts.

Wait, just wait…

By “AI” I do, of course, mean an Actual Idiot.

Namely, myself.

Obvious clickbait title, eh? Thought that’d catch you!

Let me elucidate.

Actually, no. Let me explain.

Words like elucidate are what got me into this mess in the first place.

Despite my best intentions, I apparently sound artificial.

I’m not offended by this. In fact, I’m quite fascinated by it.

I’d noticed that my writing scored embarrassingly highly on various online “Was this written by AI?” tests. At first I couldn’t understand why.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

I had a fair-to-middling idea why.

It’s my writing style.

It’s too… measured.

Too formal.

Too structured.

Too fond of words like fair-to-middling.

I grew up with a fairly severe stammer. (See my previous post about that.)

As a result, I spoke slowly and used small, simple words. But just because I spoke slowly, chose my words carefully and delivered them in a flat, measured manner didn’t mean I lacked a vocabulary.

Far from it.

I was a voracious reader.

If there was something to read, I read it.

Books.

Magazines.

Newspapers.

Encyclopedias.

Dictionaries.

The backs of cereal boxes.

If it contained words, it was fair game.

My nose was almost permanently buried in a book.

I developed a particular fondness for older literature. Poe, Lovecraft, Shelley, Dumas, Dickens and many others filled my head with strange vocabulary and elaborate sentence structures.

Reading dictionaries and encyclopedias gave me a phenomenal vocabulary. Positively Brobdingnagian, one might say.

(I use that word rather a lot. It’s one of my favourites. Perhaps I should stick with “Big” going forward?)

My irritating near-photographic memory meant I accumulated a vast store of facts and trivia. So much so that my parents’ nickname for me was “The Professor”, because I was always explaining how something worked, who invented it or why some obscure historical event mattered.

In public, however, I was deeply introverted.

I embodied the old instruction:

“Speak when you’re spoken to.”

And even then, I generally replied with the minimum amount necessary to remain polite.

I developed an inferiority complex that never entirely left me.

I’m fifty-six years old.

I work for a large multinational IT company and support some fairly significant clients.

Think military.

Think government.

Think organisations with enough bureaucracy to make Kafka and Orwell ask everyone to calm down.

And yet, in my head, I’m still just a code monkey.

Most people my age have become team leaders, managers, senior managers or directors.

Not me.

I never particularly wanted promotion.

I lack anything resembling a healthy ego.

I’m just as happy writing a flagship application or major piece of software as I am testing somebody else’s code or filling out administrative paperwork.

I’ve never been good at putting myself forward.

I rarely assume excellence.

I rarely even claim competence.

Which is ridiculous, of course.

I know I’m good at what I do.

I find that difficult to say.

In fact, if I’m being painfully honest, I’m very good at what I do.

There. I’ve said it.

Please don’t make me do it again.

At university, the expected trajectory was a PhD.

I dropped out at the end of my BSc during my Master’s.

Why?

Because I couldn’t picture myself as a doctor.

(Albeit a Doctor of Mathematics rather than the Gallifreyan variety.)

Me?

A stammering working-class lad from a family of labourers and cooks?

I knew my place.

And in my mind, it certainly wasn’t “Doctor”.

Looking back, that says rather more about me than it does about academia.

My lack of ambition and reluctance to promote myself influences my writing too.

I minimise myself.

I soften statements.

I hedge.

I qualify.

I write passively because active statements feel uncomfortably close to boasting.

Even writing this article feels slightly unnatural.

I’ve deliberately filled it with “I am”, “I did” and “I think” statements.

Normally I’d be restructuring sentences, removing myself from them and quietly disappearing into the background.

The urge to do so is considerable.

I’m resisting it for the sake of the experiment.

So perhaps that’s why AI detectors think I’m an AI.

Not because I write like a machine.

But because I write in a style that is structured, measured and oddly formal.

The irony is that I was probably sounding like this long before anybody took artificial intelligence seriously.

For the record, I’m not particularly an AI enthusiast.

My mathematical background means I understand the statistical prediction and pattern-matching taking place beneath the surface.

My IT background helps me understand the engineering behind it.

I find the technology fascinating.

I find many of its applications considerably less so.

Personally, I wouldn’t trust a large language model to write a postcard, let alone a blog or novel.

Speaking of novels, I have one.

Actually, I have ten.

Although, technically, they’re ten versions of the same novel.

None of them will ever be published because none of them will ever be finished.

I keep discovering ways to improve them.

Or ruin them.

The distinction becomes increasingly blurry after version seven.

As for AI-generated writing?

I find much of it technically impressive but emotionally hollow.

Competent.

Coherent.

Soulless.

Perhaps that’s why I’m amused when people accuse me of writing like an AI.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out how to sound more human.

It would be deeply ironic if I finally succeeded just as the machines started sounding like me.

BEEP BOOP.. END OF POST ERROR : REFILL #C0FFEE.

Most people are surprised when I tell them I have a stammer.

That’s because they don’t hear it.

Or rather, they don’t hear the amount of work that goes into making sure they don’t hear it.

The Early Years

I am a stammerer and have been all my speaking life.

At school I was picked on for it and tried to minimise it by speaking more slowly and using smaller, simpler words. This, in turn, made people assume I wasn’t intelligent. Everyone talked down to me and treated me as if I was less capable than I really was.

People didn’t just hear my speech difficulty.

They assumed I had a thinking difficulty.

I quickly learned that if people struggle to understand how you speak, many of them begin making assumptions about how you think.

If eyes are the windows to the soul, then perhaps the mouth is the WiFi enabled smart speaker to the mind?

(Hmm, you’re stretching the analogy a little thin there. – Ed.)

It wasn’t until later, when I was in secondary school, that I got a speech therapist who actually made a difference.

Although, at the time, I was less than pleased with her approach.

She wrote me a letter, sealed it, and told me to deliver it to my headmaster at school the next day.

Now, in the early 1980s, at my school you only went to the headmaster’s office for one thing.

Namely, corporal punishment.

So there I was, standing outside the headmaster’s office, listening to the sound of leather on palms and hearing the wails of the student inside, getting more nervous by the second.

The door opened, a crying boy emerged, and the headmaster , a veritable mountain of a man feared by all , stepped out, took one look at me and exclaimed:

“Little? What are you doing here? Come in, boy.”

Long story short, I nervously handed him the letter and he did something I’d never seen before, nor since.

He laughed.

He promptly marched me down to the “forbidden zone” ( namely the teachers’ common room, which in those days was a haze of cigarette smoke ) addressed my English teacher by her first name and told her, in no uncertain terms, that I was joining her after-school acting club.

I couldn’t argue.

I mean, I wanted to, but you never answered back to the headmaster.

Press-ganged against my will into the acting club?

I swear there must be something in that which violates the Geneva Convention.

Oddly, on stage I noticed something.

I rarely stammered over my lines.

I never stammered when singing.

(I mean, I couldn’t hold a tune if you gave it to me in a bucket, but at least I didn’t stammer tunelessly.)

And I could recite whole Shakespearean monologues like…

Well, I was going to say like an RSC professional, but no…

Like a sixteen-year-old Scottish schoolboy.

The difference?

The speech became:

• structured
• rhythmic
• intentional

I wasn’t speaking spontaneously.

I was performing.

The Post-Education Years

Over the years, through university and into work, I kept the performance up.

I developed:

• a comfortable speech rhythm
• pacing and pauses
• a fallback repertoire of repeated phrases
• verbal scaffolding
• and, eventually, my “stage voice”

Many decades (and one very late autism diagnosis) later I realised something else.

In researching autism and trying to understand its impact on my life , and ways to mitigate it , I discovered the concept of autistic masking.

Once I understood masking, I recognised I’d been doing exactly the same thing with my speech. My repertoire of repeated phrases and stock responses? Echolalia!

Long before I knew the word “masking”, I was already an expert at it.

Today people often look at me with genuine confusion when I tell them I stammer.

Invariably someone replies:

“But… you don’t stammer!”

That means I’m doing what I’m doing well.

But what they don’t see is:

• the intense concentration
• the constant monitoring and adaptation of what I’m saying
• the fatigue from the continual mental effort
• the stress of trying to do all of that and get my point across at the same time

I’ve become remarkably good ( you might even say circus-level good ) at spinning plates on sticks.

What people don’t realise is this:

Fluency is not the absence of effort.

When the Mask Slips

Of course, it doesn’t mean I can get away with this all the time.

Maintaining the performance takes a tremendous amount of mental energy.

Running my ship with shields up all day eventually depletes the dilithium crystals and I need time to recharge.

When I’m tired, my stammer returns.

When I’m overwhelmed, my stammer returns.

When I’m under pressure or stressed, my stammer returns.

This isn’t failure.

It’s simply the consequence of running out of the resources required to maintain a very energy-intensive system.

The Stigma of the Stammer

Despite it being 2026 as I write this, and despite the enormous strides made in neurodiversity awareness and acceptance, I still encounter stigma.

Sometimes it is unintentional and well-meaning.

Sometimes it is neither.

People:

• become impatient and try to rush me
• make assumptions about my intelligence (or perceived lack thereof)
• take pleasure in mocking or joking about my stammer
• simply talk down to me

And the thing that really grinds my gears is when people, under the guise of being helpful, decide to finish my…

(Sandwiches? – Ed.)

No.

My sentences.

Like so many neurodiversity-related challenges, the actual problem isn’t usually the stammer itself.

The problem is often society’s reaction to it.

Summing Up

When I was young, the goal was often to hide differences.

Today we’re increasingly learning to understand them.

I still have a stammer.

The difference is that now I understand it.

I understand the techniques I’ve developed, the effort they require, and the role they’ve played in shaping who I am.

I also understand that communication is about far more than flawless delivery.

A person’s worth isn’t measured by the smoothness of their speech.

And perhaps that’s one of the more encouraging things about the growing neurodiversity movement.

We’re slowly learning that different doesn’t mean broken.

Sometimes it simply means different.

That seems like a conversation worth having.

…. Even if it occasionally takes me a little longer to say it.

I have long suspected that small talk is not really about talking at all. I mean, obviously it’s about talking, but it’s not about imparting information or saying anything of actual interest.

It is, I think, more accurately described as a kind of human protocol negotiation. A lightweight exchange whose purpose is not to transfer meaningful information, but to confirm that both parties are present, functional, and broadly willing to proceed without causing a scene.

In computer networking terms, it feels rather a lot like a TCP three-way handshake.

That may sound like an over-complicated way to describe “Morning” and “Busy day?” but I maintain it is exactly the right amount of over-complication.

The analogy works on several levels at once.

TCP handshake	Human small talk
SYN	“Morning.”
SYN/ACK	“Morning. Busy today?”
ACK	“Yeah, not too bad.”
Connection established	Actual conversation may now proceed

The actual content is almost irrelevant.

The handshake exists to establish availability, willingness, compatibility, safety, and communication parameters. Small talk does much the same thing. It is not there to win prizes for insight. It is there to say, in the safest possible way:

I see you. You seem non-threatening. We may now continue.

That is quite a useful invention, really.

It is also, for some of us, faintly bewildering.

Because my brain has a tendency to assume conversations should do one of three things:

1. exchange useful information.
2. explore an interesting idea.
3. contain at least one genuinely terrible joke.

Small talk often does none of these things.

Which is not to say it is pointless. Far from it. It is just that its point is not always the same as the point my brain is looking for.

That can make it feel a bit like packet loss.

Some of the signal gets through. Some of it doesn’t. A few words arrive intact, but the important meaning seems to have been dropped somewhere between the intention and the execution.

The weather is discussed.

The weekend is mentioned.

A vague inquiry is made about one’s wellbeing.

And yet the actual data being transmitted is something like:

I am safe. You are safe. We may continue this interaction without immediate risk of social collapse.

That is a rather elegant system when it works properly.

It is also a system with some spectacular failure modes.

Failed Handshake

Sometimes the handshake fails immediately.

You offer the smallest possible opening.

“Morning.”

And the other person replies:

“Is it? I mean the way the world’s going it might as well be the end of days. The planet’s going to hell in a hand basket and we’re all doomed.”

At that point the connection has not merely failed. It has been forcibly terminated, the cable has been unplugged, and the router has probably started smoking.

Connection reset by peer.

Timeout

Then there is the timeout problem.

Someone asks:

“How are you?”

and the answer requires a socially acceptable level of detail, emotional calibration, and acceptable honesty.

My brain, meanwhile, is attempting to calculate whether “fine” is technically accurate, whether “surviving” sounds too bleak, whether “not bad” is too British to be believable (see below!), and whether any response longer than six words will prompt a follow-up I do not have the energy to sustain.

By the time I have finished this internal analysis, the moment has passed.

Connection timed out.

Packet Flooding

Some people go in the opposite direction.

You offer:

“Morning.”

And they respond:

“Morning! Did you see that interesting show on TV last night about medieval bridge taxation? Made me think about my current view on plug in solar panels, my advancing years, my neighbour’s cat, and the collapse of the world’s democratic politics systems..”

That is not a handshake.

That is packet flooding.

ADHD can do this rather beautifully. One tiny conversational spark and suddenly a completely unrelated archive of information is bursting out of the firewall at speed.

Which, to be fair, can sometimes be entertaining.

It just isn’t small talk anymore. There’s nothing small about it.

Encrypted Traffic

Us British people add another layer of complexity, because many of us speak in what is essentially encrypted traffic.

“Not bad.”

Not only is this British understatement at its very best, this can mean:

• life is actually pretty good actually!
• life is acceptable.
• life is mildly annoying and could be better.
• life is a bit of a struggle but let us not make a fuss.
• a bottomless abyss has opened beneath me, but the kettle still works, so we are continuing cup in hand and trying our best to avoid the hordes of demons spewing forth from this hellish portal.

That is an extraordinary amount of information to pack into two words.

It is also one of the reasons small talk can be so difficult to decode. The literal words are only half the message. Tone, timing, context, and cultural expectation carry the rest.

The protocol is not just words.

It is inference, and unfortunately, not something I’m particularly good at.

UDP People

Then there are people who skip the handshake entirely.

They are the conversational equivalent of UDP.

“HELLO STRANGER HERE IS MY INFODUMP OF TRAUMAS, PROBLEMS AND CONCERNS!!.”

No connection setup.

No reliability guarantees.

No orderly exchange of packets.

Just pure, immediate data transfer with absolutely no regard for conventional protocol.

This can be alarming, but occasionally refreshing.

Stateful Firewall

Autistic masking probably deserves its own category here.

It can feel a bit like trying to pass through a stateful firewall while manually monitoring every tiny aspect of your own behaviour.

Eye contact? Adjusted.

Tone? Checked.

Facial expression? Calibrated.

Volume? Sensible.

Response time? Natural enough to avoid suspicion.

Internal panic? Well hidden, hopefully.

The result is not always elegant, but it is functional.. barely.

NAT Traversal

Trying to socialise at parties is also very much like NAT traversal.

You know there is a connection somewhere in there.

You know the other person is a perfectly ordinary human being.

You know you are supposed to be able to reach them.

And yet the routing is somehow wrong, the ports are blocked, and everyone is standing in awkward little clusters pretending not to notice that all communication has become mysteriously more difficult than it should be.

And when you do get into a cluster, the least said about the actual handshaking the better. (Especially Dave with the sweaty palms!)

So Why Does Small Talk Exist At All?

Because it is doing a job.

A very human job.

Small talk reduces uncertainty.

It establishes connection.

It signals intent.

It gives both parties a safe place to stand before deciding whether to move into more meaningful territory.

It is a social compatibility check.

A “yes, we can talk” exchange.

A way of saying:

I am friendly.

You are safe.

We may proceed.

That is actually rather beautiful, when you think about it.

Even if the words themselves are often about absolutely nothing of consequence.

Why It Feels So Hard

For many neurodivergent people, the difficulty is not that small talk is meaningless.

The difficulty is that its meaning is often indirect.

It is a social ritual disguised as conversation.

A lot of the work is happening in the subtext.

And subtext is a slippery little creature.

If your brain prefers clarity, precision, and explicit information, small talk can feel like being asked to decode a message written in invisible ink.

Which, admittedly, is not very helpful.

The Human Side of the Protocol

And yet…

And yet, for all my cantankerous grumbling, I do think there is something lovely about it.

We are, after all, social animals operating a remarkably fragile but surprisingly effective communication system. Small talk is one of the tiny pieces of software that keeps the whole thing from crashing immediately.

It is how we ease into each other’s company.

It is how we test for warmth.

It is how we say, with minimal risk and maximum politeness, that we are willing to share a moment. You’re lowering your shields and allowing the Klingons to beam aboard.

That is not nothing.

In Closing

So yes, perhaps small talk is the human equivalent of a TCP handshake.

A few neat little exchanges whose real purpose is not the content, but the connection.

Sometimes it works perfectly.

Sometimes it fails immediately.

Sometimes the packets arrive out of order.

Sometimes somebody starts talking about medieval bridge taxation or python programming before the connection is even established.

But when it does work, it lets two strangers become, very briefly, not strangers at all.

And really, that is quite a clever trick for a few essentially meaningless words and a friendly look over a cup of coffee.

I sit here in my home office, surrounded by many little boxes, each containing a strange assortment of items.

If you’ve read my About Pete page (or followed me here from my Mastodon profile), you’ll know I am a collector of collections. Not content with collecting just one type of thing, I somehow ended up collecting multiple collections. So much so that my collections have effectively become a collection in their own right.

A collection squared, if you will.

How did this happen?

More importantly, why did this happen?

I used to simply pick up things I found interesting. At some point I realised I didn’t merely “own some things”. I had somehow become the curator of a growing museum dedicated to obscure enthusiasm.

Slide rules. Rubik’s Cubes. Cravats. Books. Albums and CDs. Fossils and minerals. Obsolete retro technology. Raspberry Pis.

Left unsupervised long enough, I would probably begin alphabetising pebbles or categorising sawdust!

What is it about collecting that I find so satisfying? What part of me does it appease? What itch does it scratch?

Speaking as an autistic person, I know from first-hand experience that neurodivergent brains often experience:

• overwhelm
• anxiety around unpredictability
• sensory chaos
• cognitive overload

Collections, and the act of collecting, provide:

• systems
• categories
• rules
• predictability
• control

A collection is a tiny universe whose logic makes sense; a small island of order in an otherwise bewilderingly noisy world.

Many neurodivergent people possess brains that seem permanently configured to look for patterns. We sort things. We categorise things. We organise things into neat little systems that make perfect sense to us and absolutely nobody else.

Give us a collection and we won’t simply see a shelf full of objects.

We’ll see relationships.

A Rubik’s Cube isn’t just a Rubik’s Cube. It’s a particular mechanism, produced by a particular manufacturer, with a particular turning feel and a particular place in the evolutionary history of twisty puzzles.

A slide rule isn’t simply a calculator from before calculators. It’s a fascinating collection of scales, layouts and design decisions reflecting the mathematical needs of a particular era.

Books aren’t merely books. They’re editions, printings, cover variations and publishing histories.

The same applies to fossils, stamps, coins, model trains, vintage computers, or whatever flavour of obsession has currently attached itself to the brain.

What often fascinates us isn’t simply the object itself but the system surrounding it.

The classifications.

The subtle differences.

The exceptions to the rules.

The one obscure variation that only three people on Earth appear to care about.

Most people look at a shelf and see “a collection”.

A pattern-seeking brain looks at the same shelf and sees a map.

Every object has a place. Every category has a purpose. Every missing item creates a tiny itch in the back of the mind that quietly whispers:

“You know exactly what’s supposed to go there.”

The collection becomes more than a pile of things. It becomes a system to explore, understand and occasionally obsess over.

And for brains that derive genuine pleasure from finding order amidst chaos, that’s immensely satisfying.

Of course, collections aren’t just about categorisation and pattern-seeking. If they were, a spreadsheet would be every collector’s dream and nobody has ever become emotionally attached to a spreadsheet.

Well… almost nobody. :embarrassed smiley:

Over time, collections become something more than the objects themselves.

A favourite book isn’t merely paper, ink and glue. A battered old slide rule isn’t simply a calculating device. A particular Rubik’s Cube isn’t just coloured plastic.

They become markers in the timeline of our lives.

Some remind us of places we’ve been.

Others remind us of people we’ve known.

Some represent achievements, discoveries or periods when life felt particularly good.

Others survived difficult times and somehow became associated with comfort, familiarity and stability.

For many neurodivergent people, objects can provide a reassuring sense of permanence in a world that often feels unpredictable.

People change.

Jobs change.

Circumstances change.

Favourite television programmes get cancelled.

Entire social media platforms appear, dominate the internet for five years and then vanish into obscurity.

But that slightly battered book you’ve owned for twenty years?

It’s still there.

That curious fossil sitting on the shelf?

Still there.

The collection remains a small constant in an ever-changing world.

Objects also possess several advantages over people.

They don’t judge your interests.

They don’t suddenly decide they no longer like you.

They don’t require careful interpretation of facial expressions, body language or implied meanings hidden beneath three layers of social convention.

Most importantly, they don’t initiate small talk.

I’ve yet to encounter a slide rule that felt compelled to discuss the weather.

A collection is predictable. It has structure. It behaves according to understandable rules. You know where things belong and what purpose they serve.

In a world that can sometimes feel noisy, confusing and chaotic, there is something deeply comforting about that.

Perhaps that’s why collections often become emotional anchors.

They’re not merely accumulations of objects.

They’re accumulations of memories, interests, experiences and fragments of identity.

They’re little pieces of ourselves arranged neatly on shelves.

The Dopamine Hunt

Then there’s the dopamine hunt.

If autism often provides the catalogue, ADHD frequently supplies the expedition.

For many collectors, the real excitement isn’t owning the item.

It’s finding it.

The search itself becomes the hobby.

Tracking down a rare edition.

Discovering an obscure variant.

Learning some wonderfully unnecessary fact about a manufacturing change made in 1973.

Completing a set that has been taunting you for years.

It’s part treasure hunt, part side gather quest and part Pokémon for adults with back pain.

An ADHD brain can derive astonishing amounts of happiness from locating a very specific obscure object that nobody else on Earth appears to care about.

Hours of searching, weeks of waiting and countless dead ends can all evaporate the moment the target is finally acquired.

Of course, this creates a slight problem.

The dopamine was never entirely in the object.

It was in the chase.

Which explains why collectors are often found muttering the dangerous phrase:

“I’m only looking…”

Right before accidentally acquiring three more items for the collection.

Some Collections Are Apparently More Respectable Than Others

One of the more fascinating quirks of society is that some collections are considered sophisticated while others are considered evidence that you should perhaps be supervised more closely.

Collect vintage wines and you’re a connoisseur.

Collect rare watches and you’re an investor.

Assemble a garage full of classic cars and people nod approvingly while using words like heritage and craftsmanship.

Collect Rubik’s Cubes, slide rules or obscure retro clothing and suddenly you’re “that bloke with all the cubes” or “that fat prat in the cravat”.

The strange thing is that the underlying behaviour is often identical.

In both cases someone is spending considerable amounts of money acquiring objects they don’t strictly need, learning unnecessary amounts of information about them and becoming disproportionately excited when they discover a rare variant.

Apparently spending £10,000 on a watch is a sensible investment.

Spending £10 on a forty-year-old slide rule is a cry for help.

I remain unconvinced by this distinction.

The Danger Zone

Of course, like most things that bring us comfort and enjoyment, collecting can occasionally wander into less healthy territory.

A collection can become clutter if it grows faster than our ability to manage it.

The thrill of acquisition can become an expensive habit.

The search for the next item can sometimes become more important than appreciating the things we already have.

For some people, collections can also become a form of avoidance; a way of retreating into a familiar and controllable world when life outside feels difficult, uncertain or overwhelming.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this.

Most hobbies have their excesses.

The trick, as with so many things, is balance.

A collection should enrich your life, not consume it.

It should be a source of joy, curiosity and comfort rather than stress, debt or obligation.

After all, if your collection starts requiring its own collection to keep track of it, it may be time for a quiet sit-down and a cup of tea.

Physical Objects in a Digital Age

In an increasingly digital world, I sometimes wonder whether part of the appeal of collections is simply that they are real.

So much of modern life exists behind glass screens.

Books become files.

Music becomes subscriptions.

Photographs become pixels.

Entire friendships can be reduced to a collection of messages stored on somebody else’s server.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that. The digital world has given us remarkable things.

But digital experiences can sometimes feel strangely weightless.

A physical object occupies space in the world.

A book has weight in your hands.

A fossil connects you to a creature that lived millions of years before the first human wondered where they left their keys.

A slide rule carries the fingerprints of the engineers, scientists and students who once used it to understand the universe.

These things have history.

They’ve travelled through time.

They existed before you discovered them and, with a little care, they’ll probably continue to exist long after you’re gone.

Perhaps that’s part of what makes them meaningful.

When I hold an old slide rule, I’m not simply looking at an obsolete calculating device.

I’m holding a small piece of human ingenuity.

A reminder that generations of curious people spent their lives trying to understand the world around them.

In that sense, collections aren’t really about ownership.

They’re about stewardship.

For a little while, these objects become part of our story.

Then one day they’ll become part of someone else’s.

There’s something rather comforting about that.

In Closing

So yes, perhaps neurodivergent people do collect unusual things.

But maybe that is because we notice unusual beauty.

Maybe we find joy in patterns other people overlook, or comfort in systems that make sense to us, or delight in a slightly odd shelf of interesting nonsense that happens to look brilliant in our own particular internal lighting.

Or maybe we just like collecting things that make us happy and occasionally confuse visitors.

Honestly, it is probably all of the above.

And really, that seems like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a life.

Growing older is inevitable. We can’t escape time’s relentless arrow.

Becoming dull, joyless and terminally serious, however, is entirely optional.

Somewhere along the journey into adulthood society quietly slips us a secret rulebook explaining which activities are considered acceptable and which are not. Which hobbies are “appropriate” and which enthusiasms should probably be packed away in the loft next to your old Action Men and abandoned dreams.

Apparently the rules are something like this:

• Assembling obscure collections = eccentric
• Getting excited about games or toys = immature
• Watching cartoons as an adult = deeply concerning
• Discussing Discworld or Hitchhiker’s Guide lore at length = suspicious

I appear to have misplaced my copy of the rulebook.

But really… what is an adult?

As children we assume adults understand life. We imagine they possess confidence, competence and secret knowledge unavailable to younger minds. Adults seem unfazed by everything. They understand taxes voluntarily. They know how insurance works. They probably even enjoy shopping for furniture in IKEA.

You assume that one day a hidden switch in your brain will flip from Child Mode to Fully Operational Adult™ and suddenly the mysteries of existence will reveal themselves.

Except that day never comes.

Instead there’s just a gradual realisation that you’re no longer young. One day you’re racing down hills on a bicycle pretending to be a fighter pilot and the next you’re comparing broadband tariffs and wondering why your knee sounds like a creaky floorboard.

Internally though?

You still feel remarkably similar.

You still have the same interests, fears, fascinations, anxieties and bizarre little enthusiasms. There’s a strange disconnect between your physical age and your internal self-image. In your head you’re still basically you, just with slightly more back pain and stronger opinions about kitchen appliances.

Perhaps more worryingly, you eventually realise you’re now expected to be the responsible adult.

You may even have children of your own who look up at you with the same wide-eyed certainty you once directed at your parents. They assume you know what you’re doing.

Meanwhile internally you’re thinking:

“I’m improvising wildly and hoping nobody notices here Kid!.”

I still occasionally feel like three children in a trench coat trying very hard to pretend they understand mortgages.

Although we don’t change much internally, society expects us to change externally. We’re expected to become relentlessly sensible. Calm. Productive. Emotionally stable. Proper grown-ups.

Enthusiasm becomes embarrassing.

Silliness becomes socially risky.

Wonder becomes suspicious.

Stoic calm and maturity becomes the norm.

Personally, I think locking away curiosity, humour and joy in the name of adulthood does nobody any favours.

Let’s talk about collections for a moment.

You’re at a dinner party and someone asks what you do for fun.

You explain that you collect slide rules, Rubik’s Cubes, fossils, cravats and old books.

At this point you can actually watch them mentally powering down.

You see the unspoken question slowly forming behind their eyes:

“…why?”

What they often don’t see is the curiosity behind it. The tactile pleasure. The fascination. The sense of continuity. The joy of holding strange little fragments of human creativity and history in your hands.

To them it’s clutter.

To you it’s wonder.

Some people collect watches, paintings, cars or increasingly expensive kitchen gadgets. Depending on your social circle they may even collect spouses.

But somewhere along the line adulthood collectively decided that joy should justify itself economically.

I respectfully disagree.

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mike Teevee complains that everything in the titular factory is pointless.

Charlie replies:

“Candy doesn’t have to have a point. That’s why it’s candy.”

Exactly.

Joy should exist for joy’s sake.

Not everything meaningful has to be monetised, optimised or transformed into a side hustle for LinkedIn.

As children our worries were relatively small. Did we have enough pocket money for sweets? Did we finish our homework? Would our Tamagotchi survive the weekend?

Adulthood brings heavier concerns.

Work. Money. Relationships. Responsibilities. Health. Anxiety. Stress.

Your body also starts developing what can only be described as “design quirks”.

Your eyesight deteriorates. Your waistline expands despite eating approximately the same foods you survived on perfectly well at twenty. Your hair either turns grey, disappears entirely or relocates mysteriously to your ears.

And through all of this you’re still expected to project the calm, controlled demeanour of Proper Adulthood.

But humour and joy are forms of resilience.

They’re coping mechanisms that provide perspective on what actually matters.

That isn’t avoidance.

Sometimes humour is how humans carry heavy things without collapsing under the weight.

There is, however, an important distinction between being childish and being childlike.

Childishness is selfishness, irresponsibility and emotional immaturity.

Childlikeness is curiosity, imagination, enthusiasm, creativity, playfulness and wonder.

Unfortunately society confuses the two constantly.

Push back against this whenever possible.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with remaining curious about the world.

At fifty-six years of age I’ve realised a few things:

• Impressing everyone is impossible.
• Fitting in is seriously overrated.
• Most social rules were invented by people no wiser than you.
• Life is finite and you only get one go at it.

Once you realise this, something rather liberating happens.

You give yourself permission to enjoy things openly.

To dress oddly if it makes you happy.

To collect weird objects, even if they are Spores, Moulds and Fungus. (Thanks Egon.)

To laugh more.

To stop pretending.

To become more authentically yourself.

So yes, I’m getting older.

My knees occasionally produce noises worthy of a haunted mansion and I now make involuntary sound effects whenever standing up from a chair.

But I still love puzzles.

I still laugh at terrible jokes.

I still make even worse puns.

I still derive immense joy from simple things.

I can still freewheel down a hill on a bicycle grinning like an idiot.

And I may occasionally become unreasonably excited upon discovering an old bookshop or toyshop.

Does that mean I never fully grew up?

I can probably live with that.

Quite happily, in fact.