A poem for Neurodiversity Pride Day 2025

This is a poem from my 2014 collection, ‘Map Reading for Beginners’. I wrote it in 2010 about a trip to Oxford in January of that year, for the purpose of having a MEG scan. This, it was hoped, would reveal how my brain was wired and whether there were genetic implications with regard to my children’s autism.

Years ago, neurodiversity had yet to be recognised as a thing, autism wasn’t considered a hereditary condition, and my family had long been deemed something of an anomaly for containing not one but two autistic children. As a result, we got roped into several scientific studies over the years. The one with the MEG scan came comparatively late in the day and was the last one we participated in. It was researching the molecular genetics of autism, and involved hours of videotaped interviews and tests over quite a few years. (I remember I was told I’d achieved the highest score they’d ever recorded on word recognition, but was really rather rubbish when it came to spatial awareness.)

On the day, after being stripped of metal, wired up by the wrists, forehead, eyelids, cheekbones, and that tender spot behind the ears, and clamped into a sort of all-body salon hairdryer, it turned out the scanner wasn’t working properly, and I drove back home to Bristol with whatever mystery my brain possessed unfathomed.

This poem has added poignancy for me now, as fifteen years later I’m waiting for an ADHD assessment. I see now that a diagnosis back then could have been really helpful, not just for me but also for my two other children, who, like me, didn’t tick any of the boxes when it came to the Triad of Impairments – which was how autism was diagnosed back in December 1993, when my autists were two and four years old respectively – but who could well be interestingly wired themselves and would have benefitted significantly from support and understanding, had their (possible) neurodiversity been recognised.

I feel frustrated by this, but at the same time, I have to acknowledge that's where medical science was thirty years ago, and maybe our participation in all those studies helped to bring society's understanding about neurodiversity to the point it's at today. I'm sad too, though, because if these divergencies had been picked up, the dynamics between me and my children might have played out differently, and we might all still be in each other's lives. 

A visit to Llangrannog

 'Where shall we go today?' 

We'd met a couple of women, one a poet, in the car park in New Quay the evening before, and they'd recommended visiting Llangrannog, where they lived, so that's where we went. 

First stop, homage to a Victorian poet whose work neither of us have read because she wrote in Welsh, Sarah Jane Rees, whose bardic name was Cranogwen, and who sounds really interesting, having gone to sea as a child with her father, later setting up her own navigation school. She also edited a Welsh language women's magazine for bluestockings and proto-Suffragettes, lectured in America, and lived openly, it appears, with successive female partners, whilst still being a staunch Methodist and founder of the South Wales Women's Temperance Union. Her grave is in the churchyard of St Carranog's Church and, pleasingly, is entirely in Welsh.  

(Incidentally, St Carranog, or Carantoc, is the same saint who sailed across the Bristol Channel in a coracle, landing at Carhampton on the Somerset coast, where he tamed a dragon at the behest of King Arthur and made an appearance in a sequence of poems in my collection, Map Reading for Beginners.)  

Sarah Jane Rees is also commemorated in the village with a very newly unveiled and extremely impressive statue by Sebastien Boyson, who also sculpted the statue of the miner at the Six Bells memorial. 

After lunch on the front, we went down onto the beach ... 

... and past the rock called Carreg Bica, which, according to legend, was the giant Bica's tooth, spat out when he had a spell of toothache.

I think it looks more like an angel from behind. 

From the neighbouring cove, we climbed the steep steps up the cliff to the coast path. 

stonecrop and slate

Our plan was to walk to the end of the Ynys Lochtyn headland, where there's a colony of seals, but it was very hot and we both had spells of feeling slightly giddy, so we didn't descend to the headland, but looked down on it instead from the heights of the cliff path ... 

... before turning around and walking back to Llangrannog via a path set rather more inland than the outgoing route along the edge of the cliff. 

It wasn't the end of the world not seeing seals, not least since we had Cwtch with us who could have disturbed them, and anyhow, we'd seen some back in 2016, further down the coast at Strumble Head ... 

... and our consolation prize was a pair of choughs, seeing off some gulls from their nesting area. 

Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door - Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

My father announced some years ago now that he would like to visit Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door in Dorset, a desire he's often repeated since.  I've lost count of the number of times I've offered to drive him there but he's always had a reason not to go - too cold, too wet, too hot, too pretty much anything really.  To which he'd add, 'There's plenty of time'.

I began to think that I would never get him there, and that when I did eventually visit myself, maybe after his death, I would be consumed with guilt at my failure, even though I'd know I'd tried my hardest.  Three years ago, I even wrote a poem about not taking him to Lulworth Cove.

When my sister announced that she and her husband would be taking the parents on holiday to Dorset, I heaved a sigh of relief. Far easier to herd them there from a distance of six miles. And I could go down too, and spend the day with them.

So as soon as I'd cast my vote in the EU referendum, I set off. It was a good day for a jaunt, beautiful in a grey sort of way, as this country so often is. And despite worries about which way the vote would go, I was glad I was finally going to cross Lulworth Cove off the List of Places To Take My Parents.

Except that they are 94 and 88 now, and their mobility is poor.  The Cove proved too far for them to walk to from the pub by the car park. There was no vehicular access, not even to drop them off.  And the wheelchair I bought when I broke my leg, in the hope they too would get some use out of it, was 100 miles away, right at the back of their cupboard under the stairs, rejected.

So it was just me, my sister, my brother-in-law and their large and exuberant puppy who saw this.

We wondered if there was a way of seeing the shore from the cliffs. There'd be panoramic viewpoints, right? My sister went into the Tourist Information Centre. Nope, no way of seeing the Cove or Durdle Door from the cliffs without trekking quite a way. 'How are they at walking over grass?'

We drove up there anyway.  Rooks watched carefully to see how we were going to resolve this.  We made preliminary forays along various paths to see if they were worth a try. They weren't.

In the end only my brother-in-law, the dog and I made it down to the beach to get a proper look.

And it was beautiful ...

... Durdle Door to the left, Durdle Cat Flap to the right, with waves like perfectly scalloped lace. 

Leaving my sister pondering the possibility of hiring a wheelchair and returning the next day, I bade the merry band of holidaymakers farewell and headed for home. On the way I stopped off at Bere Regis and had a look around the stone and flint Church of St John the Baptist.  

There are some churches you go inside, look up and marvel - Muchelney is one, as are Martock, Long Sutton, and the Church of St Thomas and Edmund in Salisbury - and now there's another to add to the list.

Constructed in about 1485, the carved figures on the nave roof are believed to depict the twelve apostles. There are also huge bosses and carved heads on the wall plates between the trusses.

Meanwhile in the chancel there are angels.

The stone altar was discovered buried under the chancel floor in the 19th century, having been put there at the time of the Reformation to avoid destruction.  It's now hidden away under embroidered drapery.


I loved the 12th century carvings on the pillars of south side of the church, especially the ones of man with headache and man with toothache.  

They reminded me of the sheela-na-gig at the Church of St Mary and St David, Kilpeck in Herefordshire, which was built around 1140. 

Time was getting on. Tempting as it was to visit Shitterton, Piddlehinton and Piddletrenthide, I decided they must wait for another day, and it was as well, as an accident outside Dyrham Park meant that it took me over an hour to travel the last five miles up to the Bath junction of the M5. 

Sitting in my car looking over verges of long golden grass and poppies to a sky with clouds layered like the side of a Walls Viennetta which someone took from the packaging too hastily and smudged with their thumbs, I thought how beautiful this island is and how much I love it, and I hoped so hard that its people would not vote to turn their backs on our neighbours and close borders and minds. 

Meanwhile three men in the car in front tipped their rubbish out through the window. 

The AA New Book of the Road

He has abandoned

his forties atlas of the world,

the one that takes him back

to Castel Benito, Tripolitania, the capital

city of old Brindisi,

Palestine.

Instead he’s tracking the A37,

planning advances on

Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door, 

the skin on his finger paper thin,

the back of his hand a Spaghetti junction

of knotted highways.

Let’s go tomorrow

I say quickly. No rain forecast.

Some sunshine. 

We’ll wait till it’s warmer

he decides.  No need to rush.

There’s plenty of time.

© Deborah Harvey 2014 

Pebbles On The Shore

On Thursday we were off to Teignmouth for the launch of Pebbles on the Shore, an anthology of poems about the town. We went via the scenic route. 

Gibbet Hill and Brent Tor

Cox Tor car park

My glee at being on Dartmoor under my favourite circumstances - bright slanty sun and pewter cloud - dissipated as rain rolled in over Tavistock and hit the moor. Hard. 

The same rook which had been preaching in the shade of the ice cream van almost exactly three years earlier was there again, but wetter.   

There was nothing for it but to retreat to the car and eat a Magnum.  My dog, Ted, kindly offered to do some of the driving through driving rain.  

By the time we reached Shaldon, the weather was brilliant and beautiful ... 

 ... though fitful.

  

I'd felt a bit apprehensive about returning here while I was driving down the M5.  The sudden death last spring of the owner of the caravan park, where my family had two caravans, had resulted in a massive hoick in ground rent, followed in September by two months' notice to everyone to get their vans off the site so that his sons could install a fieldful of lodges at £180,000 apiece.  

It was painful to lose what had been our home from home for the last 45 years, but the nagging fear inside that the landscape I loved had somehow abandoned me turned out to be unfounded. (Of course it did!) I'd simply forgotten Herman Hesse's wise words: 'Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.'

So now I was looking at everywhere with new eyes, stripped of complacency.  A new relationship, a fresh and fruitful way of interacting with a place that is part of my heart.  And still less than 100 miles from where I live.  

(Of course, we wouldn't be in this situation if my parents had bought this house, Thalassa, when it was offered to them decades ago, but £3,000 was a huge sum then and they couldn't raise it.)

I must have eaten dozens of meals in the Clipper over the years, but this was the first since they dismantled the glass-walled booth selling souvenirs of Devonshire pixies and unpinned the tea towels from the walls, and it was by far the best, being decidedly palatable.  The cider was pretty good too. And it's dog friendly. 

A quick wander up to the bridge ...

... a glimpse of a still rainy moor ... 

... a peep down School Lane, through which my sister and I would walk to fetch our dad's newspaper ...

... a peek at the river between cottages ... 

... and it was time to head to the Alice Cross Centre in Teignmouth for the launch of Pebbles on the Shore.  

As well as reading some of the poems, anthology editor Neil Howell explained about the work of the Centre and gave the audience background information about them, while the artist Maureen Fayle spoke about her ink illustrations, many of which were executed in part with twigs.  I love this one of the back beach she drew to accompany my poem, The Poet and the Boatman, which you can read here. 

The whole evening went well, and it was a pleasure to meet some of the local poets. Even Ted behaved himself, although in the penultimate poem I heard a couple of loud, theatrical sighs emanating from the back of the hall to signal that even dogs who are dark poets can sometimes get poetried out.  










Information about Pebbles on the Shore and where to buy it is here on Neil's blog.  

'The Poet and the Boatman' is from my collection, Map Reading For Beginners.