The umbrella of neurodivergence

It's a little irritating when you go to your GP and ask for an ADHD assessment because you've been pretty sure for years that this is what lies behind the distractibility and executive dysfunction that has plagued your entire life and is now getting to the point where you're really struggling to get basic tasks done, and the GP listens to you describe how stressful the surgery waiting room is with the inanities of Heart Radio blaring over conversations between receptionists and patients and the passing traffic outside, making it impossible to concentrate on the book you've brought to a) while away time and b) have something else to look at other than the orange seating, and says 'I think you should be assessed for autism too', and you say 'sensory sensitivity is also part of ADHD though, isn't it, and anyhow, I tick none of the boxes of the Triad of Impairments' (which is how they diagnosed your children with autism 30+ years ago) and she says 'oh that's very old school, we don't do it like that any more', and then when your ADHD assessment happens, the psychiatrist says 'the fact you obsessively check your work for mistakes despite having ADHD makes me think you might have autism too, so I think you need an autism assessment as well', so you apply for one and wait for months and when it comes along you have four days' notice, and the next day a whole load of unrelated stuff starts kicking off, but you press on anyway even though you don't feel you've prepared enough, and the psychiatrist doing the assessment, who is a different one from the first one, says you 'don't reach the threshold for a diagnosis of autism because you pick up on vibes and other people's feelings' (and this is true, you once spent an afternoon listening to a friend who was really stressed as she poured out her troubles, after which she said she felt much better and you drove home with her migraine, despite not actually suffering from them yourself), and adds that 'sensory processing issues are also part of ADHD, don't you know, and there's nothing in your symptoms that can't be explained by a diagnosis of ADHD with hypersensitivity and anxiety'. 

The 'you' is me, of course, and actually I can work with that diagnosis. What I really need, though, is medication. I've been waiting ten months for titration to start. (Submitting my weight and blood pressure four months into this wait to comply with the legal requirement for providers of mental health and psychiatric services to start the process within that length of time hasn't really made a material difference to my situation.)

I do wonder, however, if these categories will wither away in the future, much like the Triad of Impairments has as a diagnostic tool, because this morning I completely missed my footing on my dog walk and fell down some steps, narrowly missing landing in the River Trym, and my ribs and hip are hurting badly. There's also a big black bruise on my forearm from where I misjudged the distance of the door handle while walking from the kitchen into the hall last week and banged right into it. This not-always-knowing-exactly-where-my-body-is-in-time-and-space, plus the nine pins and plate in my leg from when I fell off the doorstep eleven years ago, speak of dyspraxia to me. And though I'm good at spelling, I can't tell my left from my right and I gave up learning to play the piano after eight years because sight-reading musical notation is so laborious for me, both of which deficits are related to dyslexia.

Not that I'm going to request any more assessments. I'm done with that now. It's just that I'm starting to think of my situation and how it presents more from the perspective of neurodivergence as umbrella term, with a pick-n-mix of symptoms. And since I see things the way I do, this gives me a precise picture: the umbrella is a dusty black, faded along the folds from being stored in a sunny hallway. It has various coloured patches, and other holes and tears, though it makes little difference whether the holes have been patched or not with regard to their ability to keep out the rain and sun; they let both through at the same time. And that's the beauty of it, really.

This is Pameli's umbrella from some years ago now. It's not the umbrella of neurodivergence, but I like it.

Venerable trees and old stone bridges

I was hoping to get out for a few modest jaunts around the West Country this summer, but no sooner did the holidays begin than life kicked off with an entirely different game plan, and it's looking like I'll be staying more local that I'd envisaged. 

I did get to do a walk I'd been planning for years, which is the Leigh Woods veteran tree walk - in fact, I actually set out to do it some years back with my son, Samuel, and my oldest friend, Liz, but we chatted so much, we missed every waymark and ended up meandering around the middle of the wood, noticing very little. This time around, I found most of them, I think, although the instructions appear to have been written before a separate cycling trail was established in 2011, which makes them a bit confusing in places. But here they are:

veteran oak pollard

veteran yew

veteran oak

wild service trees, an indicator of ancient woodland

monolith beech, the branches having been removed because of a fungus called Ustulina

layering yew

a possibly veteran oak in a line of four, apparently, though all looking a lot younger than lots of other oaks we passed

this might have been another one in days of yore, when the walk was devised

veteran lime coppard on the rampart of Stokeleigh camp

re-pollarded veteran oak

There were quite a few trees we passed that seemed to me rather more interesting, by which I mean gnarly than some of the trees on this list. 

birch, and below some oaks

Stokeleigh camp

remnant wood pasture

another recent tree victim, presumably of climate breakdown

Cwtch in the woods

The other ne-to-us walk Cwtch and I did was the stretch of the River Frome that runs from  where we walk in Winterbourne to Frenchay Bridge, just above Snuff Mills - a sort of filling-in-the-gap type walk. One day I'd like to walk the Frome from its source near Little Sodbury to where it joins in the River Avon in central Bristol, but right now a piecemeal approach will have to do.   

There were lots of stone stiles ...

and stone bridges, the first of which was Frenchay Bridge.

Almost immediately our route took us away from the river briefly, past a house once owned by Edward 'Squire' Higgins, a wealthy gentleman by day and a highwayman, horse thief, house-breaker and murderer by night. He was transported to America in 1754, where he promptly robbed a house and paid for his return passage within three months, settling in what was then called Great House in Frenchay in 1763. He was finally hanged for his crimes in Carmarthen in 1767.

Grove House, formerly Great House

We then cut back down to the Frome and walked in its company as far as Cleeve Bridge ... 

... before then detouring away briefly.

An electricity substation masquerading as the earliest known branch of McDonalds. (It was actually a 19th century dovecote.)

Back down on the Frome we passed under the A4174 ... 

... whereupon I encountered one of the Frome's tributaries, the Ham Brook, which gave its name to the nearby village of Hambrook ...

... and the 17th century packhorse bridge that crosses it (here partially obscured by a fallen tree). 

The bridge by the former Hambrook Mill beyond the M4

plums

The bridge on Moorend Road

The last half a mile or so to our finish point, at the unnamed bridge near Mill Steps, was along road; once there, the gap was filled and it was a question of retracing our steps back to Frenchay Bridge, a lovely deep dive through the summer woods.

The ruined church and kissing trees of Lancaut

 

My walking book for the Wye Valley and the Forest of Dean tells me that the first time I visited the ruined, 12th century Church of St James at Lancaut was twenty-five years ago in February 2001, with my now ex-husband and our four children. I remember this walk well; it was during February half-term, the first cases of foot-and-mouth in what would be a devastating outbreak had just occurred, and I was desperate to get out for a walk before the countryside was closed down completely. 

The second walk was eight years later, in October 2009. This time I was with my late collie, Ted, who was just a puppy and my initials had changed, as had my marital status (or at least my divorce was under way). 

It's now nearly 17 years since that second walk, so ... high time I went back. Though I wouldn't be retracing my steps today; it's far too hot right now for me and Cwtch to go clambering over the boulders that form part of the route alongside the River Wye. Instead, I decided to drive to the car park high above the Lancaut promontory and walk down through the woods instead.

A fellow dog-walker warned me that cows were loose down by the church, so I put Cwtch back on the lead as a precaution (though unlike the aforementioned Ted, she's far more likely to hang back behind me than charge at such large, lumbering creatures). We sat on a stone stile for a time, in the hope they'd wander off so we might explore the ruins, but they didn't, so we had no choice but to brave them. A fair bit of staring each other down ensued, but we reached the church without incident.

St James, such as it is, is all that's left of the village of Lancaut, which, after centuries of dwindling population numbers, was finally abandoned in the 19th century. Just outside, there's a socket stone that presumably once held a stone cross. 

The lead font that belonged to the church now stands in the Lady Chapel in Gloucester Cathedral.

The piscina

I was sorry to see that someone has scratched some crude religious slogans on the 17th century ledger stones. Here's how one of them looked in 2009:

The cows were still hanging about while we were inside the church, but then disappeared, much to our relief. We explored the outside ...

... carefully avoiding what remained of a poor, dead thrush ...

... and then headed down to the very edge of England. 

In addition to the church, I wanted to find two trees I'd seen online, an ash and a sycamore, that are growing so close to each other they've become inosculated - ie 'kissing'. This is a fanciful way of saying that their trunks and branches rubbed against each other, wearing away the bark, so that they are now fused and share the same support systems, maybe even being the same tree. Or not. All I knew about their/its location was that they/it are/is near the ruined church on the banks of the Wye. 

Lancaut's horseshoe meander, looking downstream towards the cliffs of Wintour's Leap

I decided they must be a little way along the river bank, but the footpath was temporarily closed, presumably because of this downed tree (which means we wouldn't have been able to do the Chepstow to Lancaut walk even if we'd tried). I resigned myself to not seeing them this time, and headed back up through the woods by a different route ...

... encountering on the way this magnificent oak, which has clearly lost several enormous branches recently.

And then, as I sank onto a bench thoughtfully positioned at the top of a particularly steep flight of steps, I saw, off to one side, the kissing trees.

sycamore and ash

Obviously, I didn't have time to get to know them intimately, but I wouldn't mind betting their pronouns are they/them. 

hoggin

pheasant, jay, blue tit, thrush, tawny owl