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.

Autism, ADHD and me

I realised some years ago that I probably have ADHD. The waters had long been muddied by trauma-related dissociation, but even as the years passed and the fallout from my marriage started to fade, my distractibility persisted, familiar from earliest childhood and embedded in a mind with no idea how to stay in the moment and be still.  

Eventually I got my act together and earlier this year, I went to see one of our local GPs. At the end of our ten-minute appointment, she looked me in the eye and said 'Well, I'm pretty sure you do have ADHD, but I also think you have autism'. 

I was dumbfounded. Two of my four children had been diagnosed with autism at the ages of four and three in the early 1990s, and I thought I knew all about the condition and the diagnostic process. 

'But I don't tick any of the boxes of the Triad of Impairments,' I protested.

She laughed. 'That's very old school!' she said. 'We diagnose it differently these days, and the hyperfocus and sensory overload you just described definitely indicate autism. I'd refer you for assessments for both if I could work out how to do it.'

Intellectually it made sense. I was aware of what's informally known as AuDHD, of course - it's hard to be on social media, in my sort of bubble, and miss it. And I had to agree that a lot of the tricky contradictions a combination of autism and ADHD might throw up (and hurl around your head like roof tiles in a high wind) felt all too familiar.

But emotionally it was another matter altogether. My little family had been considered an anomaly back in the day, with not one, but two small, non-verbal children a considerable way along the autistic spectrum at a time when autism wasn't thought to be hereditary.  As a result, we'd been invited to participate in several medical studies over the years, and I always said yes, thinking the research might help other families in my position. 

But in all that time, not one of the many medical personnel we encountered ever suggested that I too might be autistic. The only finding that was ever remarked upon was my score in the word recognition section of one of the tests we underwent: the highest they'd recorded to date. (I did rather less well on the spatial reasoning test.)

In the event, my GP referred me for just an ADHD assessment, as that seemed to me to be the condition most relevant to my daily experience, but sure enough, when my assessment came around months later, my eventual diagnosis was combined ADHD (hyperactive and attention deficit) with autistic traits.  

Again, there's lots of processing to be done, and it's going to take a long time. In the immediate aftermath, I feel I need to reframe my whole life, to pick through everything that happened to me, and perhaps view myself and the decisions I made a little less harshly than I have up until now. In that respect, this diagnosis will, I think, turn out to be a relief. 

But at the same time, I grieve that it's taken me 64 years to get to the point where I might start to understand myself, and allow myself the same compassion I extend to others. And I grieve for earlier me: for the avid six-year-old reader, who, once her books had fewer pictures and longer blocks of text, found herself reading the same page over and over without taking any of the content in, and convinced herself she'd somehow forgotten how to read, but was too ashamed to tell anyone; for the teen who loved her friends but found their company and the shifting of group dynamics draining (and still does); for the exhausted young mother with no emotional support and no ability to self-care, who gave up any chance of a career to look after her children on a promise from her husband he had no intention of keeping; for the woman entering middle age, who felt she had no choice but to keep her head down and put up with it all and who completely lost what sense of self she had in the process.  I've always known those years were hard, but I never realised quite how hard until now. 

At the same time, I can celebrate the leaps that allow me to write poems that seem to come from nowhere, and an ability to hyperfocus that makes even essay-writing exhilarating and infuses the most mundane of dog walks with an intensity that's addictive. 

I'm grateful to those who have stuck by me regardless - my lovely, long-suffering partner, three of my children, successive dogs who have loved me unconditionally, my longtime friends and wider family, my friends in poetry, and my publishers, who've enabled me to realise the one dream I held onto through all those years not once but seven times. I love them all, with every bit of my distractible, avoidant, oh-look-squirrels heart.

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, neurodivergence 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 eulogy for my mother

 

Sylvia Hilda Jane Harvey

12th April 1928 - 29th September 2021

There’s a certain song in Shakespeare’s ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ that my father would occasionally recite while my mother preened. It starts like this:

‘Who is Silvia? What is she, that all our swains commend her?’

and this is the question we’ll explore in these next few minutes.

The only place to start a eulogy for Sylvia Hilda Jane Harvey née Hill is half a mile from this church, at 12 Douglas Road, Horfield, Bristol, where she was born on 12th April 1928, the eldest girl in a family of 13. She wasn’t Jack and Hilda Hill’s first daughter: that was Barbara, their firstborn, who died at the age of five weeks. There followed three boys –Mum’s elder brothers, Meric, Keith and Noel – and then Jack finally got to delight in his blue-eyed girl. I think it’s fair to say that Mum had him wrapped around her little finger for the rest of his life. I recall my grandmother Hilda telling me of her indignation that decisions requiring the attention of husband and wife always had to be run past Mum: ‘Let’s see what Sylvia thinks first,’ Jack would say.

Being the eldest girl in such a large family meant that a lot of the chores fell to Mum, particularly from the age of 11, when Hilda produced her hat-trick of babies. Mum specifically remembered being called into the house to help when it was feeding time, with her taking a bottle and a triplet, and whichever friends she was playing with arming themselves likewise. She was a clever girl, but she failed the oral part of the entrance exam for Red Maids School, leaving Hilda and Jack wondering whether the help she’d given around the home had wrecked her education. They did the next best thing for her, however, and cashed in an insurance policy so that Mum could attend a six-week course in typing and shorthand, and she started to earn her living the day after her 14th birthday. Mum had several employers, including a stint at the BAC where she found typing columns of numbers extremely dull, but most of her working life was spent as a legal secretary at J W Ward & Son in Albion Chambers, where she acquired the nickname ‘The White Whirlwind’ from her habit of doing everything at top speed. One day her boss, Malcolm Ward, gave her a piece of paper and told her to type what was on it. Mum didn’t realise he was standing behind her with a stopwatch, and when she’d finished, he told her she was fractions of a second outside the world speed record for typing.

I need to say a bit more about that childhood, though: a close-knit bunch of children; concert parties in the back garden with Mum the star turn; illicit Woodbines on the tump at the bottom of Douglas Road; long bike rides to Blaise Castle, Clevedon and beyond, with a picnic of jam or paste sandwiches. It was, of course, impossible for two such hard-pressed parents as Jack and Hilda to keep a close eye on all those children, which meant that Mum and Uncle Noel, who was closest in age to her, also got up to a fair bit of mischief. A few years back, as their minds were beginning to drop their guard, I heard stories over lunch at the former Royal George that would make your toes curl, but which are probably best not shared today, in this hallowed place.

It feels wrong somehow that Meric, Keith and Noel aren’t here today, for Mum idolised them. I think her proudest possessions were the letters and the embossed leather purse Meric sent her from Egypt, where he served in the Army during the war. 

In such a large family there must have been a lot of rivalry for parental attention, and this seems to have shaped the characters of many of the Hill siblings. I remember the word ‘competitive’ featuring in Uncle Keith’s eulogy, and it’s also one of the first adjectives I would choose to characterise Mum. She would compete at anything she was good at, from tennis and badminton to housekeeping, and she had a ferocious drive to win, as anyone who’s been on the receiving end of one of her shuttlecocks can testify. In a family that prized boys above girls, I think it was a disappointment to her that she didn’t have a strapping son, and that her two daughters turned out to be decidedly un-athletic, but she remained extremely proud of all of her rugby-playing brothers, not to mention her grandson Dave’s rugby career during his teens, and latterly she would pore over newspaper cuttings detailing the progress of my cousin Yvonne’s son Noah at Worcester Warriors.

The family, then, was the centre of Mum’s life. So, too, was her faith, which attached itself firmly to the church we’re in today. Eden Grove also provided the raw material for the more worldly part of her life, for it was here, in the Youth Club, that she met Lionel Harvey, a football-playing ex-RAF serviceman, and it wasn’t long before she’d converted him into a Bristol Rugby Club fan, with him selling his car to buy Mum an engagement ring brilliant enough to match her megawatt smile. She also made many lifelong friends here, among them Betty and Harold Daveridge, Edith and Roy Ridsdale, Joy and Norman Hale – familiar presences in Linda’s and my childhood, whose names were all prefixed with either Auntie or Uncle … as if we didn’t have enough of those already.

It’s only these last few months that she stopped her fundraising efforts for Eden Grove. These mostly took the form of knitting, the clack of needles being the soundtrack to her later, more sedentary years. Her handicraft stalls raised thousands for this church, almost all in denominations of little more than a pound. She was deeply saddened by the announcement of its forthcoming closure, a decision which appeared to trigger a literal race to the death between Mum and the Grove. We’re pleased Mum won it – of course she did! – and that we can say goodbye to her here on All Saints Day.

 

Another important place that featured in Mum’s service to the community was Filton Folk Centre. She was a prominent member of the Community Association from its earliest days, and her involvement was extensive.  At one point, in addition to her full-time job, she was running three early evening junior badminton clubs and the senior badminton club on a Wednesday night, as well as organising the weekly Bingo sessions on a Saturday evening. These were the association’s biggest fund-raiser, and involved frequent trips to George’s Wholesalers on Victoria Street for tombola prizes, the most prestigious of which featured a cardboard box wrapped in a leftover piece of wallpaper and filled with tinned food, a covering of cellophane and a sticky-backed rosette providing the finishing touch. Mum was in her element as Queen Bee of the Folk Centre, and once again she was conjuring valuable funds from very little other than her own hard work.

Mum was joined at the Folk Centre on Saturday nights by her sister, Mavis, who did her own valuable fund-raising in the form of the Sales Table. Auntie Mave, Uncle Den and our cousins, Joy and Sandra, were also frequent companions on holiday at Smugglers Caravan Park in Devon, and I can still see the sisters marching along the sea wall to Teignmouth, or comparing bargain balls of wool bought at Newton Abbot Market. What a loss Mavis was during those middle years. Crying was considered a sign of weakness by Mum, and one of the very few times I saw her eyes brim with tears was for her darker, quieter sister. 

Throughout her life Mum played to her strengths brilliantly. When Jennifer and Samuel were diagnosed with autism, she offered unstinting practical assistance, cycling the two miles from her house to mine and transporting one or other of the children on her bike to wherever they needed to go. My children have very clear memories of their Nanny scrubbing them to within an inch of their lives in the tiny yellow bath kept under the caravan, and all of the grandchildren remember her reading them bedtime stories, finishing with a fervent rendition of ‘You Are My Sunshine’, a song we sang together again in her final days.

I suspect that, in Mum’s eyes, illness and the depredations of old age were for other people, not her, a notion perhaps reinforced by her recovery from breast cancer at the age of 50. Certainly Mum and Dad were intent on remaining as independent as possible for as long as possible, and for some years they propped each other up, a bit like a pair of playing cards. Even after Dad’s sudden death in 2018 Mum stuck it out at 7 Kenmore Drive for another year and a half, and would have continued to do so, I think, had she not broken her hip while picking blackcurrants in the back garden. It was then she finally accepted it was her turn to be cared for, and went to live in Nottingham. I’d like to thank all of the Boston family for what they did for Mum during those final months, but especially Linda, Alan and Ruth, who looked after her diligently, and were unfailingly patient and kind as her physical and mental health diminished.

Mum was a proud woman, and as hard as it was for us to witness her decline, it was infinitely harder for her to endure it. She died on 29th September – Michaelmas Day – and we’re relieved she’s no longer suffering.

I returned to ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ to find an ending for this eulogy, and came across the love-lorn Valentine’s speech in Act 3 Scene 1, in which he contemplates a life without Silvia:

‘What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?

What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?

Unless it be to think that she is by

And feed upon the shadow of perfection.

Except I be by Silvia in the night,

There is no music in the nightingale;

Unless I look on Silvia in the day,

There is no day for me to look upon.

She is my essence, and I leave to be

If I be not by her fair influence

Fostered, illumined, cherished, kept alive.’

On first reading, this lament seems fitting. Mum’s death is another of those huge shifts in our family’s shared story, and things can never be the same without her. Yet she wouldn’t want us to grieve. I rather think her parting challenge to us is to give our noses a good blow, stand up straight, and get on with the hard work of living. 

Cameron Must Go! National Demonstration - March for Health, Homes, Jobs and Education

Very proud to share this report my daughter, Jennifer Drewett, put together following the demonstration in London yesterday. (You won't have seen anything like this on the news, of course.)

Over the years Jen and her brother, who were both effectively written off at the ages of four and three respectively by a diagnosis of severe autism with learning disabilities, have benefited from disability allowances, Statements of Special Educational Need which provided them with access to the education they required, and years of speech therapy from the NHS. One senior registrar once said to me that their progress was a miracle, but I say it was in large part down to our welfare state.

All this is now being swept away by the Tory government. Meanwhile, the rich get richer, the poor pay a hugely disproportionate burden of tax, and the Daily Mail tells its idiotic readers that we should leave the EU and lose the tattered remnants of our human rights. It does my heart good to see that there are still those who will stand up and protest.

Poem for World Autism Acceptance Day 2015

It's World Autism Accepantance Day today, and on a day when there are reports of a 10-year-old pupil with autism being kept in a cage in a Canberra classroom, I want to say how thankful I am to the autists in my life - for their courage in being themselves in a society bent on conformity, and for showing me every day that difference is to be embraced and nurtured.

Here's a poem about autism I prepared earlier.

Poem for World Autism Acceptance Day 2014

I'm posting this poem for World Autism Acceptance Day 2014, which was yesterday.  I wrote it a long, long time ago - around 1999, I think - when the two of my children who have autistic spectrum disorder were aged 10 and 8.  They are adults now and have exceeded all expectations of the medics who diagnosed them.  The neighbour who terrorised me every time I let my children into the back garden is still living two doors away. 

There's still a long way to go before autism is accepted.  Certainly books like 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime' by Mark Haddon have helped, though I doubt Herr Nachbar has read it.  

I still struggle to go out into the garden.  

The Village Idiot

Four children in a photograph –

sisters and brothers –

all scrubbed, all dutifully gleaming.

So which are deemed deficient?

The camera doesn’t know.

But there you go

windmilling down our street,

and there’s our Nazi neighbour

who thinks that you are thick,

he tells me you should be locked up.

See how he battens down spent daffodils,

entrenches his French marigolds

with pissy little rings of slug pellets!

Let’s grub them up at midnight,

let malnourished molluscs feast.

                        © Deborah Harvey  1999, 2014

Poem for World Autism Acceptance Day 2013

It's World Autism Acceptance Day 2013, and as anyone who has children or other family members rather further along the spectrum than is deemed 'normal', once the white coats have their foot in the door, it can be hard to close it again.  When my two autists were small, I always felt torn between wanting to further the understanding of this often debilitating condition, and a longing for privacy which at one point made me consider doing a bunk with all of my kids and hiding out in the middle of Dartmoor.  

One of the studies we became involved in concerned the molecular genetics of autism.  This involved hours of videotaped face-to-face interviews and tests over quite a few years.  (Apparently I achieved the highest ever score on word recognition, but was really rather unimpressive when it came to spatial awareness, though I reckon my prowess in the former category was down to studying Latin to A-level, rather than an indication of innate savant capabilities.)

 Anyhow, this is a poem I wrote a few years ago about the study, when I had to travel to Oxford for a MEG scan. 

The Molecular Genetics of Autism

for J and S

The White Coats know everything

and today they will explain

the hidden mysteries of my brain

so they strip me of all metal,

tape electrodes to my skin,

then they clamp me in a scanner

in a windowless white box

with lead-lined door.

The scanner will illuminate

the wiring in my head. One day

autism will be dead,

the minds of everyone so perfect

they will glide in punts through Oxford

sipping Pimms.

But the scanner’s wires are crossed.

It can’t unveil the wicked fairy

who bestowed those christening gifts,

it fails to break the wheel

that spun the damaged threads

and I leave with straw and silver seeds

still filling up my head. 

Outside

a vixen prints herself on drifting mist

and disappears

© Deborah Harvey 2010, 2013

Poem for World Autism Acceptance Day 2012

This is a poem I wrote 13 years ago.  I don't much care for polemical poetry and seldom write it but this wrote itself.  (Plus, it's always satisfying to have a pop at the Daily Mail!)  I am reposting it for World Autism Acceptance Day 2012 which is today.

Back then I could never have known how well things would turn out for my two autists.  They were written off at the ages of four and three.  'No functioning intelligence,' said one White Coat. 'They'll never learn to speak.'  But they are both warm, creative and talkative people with hearts full of love.  I couldn't be prouder of them.

                 
                 Cut Out and Keep 

Already you test me with questions.

But how to explain the inexplicable

in ways you’ll understand?

I have no glib replies.

You bear off my inadequate words

in your hands

to look at, sniff and taste.

Meanwhile I ponder

what I’m not going to tell you –

how in years gone by

they’d have burnt you as witches

or left you to wolves

or the mental asylum,

simply because you’re you.

And I compare this

with latter-day attitudes:

patronising Daily Mail articles

re the latest miracle cure

that works for (a few of)

the Poor Brave Victims

they would deem you.

But we know

there’s no bravery

in no choice.

And so I love this otherness,

as much a part of you

as your scent and skin and smiles

and this is why

I do not wish you otherwise.

© Deborah Harvey 1999, 2012

A Poem for Autistic Pride Day - Prognosis

In celebration of neurodivergence, a poem ... 

Prognosis

for J and S

No functioning intelligence.

No meaningful relationships.

Mute.  Forever closed off from the world.

I remind myself of this

as my daughter

bounds across the concourse,

waving her essay on Citizen Kane,

as my son delivers his lines,

word-perfect,

in bathers and rubber ring.

He’s the star of the panto.

Oh no he isn’t. 

OH YES HE IS!!

Deborah Harvey © 2010 , 2011

On Border Collies

There have been times when Ted, my border collie, and I have failed to see eye to eye.  Indeed, eighteen months ago, when his behaviour was at its most reactive, people would often stop me and say, ‘Ahhh, is he a rescue collie?’  ‘No,’ I’d answer, grimly, ‘not yet.’

Loving Ted was never a problem, but was he ever hard work!  And I only had myself to blame. After my ex-husband’s departure, the kids and I all needed a big distraction from the big absence, and what better than the dog we’d wanted for ages but were never permitted?  Within ten minutes of my suggesting it, we’d settled on a breed (I blame Shep) and chosen a name that was cuddly yet dignified enough to bawl in the park, and with more than a hint of dark poet about it.  Two evenings spent trawling the internet, and I was bonding in the back of my neighbour’s car with a gorgeous, 8-week-old border collie puppy with violet eyes (now amber).

Of course, I couldn’t have done it wronger, and I have to admit that even at the time I knew I was being foolhardy.  Ted was Love On The Rebound With Knobs On, a symbol of my and the children's new life on our own.  Worse, I’d chosen a puppy used to running around a barn with his siblings, who’d had no injections, no health checks, no socialisation.  And whilst telling myself that a pup bred for working out on the hills would be in better physical shape than a dodgy-hipped, epileptic show dog (not to mention cheaper), I’d overlooked the fact that his engrained desire to herd everything that moves might make him unsuited to being my pet, given that we live in the suburbs and our local park is full of joggers, skate-boarders, kids on scooters and speeding, non-bell-ringing cyclists taking a short cut to avoid the traffic on the A38 and A4174.  Finally, I, a first-time dog owner, had wilfully bought probably the most demanding breed of dog there is, with a high rate of re-homing, at a time when I was particularly depressed, stressed and anxious following the end of my marriage.

It could have been hell, and there were days when it was. There were three factors in Ted’s and my favour, however.  First, I only work regular hours two days a week, and in a place near enough for me to drive home at lunch time to walk and train him.  The rest of the week I work varying hours here and there, often in the evenings or at weekends when my younger son is at home to keep Ted company.  Second, raising autistic children has given me considerable reserves of patience and perseverance to draw on.  Third, Ted is extremely bright and quick to cotton on to what you want him to do (though whether he’ll do it is another matter … )

We’re not out of the woods yet, me and Ted, but we’re definitely in the sun-dappled, bluebell-y bit rather than the darkest depths.  In particular, exploiting his strengths and proclivities as a means of training him has proved very successful.  Being a typical collie with a collie ‘eye’, he responds very well to hand signals and is now probably good enough to be a Communication Support Worker in British Sign Language.  Also, he’s ball-obsessed, which allows me to keep his attention quite easily when we’re up the park, although I still have to watch for passing bikes and joggers.  To be on the safe side, I keep him on a long lead which trails as he runs, so I can grab him quickly if need be.  The hours of training, both at home and on his lead, have really paid off.  He can still be hyper-vigilant when moving from one location to another – eg from the park to the street, or car to car park – but I try to keep him away from anything he might feel the need to herd (cars, bikes, joggers, small children) or protect me from (men without dogs, mainly).  All the signs are that he’s beginning to calm down.

‘Best dog I ever had,’ people tell me of their much-loved border collies, ‘after the first three years!’

  Evolution

  

  My dog watches me squat in woods,

  on his face the smirk of male

  further up the evolutionary scale. 

  Since he’s learnt to lift his leg,

  he cocks at every opportunity,

  laying claim to territory.

  ‘Just like we did,’ grins my father,

  ‘more than eighty years ago.

  Against the playground wall, all in a row.’

      Deborah Harvey © 2009 , 2011

    Collie pup by Dru Marland