I learnt that, too. I have really sensitive ears and when I was a teenager, and I was sitting at the breakfast table, my brother used to come up behind me and pull on my ears. Kids I went to school with used to, too, while I was eating my lunch. My mother used to say to me, "You roar and whinge at people." What she didn't want to understand was, that was a communication that I was distressed and to please stop. Many of them, bullies, especially, used to get a perverse pleasure out of it.

I remember my old high school deputy principal, 35 years ago (it was a cold Thursday morning in winter) standing up and talking firmly to the boys in my year and he said (he was masking something himself, here) that the only way to train animals was to belt them. He said that if you saw people training seal pups and the like, that was what they did. This deputy principal deplored corporal punishment. What I now see, looking back on it, was that the bullies were conditioning me to be scared of them, like some animal trainers were. The thing was, the boys the deputy principal threatened with corporal punishment, were inured against it and it had no effect.

School was hell for me, and sometimes, society can be hell for me. My GP has talked to me about a psychologist, and I said to her that if a psychologist does not know enough about autism, it can do more harm than good. I have been fortunate to find a counselling social worker who is autistic, with whom I could talk about some of my problems.