Wednesday, 4 May 2011

Gary McKinnon

Last year (or was it a couple of years ago?) I got involved in Gary McKinnon's 'fight', or rather his mother's fight, to stop Gary being extradited to the USA to stand trial for causing $900,000 worth of damage to the US military complex.

My friend, Steve, asked me why I chose, seemingly at random, to add my energy and time to Gary's cause.

I couldn't give him a rational answer at the time.

Watch this

At 1.24 Janis Sharp, Gary's mother says

"People with Asperger's can't read facial expressions"

During the failure of my first marriage I wrote that trying to understand what was going on with my parents was like walking along a supermarket isle picking facial expressions from one shelf in order to match them with the tones of voices from another - a seemingly random process.

Whilst at school, coming up to that time when a choice had to be made as to whether I should stay on for the upper sixth form or leave and go out and get a job, the school's carreer advisor (Mr Barford) called me in and said

"Why don't you just leave? No one likes you. You don't have a clue about what's going on. You barge into groups of people without any understanding of what's going on. It doesn't matter what they are talking about - you don't seem to understand anything about social signals'

I don't know where this is going so it will get cut off here