Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet

Hebrew, Phoenician is a consonantal alphabet, containing no symbols for vowel sounds; these had to be deduced from context. Whole words were usually written from right to left. I was fascinated by the distinctive lines and curves of the different letters and even began filling notepad after notepad with long sentences and stories exclusively in the Phoenician script. Using coloured pieces of chalk, I covered the inside walls of our garden shed with my favourite words composed entirely of the Phoenician letters. Below is my name, ‘Daniel’, in Phoenician:

    The following year, when I was ten, an elderly neighbour died and a young family moved into the street. One day my mother answered the door to a small girl with blonde hair, who said she had seen a little girl from our house playing outside (that girl was my sister Claire) and asked whether she could come and play with her. My mother introduced her to my sister and me – she thought it a good opportunity for me to mix with other children in the neighbourhood – and we went over to her house and sat in the porch in her front garden. My sister and the little girl soon became good friends and played together most days in her garden. Her name was Heidi and she was around six or seven. Her mother was Finnish, but her father was from Scotland so Heidi had been raised speaking English and was only now beginning to learn her first Finnish words.
    Heidi had several children’s books with brightly coloured drawings and the word for the object in Finnish under each. Beneath the drawing of a shiny, red apple was the word omena and under another of a shoe appeared the word kenkä . Something about the shape and sound of the Finnish words I read and heard was beautiful to me. While my sister and Heidi played together I sat and studied the books, learning the many words. Although they were very different from English words I was able to learn them very quickly and remember them all easily. Whenever I left Heidi’s garden I would always turn and say to her, Hei Hei! – the Finnish word for ‘goodbye!’
    That summer I was allowed to walk the short distance to and from school by myself for the first time. The route was lined with row after row of hedges and one afternoon while walking home from class I noticed a tiny, red insect covered in black dots crawling inside one of the hedges. I was fascinated by it, so sat down on the pavement and watched it closely as it climbed over and under the sides of each small leaf and branch, stopping and starting and stopping again at various points along its journey. Its small back was round and shiny and I counted its dots over and over. Passers-by on the street stepped round me, some of them muttering under their breath. I must have been in their way, but at the time I did not think of anything but the ladybird in front of me. Carefully, I put out my finger for it to climb onto, then I ran for home.
    I had only previously seen ladybirds in pictures in books, but had read all about them and knew, for example, that they are considered lucky in many cultures because they devour pests (they can eat as many as fifty to sixty aphids in a day) and help protect crops. In mediaeval times, farmers considered their help divine and it’s for this reason that they are named after the Virgin Mary. The ladybird’s black spots absorb energy from the sun, while its colours help to frighten away potential predators because most of them associate bright colours with poison. They also produce a chemical that tastes and smells horrible so predators won’t eat them.
    I was very excited by my find and wanted to collect as many ladybirds as I could. My mother saw the little insect in my hand as I came through the front door and told me they were ‘clingy’ and that I should say, ‘ladybird, ladybird, fly away home!’, but I didn’t say it because I didn’t want it to fly away. Upstairs in my room was a plastic tub where I kept my collection of coins. I