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

the sack and egg and spoon races, and the combination of crowds and noise (and quite often summer heat) was too much for me. My parents often allowed me to stay at home rather than risk me having a meltdown. If I felt overwhelmed by a situation I could go very red in the face and hit the side of my head very hard until it hurt a lot. I would feel such a sense of tension within me that I just had to do something, anything, to let it out.
    This happened once during a science lesson where Mr Thraves had helped one of the pupils to prepare an experiment involving a ball of play-dough suspended on a piece of string. I was fascinated by this unusual sight and – unaware that it was part of an ongoing experiment – walked over to it and started to touch and pull the dough with my fingers. At this point my teacher became annoyed that I had interfered for no reason (at least as he understood it) and told me off, but I had no idea why he was angry with me and became very confused and upset. I ran from the class, slamming the door behind me with such force that the glass window shattered into pieces. I can still remember hearing the gasps of the children behind me as I ran from the room. When I got home my parents explained to me that I had to try very hard not to react in such a way again. They had to pay a visit to the headmaster, write a letter of apology and agree to pay for the cost of replacing the broken window.
    One idea my parents had to help me cope better with my emotions was to teach me how to skip rope. They hoped it would improve my coordination skills and encourage me to spend more time outdoors, outside my room. Though it took some getting used to, I was soon able to skip for long periods of time during which I felt a lot better and calmer within myself. As I skipped I would count each turn and visualise the number’s shape and texture as I imagined it to be.
    I often found it confusing when we were given arithmetic worksheets in class with the different numbers printed identically in black. To me, it seemed that the sheets were covered in errors. I couldn’t figure out, for example, why eight was not larger than six, or why nine wasn’t printed in blue instead of black. I theorised that the school had printed too many nines in their previous worksheets and had run out of the right colour ink. When I wrote my answers on the paper the teacher complained that my writing was too uneven and messy. I was told to write every number the same as the others. I didn’t like having to write the numbers down wrong. None of the other children seemed to mind. It was only in my teens that I realised that my experience of numbers was very different to that of the other children.
    I always completed all my sums well ahead of the other children in the class. Over time, I had progressed, literally, textbooks ahead of everyone else. After finishing, I was asked to sit at my desk and to be quiet so as not to disturb the others while they did their work. I would put my head in my hands and think about numbers. Sometimes while absorbed in my thoughts I would hum softly to myself without realising I was doing so until the teacher came up to my desk, when I would realise and stop.
    To fill the time I created my own codes, substituting letters for numbers, so for example: ‘24 1 79 5 3 62’ would encrypt the word ‘Daniel’. Here, I paired the letters of the alphabet: (ab), (cd), (ef), (gh), (ij), etc. and gave each pair a number from 1–13: (ab)=1, (cd)=2, (ef)=3, (gh)=4, (ij)=5, etc. Then it was only necessary to distinguish between each letter in the pair. I did this by adding a random number if I wanted the second letter in each pair, otherwise I would simply write the number that corresponded with the pair in which the letter was in. So ‘24’ meant the second letter in the second pair, ‘d’, while ‘1’ stood for the first letter in the first letter pair, ‘a’.
    Having first asked the permission of the teacher, I often