Michael Blastland - Joe: The Only Boy in the World

A remarkably readable and compelling book, offering much of value, at many levels. Michael Blastland, an erudite, incisive, thoughtful and articulate BBC producer, has provided us with an entertaining and educational account of life with Joe, his ten-year-old prototypical, severely autistic son. Read it. Enjoy it. Learn from it. It will haunt you. Bernard Rimland, PhD, director of the Autism Research Institute, founder of the Autism Society of America, technical consultant for Rain Man

A moving story Blastland has performed a remarkable service in baring his family life for us. Simon Baron-Cohen, Guardian

Deeply personal and moving Blastlands beautifully written book offers us a glimpse of the torments endured by the growing number of children born with their cerebral pathways wrongly wired. Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

From this careful, serious book emerges a man with a quick wit and far-seeing eye for what makes life so peculiar [Joe] stands out as a work of rare enlightenment Melissa Katsoulis, Sunday Telegraph

[Blastlands] honesty is in keeping with a compelling, brave and highly readable book that never verges on the sentimental. Julie Wheelwright, Independent

This is one of the best books on autism ever written In a vividly engaging style, Michael Blastland writes about his experiences not only from a personal perspective, but also a sound scientific one. Nobody has come closer to describing the awesome elemental force of autism, and the breath-taking innocence of the autistic child. If you want to know what classic autism is like, close-up and personal and how autism can provide deep philosophical insights about your own consciousness then read this book. Uta Frith, PhD, deputy director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London and author of Autism: Explaining the Enigma

Blastland is likeably honest Julie Myerson, Daily Telegraph

If you read just one book about an autistic child this year, you would do well to make it this one. David Newnham, Times Educational Supplement

Joe is a book that deserves to be read. It will speak loudly not just to those interested in autism, but to anyone who is fascinated by the full range of what it means to be human. Tim Hall, Catholic Herald

No book has moved me more without sentimentality, or taught me more without didacticism, or entranced me more without obvious artifice. This is a sad, happy, harrowing, hopeful story, in which Michael Blastland a father achieving understanding of his sons autism speaks with stunning objectivity, but never sacrifices passion. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, and author of So You Think Youre Human and Pathfinders

MICHAEL BLASTLAND lives in a small village in Hertfordshire, often with his daughter Cait, less often and more noisily with his son Joe. A journalist all his professional life, he started on weekly newspapers before moving to the BBC where he makes programmes for Radio 4, including Analysis and More or Less.

The only boy in the world

MICHAEL BLASTLAND

This paperback edition published in 2007

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
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Copyright Michael Blastland, 2006, 2007

S.O.S. Words & Music by Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus & Stig Anderson
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Mamma Mia Words & Music by Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus & Stig Anderson
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-10 1 86197 944 4
ISBN-13 978 1 86197 944 5

For Joe and Cait

This book is about a boy called Joe. Hes ten and hes my son. Its a story of strange happenings and human riddles, it invites fantastical speculation and argues something brazen, preposterous even: that until you know Joes unusual life, you wont fully understand your own.

Joe is a brown-haired, freckle-faced imp struck with an unusual variety of mental disability that leaves him at once vulnerable, charming and tyrannical. He digs his nails into your deepest sensibilities much as he digs them under your skin, wrenches you this way and that, and then, reaching his hand into yours or folding like a deckchair into a clatter of laughter, disarms you with innocence.

Ostensibly, he has little to say to the rest of us. He shares few of our pleasures, has many perplexing eccentricities and isnt someone youd instinctively turn to for enlightenment. Not quite the philosopher king, then. Joe is packed with strange urges and passions, missing many normal motivations and unable to make sense of the world in ways the rest of us take for granted an odd one, to be sure. By and large such oddness is kept out of sight, tucked away in special schools or behind the shy doors of suburban semis where all too often families become isolated by love and the duty of care; that or the simple awkwardness of getting out and about with strangeness in tow.

Joe is now in a special school too, brought here into public view. I make no apology for throwing so much attention at him because with luck the result will be better understanding in two directions: ours of him, and ours of ourselves. Sadly, it might never run in the obvious third direction: quite probably he will never understand other people.

He started school in late August 2004. A small part of what follows is an account of the turbulent months surrounding that event. More riotously, the book relates some of the many moving and absurd episodes in his life that led us to the borders of madness, before which we never could have let him go; more recklessly, it uses my sons history to investigate what makes the rest of us tick.

Joe was born with a perfect knot in his umbilical cord. Somehow, turning somersaults in the womb, he threaded himself through a loop in his own lifeline. There was a time when we thought this might explain his disability, but in all likelihood the knot had nothing to do with it, for theres no damage to Joes brain of the kind that shows up in a scan as a result of oxygen starvation; no palsy. The only, and I have to say unconvincing, explanation was that his thoughts misfire owing to an entirely different, metabolic, cause something to do with two of the amino acids that help make up the chemical soup in his brain. Nowadays he lives with the label autistic: broad, ill-defined, ill-fitting and unexplained, a label thats best put aside before getting to know him. But for me at least, and perhaps others who know his story, the loop in the cord became a metaphor: it framed a passage for Joe into an altogether alien existence that is magical, mysterious and infuriating in equal measure. When he tumbled into that oblique version of life, it was through the looking glass, through the doors of an enchanted wardrobe, while behind him the exit shut tight.