You Don't Have a Scratch on You...

Dear Juliet

Well, I'm not chronologically thirty-five, of course. Born 4th September 1964 in Wolverhampton, 5.10 am (Mum had a willow pattern plate made), diagnosed with autism 2002 and you probably know bits of the rest.

But then there's this other thing.

Twice in my life, I've seen or read something which really struck a chord. The first time was when I read an article about Asperger's syndrome in 2001

And the second was when I watched Unbreakable.

The simple concept, explained here by Samuel L. Jackson, is that if there are people who are always getting bugs, always down at the doctors', always moaning on about no' being well at one end of the spectrum, couldn't there be other people at the other end of the spectrum who don't get ill, who don't get hurt, and the thing is, they wouldn't even know it...

Not at first, anyway.

I hardly ever get ill. I used to walk into my old Glasgow boxing gym in my forties, not bother to warm up and start working out. I never even pulled a muscle. There's even a reference to it in Dear Miss Landau:

A few days before I left Glasgow, I’d been at the Autism Resource Centre in Maryhill on another errand and fallen into conversation with the Information Officer.

As well as being really pleased about it, I had always been curious as to why my hair had never greyed, my face remained relatively unlined and why (despite a two year layoff) my body had responded to the brutal workouts I put it through at the Kelvin like that of a 28-year-old. The day after my first gym session I’d had an early morning meeting with Jim at the NAS in Hope Street. Not unreasonably, I had expected to turn up exhausted, crocked and in agony.

In fact, despite scarcely bothering to warm up and putting my hands into hundreds of head-on collisions with heavy bags, I woke up with one little twinge, just one, in my right shoulder.

“We’ve got a lot of young-looking people round here,” the Information Officer said. “Seems a lot of people on the spectrum also have the Peter Pan gene.”

(Dear Miss Landau, p. 130)

Obviously, start talking about it too often and everyone will start thinking you're a nut job. So I didn't. I filed it away under X-file and decided, perhaps, to contact some Institutes of Aging if I got to sixty-five and was still bouncing around like a forty-year-old complete with a full head of hair.

Then, in 2007, I drove up north for a meeting in Glenfinnan.

I hit a stag at 58 mph in Glencoe. The car went off the road, rolled twice and ended up on its roof. It might have been near that location later used in Skyfall. There were a couple of moments of real fear that it might explode with me in it, but it was a diesel. I turned off the engine, turned off the lights and even had the presence of mind to get the insurance documents out of the glove compartment.

I walked up onto the main road, the A82.

And there wasn't a single scratch on me. I don't dispute for one second that modern cars have very good safety features, but for a moment I thought, my God, could it actually be true?

Fast forward to 2024, and they find cancerous cells on a melanoma excised from my lower back. It's not the most pleasant experience to walk into a doctor's surgery and hear that, but I actually managed to say, "give it to me straight, doc," and very seriously (though it may sound like a joke), I'd just been to Point Lobos and seen the Book at Cambridge University Library. If both those experiences had been TV movies, I could almost see the end credits coming down.

So if I was checking out, I wasn't too unhappy about it. I wasn't exactly over the moon, no, but I'd seen and done enough things that I wasn't quite as upset as you might think. A bit like Roy Batty's eulogy at the end of Blade Runner.

In fact, talking of things I've seen that you wouldn't believe, that first sight of you on Sunset Boulevard will stay with me for the rest of my life. 

I had to have a relatively minor operation to take two lymph nodes out. I said to the surgeon beforehand that he could take a bit more flesh if he wanted just to be sure he got everything. I didn't mind a livid scar down my back (who was there to see it?) and we ended up joking about that laser scene in Goldfinger!

There was no one to pick me up the morning after, so I was quite proud of the fact I actually walked out of the hospital under my own power. Even checked in at work before I went home.

I avoided immunotherapy, had to take a course of powerful pills and still have to go to hospital in Wolverhampton once a month to have my blood tested.

And here's where it gets weird.

My doctor kept telling me I was fabulous. Nice to hear, but what did he mean?

I asked him in more detail.

"If you didn't know the age of the person who'd given you this blood," I said, "how old do you think that person would be?"

"Thirty-five," he said.

That was my doctor's clinical opinion. I was pretty rocked. I made him repeat it, wandered round the hospital in mild shock and interrogated AI. It seems I may have benefited from a perfect storm of very tough north east of Scotland genes inherited from my mother, tremendous physical work in gyms and Australia, the "Peter Pan" gene and, luckily enough, the pills I'm on which clear out old and aged cells from my body. So it seems I may be a physical super-ager.

Instead of spending most of the last year bald and exhausted due to the pills, my hair stayed strong and I even grew it out a bit, and apart from a rocky first few weeks (let's just say I didn't stray too far from the loo), I've had no side effects.

I looked up a few Institutes of Aging, and once I'm through the course of pills I might give them a ring.

So that's where I am at the moment.

Funnily enough, that line in Sunlit City might seem literary and elegiac, but at the time it was more a simple statement of physical fact:

I wait for a while. I no longer feel tired or weary. Those aches and pains are the province of other, older men; and I am young again, as I was before.

(Dear Miss Landau, p. 175)

There are more things in heaven and earth...