The blind need a helping hand, but a disability can be a gift

                                                                                                                           A maidenhair tree, or ginkgo biloba

A recent article in the Spectator[1] had a graph illustrating the 1 in 4 students at Cambridge University who have “disabilities”. I have been visiting universities such as Tsinghua and Jiao Tong in China for 25 years, and they have a different focus. They are searching for excellence, not excuses.

Of course, these days it is fashionable to have a disability. My daughter diagnosed me with “adult ADHD”, and I have been living off that for the last few years. My line at dinner parties is “I take amphetamines…”, which, paradoxically, help me to concentrate. Of course, it is not as good as my dad’s line, which he was a master at using to shock and unnerve people: “When I was in prison…”, not mentioning the fact that the prison he was talking about was the infamous Gestapo Fresnes prison in Paris in WWII[2].

Although some may think I am a babbling idiot with or without medicine, I think it would have helped me had I had Vyvanse or Ritalin earlier in life. But let me tell you about yesterday morning. Now, luckily, my ADHD is not so bad that I have become a felon or a total write-off. However, for the hour or so before I took my pill, I had an experience that was so good I never want to try illegal drugs. It was transformative, mind-expanding and thoroughly enjoyable. And it all seemed to happen at once, yet it was spread over an hour or so.

Sitting on the pot for a morning pee, I heard the fan of the furnace stirring below; warm air blowing on my naked toes. It must be cold outside. Perhaps there had been a frost? It was a sound that I seldom heard and recognized. It was reassuring. The intense song of the furnace working hard for me! Its message of luxury and of my easy life continued in my head as I went downstairs.

I fed the cats. It was after 7:45 am; the sun was up. Overnight, the cold had turned the gingkoes’ leaves facing the retreating sun of shorter days a glorious gold. They were bathed in bleaching brilliance. Gold, gold, golden leaves, all arrayed in the still air, with a clear blue sky behind! As Rumi said, nature is the root of religion. What an ecstasy of colour! Thank God for those ancient Buddhist monks in the sharp-pointed Dalou Mountains for saving them!

I turned on my laptop, and Janine Jansen is shredding her violin with Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. The music builds and builds, haunting, repeating, utterly divine! The pain, the poignancy – and to think he wrote this after his desperately sad marriage to hide his homosexuality, fleeing to Switzerland – the torture of his soul! – and then I flee in my mind back to the music, with its themes that repeat, are inverted, expanded, contracted, all modulated into different keys[3] – in other words – the composition itself is alive in my head along with empathy for the torture of the great artist. Wow!

Then the corner of my eye caught a movement, and I saw gentle Iphigenia the cat sitting looking out of the window at the world, with the sun making a stunning halo reflecting off individual hairs and whiskers…then, it seemed, at the same time, I looked down at the desk, (seeking to avoid the work I had to do) and I saw a post card from a dear friend of a Chinese still life. The artist drew only a few leaves and a few flowers on a small branch, with a round parrotbill bird looking at the viewer…and of course the parrotbill has that lovely song of short, happy chirps! Such a delightful microcosm of the world beautifully captured with so few strokes of colour! What an experience! Please give me more ADHD!  The endorphins flood: no intoxicants needed!

And there are no side effects, no hangover.  The time passes, and a gradual return to normality descends – I watch my neighbour return from a walk with his dog, bending down to pick up a warm turd his faithful and loyal pet painfully – from the look on the dog’s face – squeezed out on my lawn.

AI is not going to help. Cheating or theft is not going to help. If you are immobile, a wheelchair can help, but, remember we are ALL mortal. We need to maximize what we can do with what we have, striving for excellence through hard work – and thoroughly enjoy the effort of what we can do. I think, over the years, I have frightened girls who could not understand intense emotions.

Nigel Scotchmer, clicked

Contributed by Nigel Scotchmer

[1] David Butterfield, Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised. 10/26/24

[2] Since this The Ironist, I can ironically point out that dad was rescued from the Gestapo by a Luftwaffe officer from Wiesbaden who travelled to Paris to ensure he was transferred to a proper POW camp – and lived.

[3] As the artist Charlotte Staples says.