Brilliance

It’s unlikely that someone like me would not receive a diagnosis along the autistic spectrum very early on now. But this was the 1980s - before Rain Man and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - and awareness was scarce.
I had to teach myself how to be more ”normal”, if that is the way to put it. I watched other children the way David Attenborough watches animals, and I made mental notes on what I needed to do to be like them. I forced myself to make eye contact, and to join in conversations. Those things come naturally to other people, but to me they are conscious and often awkward actions. I still haven’t got the eye contact right - I tend to stare at people very intently.
When I was 18, I decided to go travelling. I joined a volunteer scheme in Lithuania and it was there that I realised I had a special gift for languages. I’d always been good at them at school, but within a few weeks I could speak fluent Lithuanian.
I now speak 10 different languages - I learned Icelandic from scratch in seven days. I don’t look at grammar books or verb tables, I just look at patterns and how words relate to each other. It’s second nature to me.
After I came back from Lithuania, I met my partner Neil - I’ve known that I was gay since I was about 10 - and we moved in together. I then set up a language-teaching website, www.optimnem.co.uk.

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