The Autism Diaries?! (Part 10)

A new occasional series here at “Sounds Good“

When the 1986 Soccer World Cup was aglow, and everyone was all Maradona this, and Gary Lineker that, I had given up playing football. I swapped out of it to play hockey. I was a grafter at soccer, but a natural at hockey. The ‘86 World Cup lit a fuse though. I not only enjoyed watching the games, and the extreme novelty of waking early to catch little bits of what was left of a match on a 14” bedroom TV, I also started obsessing over the capital cities of the countries involved. There were 24 teams in the main tournament and the school project was to learn the capital cities of each country. But I was like Forrest Gump. One day, I just kept running…It was one thing to know London and Paris and the obvious ones. A slight next level to know Lisbon and Madrid, and then again another level to know Buenos Aires, and Asunción. But once I committed to memory the capital cities of the soccer teams, I was almost sad. Game over. Then I realised it’s a big world out there, so thats when I Gumped it big time (“for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run”). And just kept counting, kept clocking, kept learning. My parents bought me this Encyclopaedia of Geography — it became my favourite bedtime reading (replacing the bedside Guinness Book of Records from 1981). In a quiz team I might still be the one that can pull a Rabat out of the hat.