Blob Thing Meets The Sheep of Ted Roocroft in Manchester

Blob Thing speaks:

Well.  It's a new month.  And I'm still writing my blog.  This post will be the sixtieth post in sixty days and while that's not as exciting as ten days ago when I wrote my fiftieth post I'm still quite excited by it.  Tomorrow's post will be exciting for me too and I haven't decided what to write about yet.  I have had so many adventures.  Yesterday I had another one when Winefride and I got taken to experience the Sunday Assembly in Newcastle.  Winefride enjoyed it for a while but got a bit overwhelmed by all the people and noise and she went off to sit in the bag and had to be quiet.  I sat through the whole of it.  I don't know what to call it.  I can't call it a service like I would with a church.  But I don't want to call it a meeting or anything like that.  And an assembly of the Sunday Assembly seems a bit strange too.  Whatever.

It was great and a man talked about science and art and a woman talked about writing and a child read a story and a woman with a ukelele sang a nice song she had just written about finding a lullaby in all kinds of strange places and we all sang some happy songs.  I enjoyed it and we took photos and afterwards Winefride and I got photographed inside a blue star too.  I think my person had a good time too although she was exhausted afterwards and could hardly do a thing for the rest of the day.

But today I want to talk about an adventure I had in the city of Manchester.  That was a great day too.  Winefride hadn't been born then so I was alone with my person and we were having an explore.  We explored a lot that day.  I visited an amazing library, saw Roman ruins, went to a posh bar, walked by a canal, met some industrial sculptures, surprised myself by totally enjoying a place devoted to war, and then things got even more exciting and I got to visit the Blue Peter garden.  What a day.  The day after that I was taught how to talk with barnacles and the day after that I met worms and nearly got eaten by a tiger.  You wouldn't think a small pink soft toy could have so many fabulous adventures but I can because I am lucky.  I keep saying that I'm the luckiest small pink toy in the entire world but that's because it's true.  I think my sister would have liked some of those adventures.  Maybe one day she'll get to share them with me.

Today's adventure follows on from the one I told you about yesterday.  It's to do with sheep.  Yesterday I talked about how Winefride and I got to ride on some beautiful sheep in a town called Wrecsam, which is in another country called Wales.  Today I want to tell you about the time I got to stand on some sheep in Manchester.  I had never met a sheep before and here were three all at once.  Sheep are like buses except I don't think a sheep would be very happy if you tried to get fifty-four people sitting on one, and then added on another fourteen people standing up - or standees as buses call them - and then tried to find a space for a wheelchair user too.  No.  I don't think the sheep would be very happy at all.  I've heard of a cat bus.  I'd love to ride on a cat bus.  But there isn't any such thing as a sheep bus.  Unless there is and I haven't heard of it.  I'd look it up but my person says we need to finish this post and we haven't got enough time to look on Google and that I'd get distracted if we did look up sheep buses and then I'd either spend an hour watching videos of buses or I'd spend an hour watching videos of sheep or I'd be looking up timetables and working out all the different buses we could get in order to go and see lots of sheep.  I'd seen sheep before this adventure.  There were some on the moor I walked across in my epic reservoir walk.  But I had never met one close up.  And now there were three.  Three.  You can imagine how excited I was.

Here I am sitting on one of the sheep.  My person had to leave me sitting there so she could take a picture of me with all the sheep.  I held on very tightly but it was a bit scary in case the sheep suddenly ran off and ran so fast it forgot to stop and ran all the way to the canal and didn't realise in time and couldn't put on its sheep bus brakes quickly enough and it fell into the canal with me still riding on its back.  Whatever would I do then?  So it was a bit scary to be left there.  Things didn't go wrong though and I didn't end up in the canal and all three of the sheep behaved very well indeed.

My person took lots of pictures of me and the sheep.  They were incredibly friendly and didn't mind me riding on them.  I only rode on two of them.  The other one wasn't so friendly.  It wasn't mean or anything like that but it just carried on eating all the time I was there and didn't even look up once.  Obviously it thinks that food is more important than Blob Thing and who am I to argue with the thought processes of a sheep.  I did wonder though why it didn't move.  The food where it was standing didn't look particularly appetising and if you look at that picture you'll see that it wouldn't have taken much effort for the sheep to walk across to where the grass looks much nicer.  If I was a sheep I'd go and eat the nice grass.  Sheep can be strange creatures.

Here I am sitting on the back of the sheep I was sitting on in the first photo.  My person was closer to my by then and if the sheep had run off she could have restrained it or rescued me from its back and I wouldn't have fallen into the canal or got run down by a taxi on Deansgate or arrested by a policeman.  I might show you a picture of some policemen tomorrow.  I might.  Winefride is in it too.

A new photo.  A new sheep.  The next picture is of me sitting on another one of the sheep.  I sat on its head.  I asked if it minded but it didn't say that it did so I decided that sitting on its head would probably be okay.  I also asked it whether it liked being a sheep.  It said that being a sheep was quite a nice life sometimes because it was good to be out on a sunny day and it very much liked the taste of grass.  But sometimes it was a horrible life because it had to stay outside in all weathers and didn't even have a waterproof jacket.  And the rain made its wool quite uncomfortable.  It was also a little worried that one day it might get made into mutton and that my person might eat it.  Poor sheep.  I don't think I would like to be a sheep.  I don't want to have to stand around outside in a hail storm and I certainly don't want my person to eat me.

I've probably talked enough about my sheep adventure.  I had a lot of fun.  Here I am on that sheep's head again.  It's posing for the camera too and smiling as widely as it possibly could.  It said that if I liked I could come and see it again.  I haven't been back though.  I wonder how those sheep are doing and whether they would remember me if I went there again.  It might happen.  I know my person wants to have an all day walk that starts from very near where the sheep live.  Very close to them is the start of a walk that is nearly forty miles long and she wants to do that. I don't think she wants to walk it all in one day though.  She's not fit enough for anything like that.  But she wants to begin.

The sheep and I together make a good photo.  I like having all these photos.  I can look at them and remember how lucky I am and how amazing the past seven months have been.  It was my birthday yesterday.  Seven months old.  And Winefride was ten days old.  Or eleven days if you measure days like a Jew - like Jesus the Jew did in the Bible.  They count inclusively.  The Sunday Assembly is radically inclusive but I don't think they all count inclusively.

One last photo.  My person says that if you google the words in this photo you will be able to find out all kinds of information about my friends the sheep of Manchester.  She's just delayed my post by looking it up for herself.

I have to admit that there are interesting sites.  The best one we've been reading is this one in the link under these words.  It's not the most scholarly and most of it isn't about the sheep but it's the best.  It's written by the grandchild of Ted Roocroft and it talks about how "him and Grandma came over from Ireland in a cowboy wagon and how he defeated a Giant and his pet sabre-tooth tiger to take possession of his small holding."  If there could be any better webpage about Ted Roocroft than that I don't know quite what it would be.

Okay.  That's enough about the sheep.  Eventually I'll tell you about the rest of that day.  It was amazing.  Even though for a little while it was me who was stuck outside in the rain and it rained very hard.  We had an excellent walk and explore and ended it sitting in the sunshine by the water with a drink while a man with a guitar sat on a nearby stage and softly sang his songs.  Bliss.  So that was post number sixty.  I hope I was talking with some measure of sense.  I bet you're glad that I didn't go into long discussions about God or not god today and only mentioned Jesus once.  Today the sheep were more important to me than the Jesus.

I bet my person could write a sermon about that and bring in lots of Bible ideas and her own less than traditional interpretation.  But she can do it on her own blog if she wants.  She can't do it here.  No.  No, no, no.  This is my blog not hers.  She's my typist and it's fun to discuss all these things with her.  But it's my blog.  And she needs to remember that.  She can't forget it because I just made her type that!  She's smiling though, so it's okay.




[1879 words]

Blob Thing Visits Hexagon and Becomes Very Enthusiastic Indeed About It

Blob Thing got completely sidetracked yesterday when chatting with his person and dictating his post for today.  He isn't going to apologise for that.  In the end he felt it was important for him to share his experiences at Northern Pride.  He wanted to talk about a couple of ways he spotted in which the great festival of inclusivity isn't necessarily that inclusive.  There are other ways too that other people have talked about.  It's very sad.  At least Blob thinks it's very sad.  A festival that should ideally seek to be the most inclusive happening that happens during the Newcastle year is in these ways not inclusive.  That's sad.  What makes Blob Thing very sad indeed is that the festival organisers don't seem to be doing much to tackle the problems.  And sometimes the festival has become less inclusive rather than more inclusive.

Blob's person has to agree.  In fact she finds that there are places that don't even outwardly claim inclusivity that are more inclusive than Northern Pride.  There are organisations that are more inclusive too.  Perhaps none of them are perfect.  Perhaps perfection is impossible.  But these organisations are seeking in every way they can to be fully inclusive.  That's not the reason they exist.  It's just a byproduct of the people involved being good people.

The Sunday Assembly is one such group.  Blob was proud to be pictured with their banner yesterday.  Blob's person knows that even the Sunday Assembly members have made mistakes from time to time.  But that is fine.  She doesn't mind.  Because there is no malice intended, they always apologise, always learn from the mistakes, and they work conscientiously to make things even better.

Anyway, Blob is NOT going to get completely sidetracked today.  He'll post again about Pride sometime.  But not today.  And he hasn't got time to get sidetracked anyway - he's off to another couple of Pride events this evening, which he's sure he will enjoy.

Today Blob wants to start telling you of a very exciting day he spent in a place he keeps calling Hexagon.  That isn't its real name and Blob's person desperately wants to type the real name because she went there too and hasn't blogged about it yet and her blog will use the proper name of the place.  But Blob Thing isn't letting his person call it anything other than Hexagon.  Not on his blog.

He likes the name Hexagon.  It's a good name for a place.  More places should be called Hexagon or be named after other shapes, flat ones and maybe even after three-dimensional ones.  He'd love to see towns called Cuboid, Pyramid, Dodecahedron and Cylinder.  If there are higher dimensional town names that would be even more exciting.  Wouldn't it be absolutely wonderful to live in the town of Hypercube or perhaps even the grand capital city of Tesseract?

Blob Thing thinks so.

If he ruled the world perhaps he would change some place names to shapes.  Fleetwood could become Square.  Sydney could become Oblong.  The Potteries towns could be known as the Mandelbrot Set and be renamed after different fractal forms.  Manchester, where he was born, could be Hypercube and Newcastle, the place of his house, could be Tesseract.  Or perhaps the other way round.  But he would definitely have to move the capital city to one of them.  As world ruler that would be a very sound move.  Blob on his Tesseract throne dishing out justice, love and inclusion.  He's not sure how having a throne would be strictly in accord with his democratic beliefs but since it's just a fantasy that he knows will never happen he isn't going to worry too much about that.

Anyway.  Hexagon.

Blob Thing was very excited to be going on another trip.  And this time a trip to somewhere with a good name.  Hexagon. Hexagon.  Hexagon.  Hexagon.

Blob's person would like to apologise for the way that paragraph went.  The end of it can't have been very interesting for Blob's readers.  Blob's person could have typed the word dozens and dozens of times were she just to type everything Blob says rather than discussing the words a bit during the typing process.

Blob is just sitting there at this moment and he keeps saying Hexagon.  Over and over again.  Mostly slowly and in a monotone.  Hexxxxxxxx  Aaaaaaaaaa Gonnnnnnnn.  But sometimes he's throwing in a few quick Hexagons in a high voice or he is singing the word slowly and playing with the sound of it.  Blob's person has told him that he's meant to be dictating his blog post to her but he's enjoying the word immensely and is pretty much lost in a world of his own.

Sometimes Blob can be very stereotypically autistic.  But that's okay.  He's allowed to be who he is and nobody is going to seek to try to change him into someone else or use well-meaning but ultimately cruel techniques to try to get him to be less autistic.  Nobody will ever say that Blob should be cured.  Nobody will ever be allowed to say that he is less than anyone else because he is autistic.  Nobody.  Ever.

And now Blob has changed his repetition.  Tesseract.  Hexagon.  Hypercube.  Tesseract.  Hexagon.  Hypercube.  It's pretty cute to listen to the way he is speaking and singing the words.  You would probably laugh if you heard him and it has to be said that autism can be quite funny.  It's very hard work.  But it can be staggeringly amazing.  And sometimes it can be funny too.  As long as the laughter is in the right spirit then laughing about it is good.  It's the old adage - laugh with the person, not at the person.

Blob Thing is enjoying himself and is getting very bouncy about the words.  He'll stop soon.  He has to really because he is wanting to accompany his person to the Pride events soon.  Blob really is pretty marvellous.  His person loves him a lot and it brings her such joy when she sees how happy Blob can be, whether it's through a word, through the feel of the wind, or through the way he spends time with his friends.  Maybe one of the brilliant parts of autism is that there is often a deeper appreciation of joy, of wonder, and of the intense and sometimes and overwhelming intensity in something so little.  It's just a word.  It's just some dust in the air.  It's just the smoke from an incense stick.

Blob is happy.  His smile is so wide.  Autism doesn't make him less.  It makes him different.  His struggles are different from that of a neurotypical person.  And so are his joys.

Sorry about that.  Blob was wanting to write about Hexagon today.  He'll have to do it tomorrow because his digression into inclusivity, his digression into place names, and his total concentration on the shape words mean that together we have written a lot and we haven't even reached the first of his Hexagon adventures - which involves a prison and a punishment.

That will have to wait yet another day.  Please forgive Blob and his person.  They will try again tomorrow.


[1201 words]

Note:

It's fortunate (or unfortunate) that Blob Think doesn't yet know about hexaflexagons.  His person says it's very unfortunate and he should learn of hexaflex joy.