Dyslexia, it's not always terrible (unless you are Matthew Offord in this blog)

This blog was nearly a scandalous expose of Hendon Tory Parliamentary Candidate Matthew Offord and his romps with his amorous aunty ! Being dyslexic means that sometimes when I read things, my brain filters the information in a rather interesting way, chucking out the bits that don't interest me and highlighting the bits that do, turning the mundane into the salacious. Sometimes this has results which crack me up when I reread the sentence and the brain finally assembles the words in the right order.

A classic example was today when I looked at Matthew Offords blog on the Hendon Times. I check this every day in the hope of finding inspiration for my blog. Today I nearly fell off my chair. The title was :-

My struggle with Sexy Auntie

Bingo, I thought. This is definately worth a good blog. Within a millionth of a second I'd clicked on the blog. I read the whole thing with ever increasing puzzlement. Here I was looking for some salacious confessions from our Mattie and all I got was a rather dry blog about calculating longitudes (no not that type of longitude). I eventually decided that the crafty old sausage had done that typical News of the World trick and put up a salacious headline to lure me in. Then the penny dropped. In my excitement, I'd not actually properly read the title. There it was "Stuggling with a sextant". He hadn't conned me at all. My dyslexic, mixed up brain had conned me.

For those of you who aren't dyslexic and can read a sentence from start to finish, this is probably incomprehensible. Let me explain (roughly) how my brain works (this is sort of how it was explained to me). My brain starts reading a sentence at the end or half way through. It is drawn to words I like or can associate with. Once it has decided what they are it can be rather hard to change that impression. Other words in the sentence just get ignored (often the "not's", "what's" and "where's"). To make sense of it, then extra words get randomly inserted. To make matters even worse, it's not too hot at spelling. So with Matthew's sentence, I read "ant", I know what an Ant is. Then I read "Sex". Now my brain filter kicks in. Matthew probably doesn't have sex with ants. Ok so I've misspelled ant - it's Aunt (for the avoidance of doubt, I've not had sex with any of mine, honest guv). Then I ignore the other bits, till I get to "Struggle". Yep, that works Matthew has struggled with this and he wants to confess his sins to the population of Barnet. Job Done. All of this takes about a millisecond. As it is quite an interesting concept for me it becomes fixed. On to the main story.

Anyway, I have this little mental challenge about 10,000 times a day. It meant I didn't read a book till I was about 12. Partly this was because kids learn to read books have short sentences. The reason I saw that Matthew hadn't said what I thought was because as I read the article, I gained context. Having not read a book till I was 12, the first one I read was "1984" by George Orwell. I found I could read, if the subject matter was stimulating enough.

I often read ignorant comments by commentators who don't understand dyslexia, complaining that dyslexics get longer to do exams. If you had to read every question 3 times, to try and ensure that you hadn't missed a not or a what, you'd probably understand it a bit better. I used to drive my parents completely insane as a youngster. They'd send me down the road with a list saying

Banana's
Milk
Butter
Bread

And I'd return with

Banana's
Sardines
gherkins

or something. They'd show me the list and scream "are you stupid or are you just trying to wind us up". I'd look at the list and be completely flumoxed. I'd looked at it and it had said something completely different.

The worst humiliation was when I was asked to read at Sunday mass once. I pleaded with my folks to say no, but they were adamant. I stood up, read the reading and thought I'd done really well. Everyone was rapt with attention. When I finished and went back to my seat my Father told me I was "for it" when I got home. I'd stood up and a completely incomprehensible stream of random words had spouted forth, delivered with zeal and panashe. I hadn't even realised.

Mind you, it has it's upside. I'll often get cracked up whilst reading the paper. The most mundane story suddenly becomes a killer "carry on" style script (yup, you've guessed how my brain works). I see things there that no one else in the world sees. Things like Matthew Offords sexy Auntie !

Despite my problems with dyslexia, I've done pretty well so far. If you are a parent or carer and your child displays any of the tendencies I've described in their reading, please get them checked out. Dyslexia does not = stupidity and the younger you learn "coping strategies" the better. I got to grips with it (most of the time) aged 13/14 and I went from bottom of the class to slightly above average. If I'd learned to cope age 7-8, I might actually be reasonably intelligent now. I've tried to explain the way this works to people before (usually after a couple of pints) and they glaze over. Strangely it all makes perfect sense to me.

Oh and a couple of little things here before I go. Apologies to Matthew Offord for dragging him into my little blog here, through no fault of his own, it's just that his blog title perfectly illustrates the way dyslexia works for me. I hope he sees the funny side of it. His blog isn't really quite as dry and dull as I made out, but it wasn't what I was expecting on this occasion.