Raymond Babbitt walks the dog

When I was a child I took autistic savantry to a new level, in the process managing to make Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man look like Hercule Poirot on ProPlus. I also had an almost pathological aversion to hard work. This can be a deeply dangerous combination.

I was on the run from paid work and I managed to remain a fugitive, very effectively I might add, for 21 blissful years. Not for me the joys of pounding the streets at 6 in the morning delivering copies of the Thatcherite Pravda to my sleepy suburban neighbours. Not for me the dubious delights of going to Waitrose, donning a wanky white hat and handling some elderly gentleman’s salami over the cold meat counter. No, the closest I came to actual work as a kid was walking the dog.

Every day after school I would get the lead and take the dog off to the nearby park – usually hooked up to a Walkman (I once managed to listen to The Songs of Leonard Cohen non-stop for about 6 months when I was about 13. Explains a lot, doesn’t it.) and completely in a world of my own. That sentence makes it sound like my dog was listening to the Walkman, doesn’t it? I can assure you it wasn’t. Anyway, this was usually a lovely relaxing trip after school and more crucially it meant I got paid pocket money every week. Those Leonard Cohen cassettes didn’t buy themselves, after all.

Except one day I lost the dog.

I was walking round the lake when I realised I had no idea where she was. Said lake was complete with seedy-looking twitching fisherman, but my family thought nothing of sending me there every day. It’s easy to forget this, but the 80s were a more innocent time. Back then nobody as much as blinked at ads with slogans like Kids Will Do Anything For Dairylea or A Finger Of Fudge Is Just Enough To Give Your Kids A Treat. Nowadays the red tops would scream VILE PAEDO SMEARS COCK WITH DAIRYLEA IN SICK KIDDY FIDDLING HONEY TRAP. More to the point, paedophiles may be sick but they’re not desperate. The clothes my mother picked for me kept me safe from molestation – by either sex – until well after I went to university.

Where was I? Oh, that’s right – the dog. So about half an hour into my daily constitutional I realised the dog was nowhere to be seen. I panicked. I looked everywhere. I retraced my steps. I even called out the dog’s name at the top of my voice. Being a middle class family with aspirations, our dog was called “Freya”. Yes, Freya. Fortunately, back then, I was far too autistic to realise just how embarrassing yelling “Freya! Freya!” over and over again in front of a bunch of seedy old fisherman actually is. No wonder they didn’t want to molest me.

Eventually I admitted defeat and sprinted back to the house in a state of extreme and agitated anxiety.

“I’ve lost the dog! I looked everywhere. I can’t find her. What do we do?” I breathlessly explained to my mother.

“She’s in the study, where you left her. An hour ago.” came the reply.

Even now I’m not quite sure how I managed to walk round the park for 30 minutes, empty lead dangling uselessly from one hand, without realising that I had forgotten perhaps the single most vital component of the activity known as “walking the dog”. What a moid I must have seemed to passers by.

The reason I’m telling you this story today is that Iain and I were at Gemma’s desk earlier today in the office when we spotted Gemma’s boss’ to do list at the desk next to her. DIESEL, it proudly declared. Along with PHONE THE GARAGE. All plausible enough. But then, at the bottom, in particularly large letters it said FETCH [Gemma’s boss’ 2 year old daughter]. Gemma and Iain were especially tickled by this. What kind of idiot needs to be reminded to pick up his own daughter? they wanted to know. To which the answer, as it turns out, appears to be Err… an idiot like me.

Much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I’m afraid the dog walking incident was not an isolated one. One day we were having spaghetti bolognese for tea and I was given the vitally important job of grating the cheese. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the cheese grater to work. Clearly it was blunt or defective in some way. As my frustration mounted I summoned my mother to the kitchen to ask her to explain the shoddy tools she had given me.

“You’ve got it upside down.” she said with a tone of indulgent despair.

I was 17 at the time. I’m told this kind of thing can be very character forming.