Free Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet Page B

them to be taken away to the local tip.
    A short time afterwards came an obsessive interest in collecting leaflets, of all different sizes. They were frequently pushed through our letterbox with the local newspaper or the morning’s post and I was fascinated by their shiny feel and symmetrical shape (it didn’t matter what was being advertised – the text was of no interest to me). My parents were quick to complain of the precariously stacked piles that accumulated in every drawer and on every cupboard shelf in the house, especially as they poured out onto the floor every time a cupboard door was opened. As with the conkers, my leaflet mania gradually faded over time, much to my parents’ relief.
    When my behaviour was good I was rewarded with pocket money. For example, if there were leaflets on the floor I was asked to pick them up and put them back in the drawer. In return, my parents gave me small value coins, lots of them, because they knew how much I loved circles. I spent hours painstakingly stacking the coins, one atop another, until they resembled shining, trembling towers each up to several feet in height. My mother always asked for lots of small change at the shops she went to, so that I always had a ready supply of coins for my towers. Sometimes I would build several piles of equal height around me in the shape of a circle and sit in the middle, surrounded on all sides by them, feeling calm and secure inside.
    When the Olympic Games came to Seoul in South Korea in September 1988, the many different sights and sounds on the television screen, unlike anything I had seen before, riveted me. With 8,465 participants from 159 countries it was the largest games in history. There were so many extraordinary visuals: of the swimmers pulling at the glistening, foamy water, their goggled heads bobbing rhythmically up and down with every stroke; the sprinters racing down the lanes, their brown, sinewy arms and legs reduced to a blur; gymnasts springing and twisting and somersaulting in the air. I was engrossed by the television Olympic coverage and watched it as much as I could from the living room, no matter the sport or event.
    It was a piece of good fortune when my teacher asked the class to write out an assignment based on the Games in Seoul. I spent the next week cutting and gluing hundreds of photos of the athletes and events from newspapers and magazines onto coloured cardboard sheets, my father helping me with the scissors. The choice of how to organise the different cuttings was made by a logic that was entirely visual: athletes dressed in red were pasted onto one sheet, those in yellow were put on another, those in white on a third, and so on. On smaller sheets of lined paper I wrote out in my best handwriting a long list of the names of all the countries I found mentioned in the newspapers with participants in the Games. I also wrote a list of all the different events, including Taekwondo – Korea’s national sport – and table tennis, which made its Olympic debut in Seoul. There were also lists of statistics and scores, including event points, race times, records broken and medals won. In the end, there were so many sheets of cuttings and written pages that my father had to hole-punch each one and tie them together with string. On the front cover I drew a picture of the Olympic rings in their colours of blue, yellow, black, green and red. My teacher gave me top marks for the amount of time and effort I had put into the project.
    Reading about the many different countries represented at the Olympic Games made me want to learn more about them. I remember borrowing one book from the library that was about different languages from around the world. Inside was a description and illustration of the ancient Phoenician alphabet. It dates from around 1000 BC and is thought to have led to the formation of many of the alphabet systems of the modern world, including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Cyrillic. Like Arabic and