Tag: Joely Colmer

Autism Events III: Saturday in London Part 1

The first of several posts about the Anna Kennedy Autism Expo.

INTRODUCTION

Greetings from a cold, snowy King’s Lynn. Welcome to the third in this mini-series of Autism Events posts, following on from:

  1. Autism Events I: Norwich
  2. Autism Events II: Norwich part 2

Most of this post covers events from a week ago yesterday, but before I get into the main body of it there is on little thing I need to attend to first:

AN AMENDMENT AND AN APOLOGY

For those of you who saw the original version of Autism Events II, you will notice should you revisit it that I have removed many of Amanda Hind’s slides from it. This was at her specific request, on the course of a very friendly twitter exchange. I have never previously been asked to remove photographs of slides from a post, but I fully acknowledge Amanda’s right to make the request, and I acted on it very promptly. This is by way of both explaining why I edited that post after it had been up for a while and apologizing in this blog for publishing more of Amanda’s slides than she was happy to see published.

THE ANNA KENNEDY AUTISM EXPO – GETTING THERE

The event was taking place at Brunel University’s Eastern Gateway building in Uxbridge. This meant getting a train and changing at King’s Cross. The Metropolitan line route from King’s Cross to Uxbridge is more direct than that of the Piccadilly line, and the Metropolitan line platforms take less long to get to from the railway line, so I opted for that route. I also decided that even though it would almost certainly mean not being there for the very start of the event that I would get the 6:54 rather than the 5:54 from King’s Lynn. I will be covering the Metropolitan line element of the journey in detail on my London transport themed website, but here are some photos from the journey…

Display board
On the platofrm – note that mine is the second train due in.
Chesham train I
The chesham train – doors open.
Concertina section of articulated stock
The new stock operating on the Circle, District, Hammersmth & Cty and Metropolitan lines is articulated in the manner of Swedish Tunnelbana stock rather than using old-fashioned bogie couplings.
Route Map KCSP II
The route map at King’s Cross St Pancras
Metropolitan line
The Metropolitan line route map on the train.
Jubilee line train
A Jubilee line train (from just before Finchley Road to just after Wembley Park the Jubilee and Metropolitan lines run side by side)
Crossing Kilburn High Road
Crossing Kilburn High Road.
Piccadilly line train
A Piccadilly line train (from Rayners Lane to Uxbridge the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines run in tandem).
Uxbridge II
A roundel at Uxbridge station.
Uxbridge Clock
The clock at Uxbridge station.
Stained glass, Uxbridge
Stained glass windows at Uxbridge station.
Station frontage, Uxbridge
The outside frontage of the station

 

Uxbridge Station
The full surface building.

The walk from Uxbridge Station to the venue was supposed to take about 25 minutes, but I went the wrong way at first, so it took me a bit longer than that. I arrived at the venue a bit late, but soon got stuck into visiting all the stalls, to see what people were doing and to tell people about myself and NAS West Norfolk. I will now share a few thoughts and photos from a couple of those stalls.

GREEN BOARD GAME COMPANY

I spoke to two of the people from this company, which creates games aimed specifically at helping SEND children, including autistic children. I got to sample a couple of the games as well – they look very good to me. Please note that the title of this section is formatted as a link to their homepage. 

Toy corner I
Some of the products.
Shaperise
This is a viciously hard game – you have 30 seconds to look at the shape and memorise it and you then have to use the blocks to construct it.
Corner'd
This is tough in the early stages, but as more spaces are filled it gets easier to place your pieces.
Qbitz
This one can be played in two ways. Either require the players to memorise the shape they will be building or leave it on display. You have to place as many blocks as you can without rotating them, then when no more can be used towards making the shape pick the unused blocks up and roll them like dice to reveal new faces, and so on until you have completed the shape (the completed shape here, using light blue blocks was the work of yours truly.

JOELY COLMER

Joely Colmer is an autistic woman whose website I linked to via the title of ths section. As well as her website she is the author of a book about her experiences, “Aspergerworld: My Fairy Jam Jar”. 

SOME PHOTOS FROM THE VENUE

I will end this post with some of the photographs I took of general stuff at the venue:

AKOGlobe1628 Petition of Right

light four 1
These last two poctures are of a boat that hangs from the ceiling of that building.
light four two
It is of the type referred to in rowing circles as a ‘light four’ (there are two types of four person rowing boats, the light as seen here, and the ‘tub four’).