Train Spotting

We live in a funny age, one in which people often feel compelled to redefine their God-given gifts and abilities as handicaps and disabilities, be that the ongoing trend of well-known actors “sharing” their recent diagnoses for Asperger’s syndrome, caged high-energy kids suffering from ADHD, or anyone who wishes to master something, and aims for perfection, being “a bit autistic”. I suppose that in an age when no one is ever just sad anymore, but only depressed, and every word equals power (give or take); where mediocrity is heralded, and good enough, is, such a redefinition is a great get out when you really are just shit, or retarded. 

I try not to use this kind of thinking about myself or use it on others, my kids, most of all. This hasn’t always been the case, and I spent most of my life seeing myself as a victim of myself, that I had this and that un-spellable affliction. When you go on about being d______c, and how hard it is, then say you make a living as a writer, it might provide the opportunity for self-aggrandisement, but it’s like a one-armed, one-legged swimming winning a triathlon; it’s obviously such a minor issue why point it out? We don’t live in the age of stolen valour, but it’s the opposite, I suppose.

Why this random point of view? I was struck by this mental virus just this afternoon after spending two days drawing tiny illustrations of assisted belay devices for my book “On the Line”. For this small part of the book, which explores the different rope grab mechanisms (eccentric, rocker, lever, etc.), I could have just inserted a high-resolution photo of one device grabbed off the internet. Sure, when reproduced in black and white by the printer, it might look a bit shit, but who cares? This isn’t a coffee table book; it’s more like the manual you get with a washing machine. I could also have just banged out a rudimentary image of a device, by either having Adobe Illustrator automatically trace a photo, or have Photoshop render me a drawing.  If you were in the graphics biz, you’d know I was being a lazy ass, but if not, you’d not even notice. It took Michelangelo four years lying on his back to paint the Sistine Chapel when a skilled painter and decorator could have hung a nice bit of wallpaper in a week. 

But no, something in me not only demanded I take the time to draw the image from scratch, using Adobe Illustrator (a vector drawing program), but that image couldn’t just be a rudimentary illustration but had to be the best I could do. This meant I had to include as many details as possible, including text, even though most of it would be invisible.  It’s a bit like modelling the cloakroom in The Death Star and inserting it into a model you’re going to blow up (at least you, the master builder, knows it’s there somewhere, in the debris on the studio floor). 

So I drew that image, which probably took less than an hour. But when your project has hundreds of such little details, what could take just a day or two (just using photos), ends up taking months and months. All of a sudden, you get it when you watch a documentary about those nerdy guys building Thunderbirds or Moonbases for film and TV. 

With the image done, what next?

Why not draw more? In fact, why not draw them all?

How about you make sure they’re all to scale?

And so, in the end, you have a ten-minute job, that takes a week.

The question I’m left with is not “Am I a bit autistic?”, much of my life has revolved around a recurrent obsessive-compulsive mania around the irrelevant and not easily monetarily convertible, but what is it in the nature of some men (it’s generally men), to be a train spotter, a Lego Taj Mahal builder, a master of patterns and order?