So, first you’ve got my favourite book, The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov.

I think it’s the best book I’ve ever read. My dad and I never agree on books, and he came up the stairs one day in about 1990 and he had this book in his hand and he said: ‘I’ve just finished reading this and I think this may be the best book I’ve ever read and I have a funny feeling that you and I are going to agree on this one.’ So, he gave it to me and, like a lot of Russian, or in this case Ukrainian, novels, the first 30 pages are heavy going but it’s the only book I’ve reread several times. Beyond that, in terms of autism, it’s the book that inspired the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and it’s all about compassion for yourself, for others and really how ultimately that’s all that matters. The story is that the Devil comes to Moscow for a week and it’s about what happens. The other part of the book is a conversation between Christ and Pontius Pilate. And, essentially, it’s about compassion. So, as a parent, and long before I became an autism parent, I was getting a crash course in compassion from Mikhail Bulgakov. It stood me in good stead. And anyone who has read that book will find it resonates with you all the time. There were many times, when we were going through all the stuff you go through as autism parents in the early years of autism…

How old is your son now?

He’s eight. He’s actually playing computer games right next to me now. He’s very, very much further along now, but in those early years it was very tough. I would say that having read that book several times, well, it’s a bit like a crash course in practical Buddhism, isn’t it? 

Well, I’m so interested that you think that. I’ve always thought that it’s about truth and the fact that truth exists and is absolute.

But it’s compassionate truth. Like the lady who kills her child and is forgiven at the Devil’s ball. Basically, what the devil is doing is extending compassion to sinners and doing what Jesus is telling Pontius Pilate it’s all about and that’s why the Devil gets very upset with people who say they don’t believe in it. Really he’s the enforcer and dispenser of the divine law. 

The Once and Future King. 

Well, T H White wrote this in the 50s when a lot of people were writing fantasy epics, like Tolkien and C S Lewis, Mervyn Peake and all these British writers who were writing masterpieces after the war. But I think what the books all did was to take the myths of the Nordic and Celtic peoples and make them available to a traumatised post-war populus and reintroduced romanticism in a context that people who’d fought in those wars could understand. This is the King Arthur story and I guess it’s about compassion. He doesn’t want to be king, he becomes king, his best friend and his wife fall in love and he is compassionate and understanding about that and he’s always trying to put the bigger picture first. It’s that thing of no good deed goes unpunished because in the end he dies, of course, by the hand of his son and sister. But he has done his best and been a good man throughout. The writing is beautiful beyond belief and it’s incredibly funny, particularly the first book, The Sword in the Stone. Again, the theme with these books is that they show you the bigger picture of people doing their best in difficult circumstances and whether they succeed or fail isn’t really the issue. The issue is that they are authentic as people.

In terms of dealing with autism, are you talking about compassion for your son, for yourselves? How do you direct the compassion?

Well, the early years of autism are all about dealing with suffering. Your child is suffering, with neurological traumas, you are suffering with helplessness and fear and loss of dreams, helplessness. And the suffering of when he kicks off in public.

And you must be exhausted too. 

Yes. You are basically like knights on a quest as an autism parent. You are questing for solutions and for a holy grail that may or may not exist. I guess when we went to Mongolia you could say that was a classic quest. I had to ask myself: what if there’s no change in Rowan at all? But that doesn’t matter because at least the diagnosis of autism didn’t stop us having an incredible adventure like that as a family. In fact it made us do something more beautiful and extraordinary than we would have done otherwise. So, suddenly, autism becomes a great gift and that shifts your perspective. In the event there was all this extraordinary change in Rowan. But these classic quest stories are always assumed to be allegorical in the western intellectual world, when, in fact, a lot of life is composed of very real questing and you need to have a bit of that in your bloodstream if you’re going to get through difficult situations in life. These situations where logic and reason and science suddenly aren’t helping you. You need a non-rational set of ideas to draw on. 

Did you take any other children with you on the journey?

No. But Rowan made his first friend on the journey, a Mongolian boy we met outside Ulan-Bator, the son of our guide. So, in the end, there were two dads and two boys on the steppe travelling up into Siberia to the reindeer people and the shaman where the big changes happened.