Born on a Blue Day

This chapter offers the author’s recollections of his time in primary school, which he attended in his community alongside children who were mostly neurotypical. There were aspects of school that he very much liked and others that posed significant challenges. For example, parts of the school day that were regular and ordered, like morning Assembly, were comforting and enjoyable. The unpredictability of other pupils, however, was distracting and discomforting. The author saw his peers as “something to cope and contend with, to navigate around” (48). While he mostly tried to remain aloof from his classmates, he says, “bullying was sometimes a problem for me because I was different and a loner” (71). The social world of school created a lot of anxiety for the author.

The chapter is not just about school but also about learning and life outside of school. In certain areas of learning, Tammet excelled. He began practicing more and more advanced computational skills in his head after his mother bought him a secondhand math puzzle book. He read encyclopedias at the local library and made many lists of facts and figures that he could memorize. He started learning how to read, write, and speak foreign languages he had exposure to.