After doing the school run this morning I went to our local supermarket. It being early, and West Cork being West Cork, I chatted with the checkout lady about the likelihood of rain, the futility of weather forecasts, and how the long summer holidays cause problems for parents juggling work with childcare – especially, the checkout lady added as she scanned my cartons of smoothie, for the parents of kids with special needs, like her niece. 'It's so sad,' she said, grimacing and shaking her head, 'it's very, very sad.' I said something about how, if you have a kid with special needs, you can't sit around all day thinking how sad things are. 'That's right,' the checkout lady agreed, 'you've got to confront it. But it's still sad.' Only later did I work out what I wanted to say: that pity is better than mockery but it's still not great; that sympathy is better, if it engenders tolerance; but that what we really crave is public understanding.

A generous slab of understanding is offered by Naoki Higashida's concise book, The Reason I Jump. The author is diagnosed with autism and speech continues to be difficult for him, so he 'typed' the book by pointing to letters on a cardboard alphabet grid when he was only 13 years old. It uses a Q&A format to explore many of the confusing aspects of autism, and helped me a great deal in understanding what was going on in my own young son's head: Why do kids with autism bang their heads on the floor? Flap their hands in front of their faces? Display emotions that have nothing to do with the context, and then vanish a moment later? Many of Higashida's answers were of immediate practical value, but the book also discusses questions I'd been too caught up in the 24/7 grind to consider: How do people with autism perceive time, memory and beauty? Who and what is 'normal' and why, and how do people with autism think of autism – and us neuro-typical lot? These passages I found fascinating, not least because they encouraged me to consider many of my own unexamined attitudes.