The woman on the red sofa was being interviewed about the local food bank and how so many more people were using it because of the pandemic and the impact it had had upon families. And then she started speaking about her autistic son.

I think he’s loving this situation, she said thoughtfully.

He has me and his father and Ralf our border collie with him in the house all day every day except when I’m volunteering at the foodbank and he doesn’t have to go out unless it’s to walk Ralf which he loves, and he doesn’t have to go to school which he loves when he’s there but getting him there every day for 9am  can be a struggle…

Her son had spent the weeks since lockdown taking stuffing out of cushions so he could put the stuffing into sacks and replacing it with lego (only the round shapes, not the square ones) and then he’d ask her to sew up the cushions so a little later he could unpick the stitches and take the lego out so the game could begin again.

We don’t have much left stuffed in the house, she said, with a small laugh. But we do have two huge bags of stuffing that’s growing all the time. I suppose we could use them as replacement cushions…

His bed’s nearly off the floor with all the random bits and pieces he hoards underneath it.

Before the lego cushions, it was nuts and bolts – he spent hours dividing them into equal piles across the lounge carpet and we’d have to make sure Ralf, our border collie, didn’t run into them and knock them over because that could cause a meltdown.

For the two months prior to nuts and bolts, it was wrapping tins in cellotape and string. And then there was the obsession with rice in plant pots which he pushed under his bed.

Any little thing could cause a meltdown. Life with him was living on a hair trigger, you never knew what it could be that would set him off. There were certain key triggers – like  getting him ready for school and then on the way to school, if we didn’t see the 825 train to Birmingham go past the level crossing…but there were other things that I could never see coming at all. Something that made him really happy one day (e.g playing with a red balloon in the back garden) could  spin him over the edge the next…

Now there’s no set timetable, the meltdowns are far fewer…he seems happier…and so are we in some ways, we aren’t constantly trying to him fit in a world which is a different shape to the one he inhabits. And he loves sorting out the tines for the food bank.

The woman interviewing her,  sitting behind the desk, smiles and says it’s so good to hear some good news for a change…