Страница 27 из 42
But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bumping off something and carrying on in almost the same direction, e.g., when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball. And the information in their head is really simple. For example, if they are in the countryside, it might be:
I am standing in a field that is full of grass.
There are some cows in the fields.
It is su
There are some flowers in the grass.
There is a village in the distance.
There is a fence at the edge of the field and it has a gate in it.
And then they would stop noticing anything because they would be thinking something else like, “Oh, it is very beautiful here,” or “I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on,” or “I wonder if Julie has given birth yet.” [11]
But if I am standing in a field in the countryside I notice everything. For example, I remember standing in a field on Wednesday, 15 June 1994, because Father and Mother and I were driving to Dover to get a ferry to France and we did what Father called Taking the Scenic Route, which means going by little roads and stopping for lunch in a pub garden, and I had to stop to go for a wee, and I went into a field with cows in it and after I’d had a wee I stopped and looked at the field and I noticed these things:
There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and white.
There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible houses and a church with a square tower and not a spire.
There are ridges in the field, which means that in medieval times it was what is called a ridge and furrow field and people who lived in the village would have a ridge each to do farming on.
There is an old plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a snail on it, and a long piece of orange string.
The northeast corner of the field is highest and the southwest corner is lowest (I had a compass because we were going on holiday and I wanted to know where Swindon was when we were in France) and the field is folded downward slightly along the line between these two corners so that the northwest and southeast corners are slightly lower than they would be if the field was an inclined plane.
I can see three different types of grass and two colors of flowers in the grass.
The cows are mostly facing uphill.
And there were 31 more things in this list of things I noticed but Siobhan said I didn’t need to write them all down. And it means that it is very tiring if I am in a new place because I see all these things, and if someone asked me afterward what the cows looked like, I could ask which one, and I could do a drawing of them at home and say that a particular cow had patterns on it like this:
And I realize that I told a lie in Chapter 13 because I said “I ca
And this is the joke.
There are three men on a train. One of them is an economist and one of them is a logician and one of them is a mathematician. And they have just crossed the border into Scotland (I don’t know why they are going to Scotland) and they see a brown cow standing in a field from the window of the train (and the cow is standing parallel to the train).
And the economist says, “Look, the cows in Scotland are brown.”
And the logician says, “No. There are cows in Scotland of which one at least is brown.”
And the mathematician says, “No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown.”
And it is fu
And when I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn’t any space left to think about other things. And when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is even harder because people are not like cows and flowers and grass and they can talk to you and do things that you don’t expect, so you have to notice everything that is in the place, and also you have to notice things that might happen as well. And sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going.
And that is why I am good at chess and maths and logic, because most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t co
191. My train set had a little building that was two rooms with a corridor between them, and one was the ticket office where you bought the tickets, and one was a waiting room where you waited for the train. But the train station in Swindon wasn’t like that. It was a tu
But this is not a very accurate map of the station because I was scared so I was not noticing things very well, and this is just what I remember so it is an approximation.
And it was like standing on a cliff in a really strong wind because it made me feel giddy and sick because there were lots of people walking into and out of the tu
So I put my hands over my ears to block out the noise and think. And I thought that I had to stay in the station to get on a train and I had to sit down somewhere and there was nowhere to sit down near the door of the station so I had to walk down the tu
And eventually I got to the end of the tu
11
This is really true because I asked Siobhan what people thought about when they looked at things, and this is what she said.