Finn
I was thinking about Leonardo da Vinci and birds as I bounced on the trampoline.
I have to take my melatonin at bedtime because otherwise I feel too anxious to get to sleep.
But often I wake up before it gets light, especially if I’ve had a nightmare, and so I go outside in the darkness and jump.
It helps me get the bad dreams out of my head and it’s the best time to do it, before the sun comes up and makes everything too bright and too busy.
We have a big trampoline in the garden back home in Scotland.
We’ve been coming to the house in France in the summer holidays for as long as I can remember – it used to belong to an old friend of my Great-granny Ella, a lady called Caroline, and then when she died a few years ago she sold it to Mum and Dad so we could keep coming.
So then we got a trampoline here as well.
Jumping takes the pressure off my brain.
Not literally, of course, it just makes my thoughts go a bit quieter. They’re usually very loud.
After a while, I noticed a light come on in the window of one of the upstairs bedrooms. It wasn’t Mum – I knew she was downstairs doing her writing.
Then the shutters opened, and the Old Lady looked out.
She watched me jumping in the moonlight for a few seconds and then she raised one hand to her head, like a salute, and turned away.
So I stopped jumping, because I didn’t want to disturb her if she wanted to go back to sleep, and I went back inside to do some maths instead.
The thing about the air pressure and the wings was really discovered by Daniel Bernoulli, who was a Swiss mathematician. He came up with an equation that, in its simplest form, is written like this:
Where P is Pressure (force exerted divided by area exerted on)
And ρ is density of the fluid or air
And V is velocity of the moving object or fluid
The Bernoulli equation states that an increase in velocity leads to a decrease in pressure.
Thus, the higher the velocity of the flow, the lower the pressure.
Therefore, air flowing over an aerofoil will decrease in pressure.
The pressure loss over the top surface is greater than that of the bottom surface.
The result is a net pressure force in the upward direction. This pressure force is lift.
Q.E.D., as Philly said to the mechanic.
I wrote out the equation and laminated it.
I like the language maths problems use. It takes you through a problem one step at a time until you can resolve it.
It’s logical. Mostly, people aren’t logical, they are emotional.
Emotions are often illogical on the surface, but if you look at them in a bit more detail, to get to the root of them, you can see that they actually come from a pretty logical origin.
Like how our brains are programmed for fight or flight and that goes back to the days when we lived in caves and had to be ready for attacks by sabre-toothed tigers.
The ones who didn’t either fight or run away got eaten, so their brain wiring died out.
We’re left with the fight or flight wiring, even if there are no sabre-toothed tigers left now.
It was my fight wiring that got triggered when I had a meltdown about doing the sailing camp, the first time Dad brought it up.
Afterwards, he said he couldn’t understand why I was getting so emotional about it.
He was putting some antiseptic cream on his hand where I’d bitten it.
I tried to explain about the La Palma volcano and the mega-tsunami hypothesis, but he wouldn’t listen. And that seemed pretty illogical to me.
I wonder whether Mrs Philly Delaney would like to sail the dinghy with me.
I have a hypothesis that if she knows how to fly then she should understand how to sail.
I don’t know if she could manage to climb into it with her false leg, but she seems pretty calm, so I think she’d be good in a crisis, unlike all the other kids who are going to be coming on the camp.
We’re not renowned for our calmness in the face of stressful situations, those of us with autism.
Dad says one day it would be nice to get a plane to France, just throw a few things into a suitcase and travel light.
But we have to take the car because of needing to bring things like our bikes and the laminating machine and the jars of Marmite.
Also, I don’t think I’d like going on a plane because of all the other people.
A private plane would be cool though. Perhaps Philly could fly it.
I spent the whole morning looking at maths blogs.
You can find all sorts of interesting things on them.
My favourite one is by Stephen Wolfram. He’s developed his own computer language, and also an answer engine called Wolfram Alpha.
I went on to it to find out about earthquakes in the Canary Islands, but it said there haven’t been any in the last 30 years.
There was an eruption of the La Palma stratovolcano on Tuesday, 26 October 1971, though, which just goes to show there could be another one any day now, resulting in a catastrophic landslide.
After lunch (my usual Marmite sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off), Mum and Mrs Ophelia Delaney did another session of the Old Lady’s life story.
I just sat and listened this time, without even pretending to read the book about sailing.