A final feeling. While walking by the Thames in Abingdon last Sunday evening Joe heard drums in the distance & led me to this fallen dismembered tree, the site of an amazing one performer free festival and, despite all the amputations, a moment of pure contemplation & sensory delight.

@laylamoran.bsky.social as our local MP & chair of the HSCC it would be great if you could help promote Joe’s fundraising for this brilliant local charity, highlight the lack of out of school support for some of those who need it most & read John’s brilliant book www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Joe has been attending Yellow Submarine 1 day/wk in holidays since 2019. He loves it, but last December Oxfordshire County Council told us they would no longer support YS to work with children needing 1-1 support, so kids like Joe who need to be active and outside currently have nowhere to go.

but since Joe doesn’t believe in lying back & saying how bad his luck is he’ll be running his first 10k in July to support amazing local charity, Yellow Submarine www.yellowsubmarine.org.uk. Please sponsor him if you can bit.ly/3G24aF9 repost if you can’t & visit their awesome Oxford cafe.

he’s been listening on his headphones to Hard Times Come Again No More from Yo-Yo Ma’s Appalachian Journey www.youtube.com/watch?v=by3d.... The hardest part of all is how little support kids like Joe get: no breakfast clubs, no music lessons, and now no holiday clubs …

I particularly welcomed the book’s pushback against Daniel Levitin’s claims about which DSM categories do/don’t respond emotionally to music. Joe, who has an ASD diagnosis should he care to use it, often suddenly bursts into tears and tells me “I feel sad”. Every single time it has the same cause:

…from using Eddy Grant’s Police on My Back (Sandinista! version obvs) as a teaching aid, to amazement at the intensity of Joe’s musical engagement and the exuberance of his musical creativity, to the great leaps forward enabled by modern ABA.

What an incredible piece of music. Joe was transported. I was also transported by John’s book, a paean to the power of music to shape our lives and bring us together across neurological divides. It is deeply moving, particularly so for me because of the congruences with our family’s experiences…

This is Joe at a glampsite in Hay-on-Wye last summer. My cousin, an in-demand bohemian luthier and (naturally) resting actor who lives in Frome (www.linkedin.com/in/laurence-...) calls him a lumber drummer 🤩

As a recovering Velvets & Clash obsessive, Hay & Frome fanboy, dad to a neurodivergent 16yo musicophile & having been through the whole dehumanising ASD diagnosis thing (🤮) this resonates on SO many levels. For Joe, since he was about 5 yrs old, this has been THE song www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z680...

Thanks to Oraya Srimokla & cherrylim128.bsky.social for making the pictured Shiny App at such short notice (based on this paper www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...). Also to other Oxford faculty Gisela Robles Aguilar and @missotuko.bsky.social & to IHME colleagues who we shared the teaching with.

Love it! I wish more schools would get this. My 16yo son, Joe, who has HVDAS, ASD etc, also fears hand dryers but is transported by nature & music to an extent I didn’t even see in my dad who devoted half his life to the guitar www.theguardian.com/theguardian/... We need to get out to the mountains.

Blackadder definitely a good start
Cunk on Britain on the iplayer (my 11 year old’s favourite) is hard to beat www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...)
David Olusoga (my wife’s favourite when she was cramming for her test last year) is also consistently great www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

Agree with Tom. I'm getting on pretty well with one of these www.brooksengland.com/en_uk/c15-ca...

I know this is pedantic, but surely that's #TreeByTrike
This is #TreeByBike :

Hoorah! Congratulations again!