Age:	65
Profession:	Learning and Development Consultant, but now retired, hooray!
Habitat:	Small village near Bristol, England.
Highest qualification:	MSc. in Advanced Learning Technology from Lancaster University.
Interests:	Music, Songwriting, Home Recording, Reading, Film and Cinema, Popular Culture, Drawing, Illustration, Photography, Writing, Science, Computing.
Sports:	Nope.
Sense of humour:	Very left field (i.e. frequently described as "weird"). The reason for this will soon become obvious.
Favourite writers:	William Gibson, Becky Chambers, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Martha Wells, Larry Niven, Ursula Le Guin, Jack Womack, Richard Kadrey, Charlie Stross, Adrian Tchaikovsky, James Gleick, and Ed Regis (to name just a few).
Favourite TV shows:	Horizon, The Sky at Night, Monkey (both the original version and the New Adventures), UFO, Cowboy Bebop, Twin Peaks, Blackadder, Monty Python, Pinky and the Brain, Father Ted, Futurama, Buffy, Warehouse 13, The IT Crowd, Black Books, Star Trek (all of it), Frasier, Lovejoy, Stargate SG-1, Only Murders In The Building, Murderbot, and Babylon 5.
Favourite films:	Buckaroo Banzai, Forbidden Planet, Blade Runner (both the Original and 2049), Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Danger: Diabolik, Inception, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fifth Element, The Day The Earth Stood Still (just the original version, or course), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Wings of Desire, It Came From Outer Space, Big Trouble In Little China, Ghost in the Shell, Ghostbusters, Tron, Flow, Dune (the Villeneuve version, although I still have a fondness for David Lynch's movie), and all of the work of Jacques Tati. Oh, and I'll happily watch any kaiju movie you can find for me, no matter how bad.
Other films I'll always end up watching if I stumble across them while channel surfing:	Diamonds Are Forever, Deadpool, Sneakers, My Neighbour Totoro, The Iron Giant, Communion, Starman, Men In Black, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, The Matrix, This Is Spinal Tap, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and The Princess Bride.
Favourite Podcasts:	The Infinite Monkey Cage, The Life Scientific, The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, Book Shambles with Robin and Josie, The Thrilling Adventure Hour, Tea and Jeopardy, The Art of the Score, A Good Read.
Favourite beverage:	Coffee.
Would spend sudden fortune on:	A larger house with more bookcases and a better home cinema set-up. And an even more kick-ass recording studio.

As you may have realised (especially if you Google me) there are quite a few folks called Chris Harris about. So here are a few details to help you see if you've found who you're looking for.

No, I'm not the speedway rider and Top Gear presenter. I've never been a Texas State Senator. The guy with the domain name is a Canadian wildlife photographer. Furthermore, I would like to state for the record that I have never, at any time, had anything to do with Chris Moyles. I have never been a professional wrestler. Nor am I a New Zealand cricketer. And I wasn't Bristol's famous pantomime dame, either.

These days I'm very much enjoying being a musician and a front-of-house sound engineer and I can normally be found beavering away in my own home recording studio...

...or in someone else's.

Chris with Portishead's Adrian Utley in front of the monster SSL mixing desk in The Big Room at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Box, 2025

I was born in 1960 in the town of Lytham St. Annes, in Lancashire. Being born on 11th August meant that I got a total solar eclipse for my birthday way back in 1999, which was a once-in-a-lifetime experience in all senses of the word.

I led a depressingly rootless childhood. My family moved about a lot as my father pursued his career and it was unusual for us to stay in one house for more than three years. In the 1970s I went to Burton Manor County Primary school and King Edward VI Grammar school (now the High School) in Stafford, but I finished my "A" levels at John Newnham High School in Croydon.

I dropped out of university after a year, because I hated it. My parents couldn't afford to pay for me to move into digs, so I commuted from home every day and that was never going to work out. Instead as the 1980s got under way I found myself working for Post Office Telecommunications in London. By the time the company had become British Telecom, I'd moved to Milton Keynes, where I worked in their training division. For a while I was based in the Mansion at Bletchley Park, which had recently become famous for its role during the war in breaking German military codes. I really enjoyed my time there. I met some great people, and I ended up marrying one of them. Sadly, life in the 90's wasn't as good, and we split up a few years later so I took voluntary redundancy from BT and left my life in Milton Keynes behind forever. It was one of the most painful things I've ever done but it was a decision made from necessity. I'm not exaggerating when I say I wouldn't have survived otherwise; as 1994 drew to a close I came very close to taking my own life.

But instead the following year I moved to Gloucestershire and apart from regular commutes to Atlanta, Georgia and even a brief stint living and working in Tampa, Florida (it's a hard life) I've lived here ever since. Moving here resulted in a significant levelling-up of my professional abilities that included going back to university (and this time, I absolutely loved the experience) and I found myself developing a successful career as a training consultant and learning specialist. Since then I've worked in the public sector, the private sector, and I even spent some time doing postgraduate teaching in academia, which was great fun. It also did wonders for my self-confidence. So now I live in a nice house in a small village on the southern edge of the Cotswolds, a little bit north of Bristol. I should have moved here years before I actually did. It feels like home in a way that nowhere else I've lived ever has.

I've always known I that I'm not even remotely neurotypical. I could read by the time I was four years old, but back then nobody had heard of autism so I was just seen as precocious. I skipped the second year of primary school and was moved up to the third because I was making no attempt to hide my boredom at how slow it all was. As a result I was bullied mercilessly—at least until I learned how to fake being a "normal" kid—but I was never that great at doing that. Even today, I struggle to fit in socially and I've lived on my own for most of my life.

And yeah, that absolutely sucks.

Up until very recently I assumed that my behavioural problems all arose because I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. I've known for several decades that I have this condition; it's been a part of my life since I was an infant. I'm not going to go into details but let's just say that the worse things got, the more introverted and shut down I became, and the deeper I would disappear into my books or my drawing. When I finally left home in my mid-twenties, I was able to begin a form of healing but what's really sad is that back then I had absolutely no idea how ill I was, so I never thought to ask for help. My sister recently said to me, "How could you have lived through the childhood you had, and not have ended up with PTSD?" but back then, I didn't even realise anything was out of the ordinary. So I never got a formal diagnosis or access to any form of treatment or therapy, and I was still profoundly damaged by the time I'd reached my thirties. I just thought that everyone else had somehow learned to be a lot better than I was at dealing with all the problems that I was going through. It never occurred to me—not even once—that their life experiences might be so radically different to mine that for them, those problems simply didn't exist.

As I got older and a little wiser, that began to change. As my father's mental health declined I learned about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and suddenly it was obvious that this was driving his behaviour (and the way he had always treated the rest of his family). Realising that he almost certainly had Asperger's—and very probably full-on autism as well—and discovering that traits like this were genetic and heritable, I started reading up about the autistic spectrum in an attempt to figure out if I was on it, too. But there was a problem: back in the 90s the public image of an autistic person was of a robotic, emotionless character like the one portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988). Apart from exceptional people like Temple Grandin and Stephen Wiltshire, every case I'd read about described people who were almost or entirely nonverbal (you may have noticed I'm really not like that) and I didn't believe for one minute that I suffered at all from what's known as "mindblindness" because I was always painfully aware of what other people thought of me. To me, autism meant having no feelings about anything at all; I was struggling because mine were always so intensely out of control that any situation which was even slightly challenging threatened to overwhelm me completely. It became more and more difficult just to go out into the world, at least if I had to remain sober. A bit of "flattening of affect" would have helped considerably.

All the same, at the time I decided to ask a few of my friends if they thought I might be autistic.

Autistic? Me?

Nope, absolutely not. I couldn't possibly be.

It wasn't until I reached the age of 65 that all that changed thanks to a wonderful book written by my friend Robin Ince. When I read it, I was astounded by how familiar Robin's journey sounded and I had to accept that "being on the spectrum" was the simplest explanation for my experiences. Of course, as soon as I asked my friends what they thought about this, they invariably told me they'd known I was neurodivergent as soon as they'd met me; a very different response to last time!

I can only explain this in terms of people being much more familiar these days with how someone who is autistic actually behaves. Today I have no doubt whatsoever that I am autistic and that I also have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Read the rest of this website and you'll probably conclude that it's pretty bloody obvious. You'll get no argument from me there; but getting to the point where I could accept that has been a long and arduous journey. But it's one that has let me join the dots about many aspects of my life that up until this point had left me feeling frustrated, confused, and deeply hurt. Of course, now I can see that the signs were there all along...

For a start, I understand why, when I began working in London and had to spend several hours a day stuck in overcrowded trains on my commute, I would get crippling anxiety attacks (my doctor at the time basically told me to suck it up and deal with it, which didn't really do much for my opinion of the medical profession). I now have no doubt whatsoever that the diagnosis of chronic depression which I was given in 2009 was wrong; I was actually suffering from autistic burnout. I was in a job I utterly loathed. I could no longer sustain the effort required to mask who I really was each and every day, or deal with the sensory overload of a highly stressful commute (I hate driving) when I could quite easily have worked more productively and happily from home. Worst of all, I was being driven mad by the cognitive dissonance that's inherent in being told what to do by a management team who were all textbook cases of the Dunning-Kruger Effect: none too bright, utterly clueless when it came to managing professionals who were their intellectual superiors in every respect, but nonetheless sublimely confident in their own (completely non-existent) talents; for them, being a manager relied exclusively on being able to shout angrily and loudly at people—and to give them their due, I must say they were good at that. I ended up being prescribed a hefty dose of antidepressants because it turned out that I quite literally needed to be on drugs in order to continue working there; that's how bad it was. By the time I reached my mid-forties I was, quite simply, done. I was very glad when the entire department was shut down and I could take advantage of another hefty redundancy package. I spent most of the following year trying to recover and I didn't do much each day other than play guitar (my abilities saw a tremendous improvement!) But the news that the entire management team had subsequently found themselves out of a job as well was a delightful bonus...

That job was one of the few occasions when I knew at the time that nothing I could have done would have changed the course of events. Sadly, I've spent most of my life beating myself up for things which happened to me that not only weren't my fault—they were never going to have turned out any differently than they did. It's only since I realised that I'm autistic that I've been able to accept that.

Finally learning that it's not my fault that I have struggled to fit in, or that I was not responsible for the awful things which have happened to me over the years, and recognising that the reason some people treated me badly was because they weren't very nice people, not because that was how I deserved to be treated, has been an emotional and incredibly liberating experience. A dear friend told me recently "Your life is not the car crash you thought it was" and when I realised that she was right, it felt as if someone had lifted a huge weight from my shoulders. In the space of six weeks, my "depression" disappeared completely and I went from spending my days just lying in bed wishing I was dead to being genuinely and profoundly happy. After sixty-five years, I have finally started to find out who the authentic me really is. And it turns out he's okay.

If I was to try and sum myself up in a single word, I'd like to think that the word would be "creative." I've immersed myself in many hobbies over the years, and they have all been connected with the arts in one way or another. I think this is because I have always desperately needed to be involved in things that made life better in some way. I'm sure the PTSD has been instrumental in shaping that need, which often became a compulsion.

My first means of escape was through drawing. I used to draw a lot—cartoons, portraits and a little graphic design. Not only did it help me cope with some very unpleasant circumstances, I also really enjoyed being good at it; good enough to end up doing some work for a few bands, including the heavy metal group Motorhead. For some reason people don't believe this, muttering things like "and he looks so normal..." but it's all true (and I've just realised that comments like that suggest that my ability to "mask" my autism so that I could fit in to normal society must have been a lot better than I've been giving myself credit for).

As I got older, my preferred means of escape switched from drawing to sex, and drinking, and increasingly to music. But these days, my drawing board is set up in the conservatory and I've started sketching again. I've put together a graphics page about some of the stuff I've produced over the years.

Photography has been a big part of my life for sixty years. You'll find lots of stuff about that elsewhere.

I also enjoy birdwatching. It's handy living where I do, because the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Slimbridge is a few minutes' drive from here. I joined the WWT in 1997, and I've been in the RSPB for more than 40 years. My parents used to live in north Norfolk, which is also prime birdwatching country. When I visited them, I would try whenever I could to go walking on the beach at Cley or Salthouse. There, you can see all sorts of birds—even the occasional Flamingo! After living inland for so long, I'm still terrible at identifying waders and the like, but I'm getting better. My mum was a great birdwatcher; she was the sort of person who could say, "what's wrong with that blackbird on the drive?" and when you looked, it would turn out to be a perfectly healthy ring ouzel.

Then there's reading: I have a book problem. Look up the definition of the Japanese word tsundoku and the associated illustrations will look very much like my house. In normal circumstances, I can't go into a bookshop without buying a book, and my house is full of stacks of paperbacks and hardbacks. Even buying a Kindle a few years ago has done little to stop the growth of piles of physical books on all available flat surfaces. I buy a tremendous amount of books and I usually spend at least an hour a day reading through them. So many books, so little time... On my books page I used to go on and on about the fact, then switched to using Goodreads, but when it became clear just how vile and toxic Amazon is as an organization, I switched to buying books from Hive and World Of Books and deleted my Goodreads account. Now, I write my reviews for this website instead, and you can read reviews of all the books which I read in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

I'm also completely obsessed with the movies. I've loved films since I was little, but these days that love has become an all-consuming passion and if you still need any evidence that I'm autistic, all you need to do is to take a look at my living room and the shelves of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs in there. Some friends of mine once suggested that I'd had the Internet Movie Database surgically implanted in my brain; my autistic mind soaks up film trivia and end credits information like a sponge. My autism also meant that, long before the pandemic struck, I preferred to watch films from the comfort of my sofa rather than sitting with other people in a noisy, overwhelming movie theatre. My home setup has been expanded and upgraded over the years to provide the best big-screen experience that I can afford. You can find out more—so much more—about all that on my films page.

My greatest obsession will always be music. I enjoy listening to all styles, from classical to heavy rock, from pop to electronica. I'm not sure "enjoy" is sufficiently hyperbolic to describe the effect that music has on me. When I listen to a piece of music I become totally absorbed in it. The home movies obsession has really paid off when it comes to audio, too. I absolutely love the immersive audio experience and I have a full 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos setup in my living room, which will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody who knows me. Having music around me when I'm on the go has been just as important for forty years: I bought my first Sony Walkman in 1984 (it still works!) and these days I have a selection of tape and digital music players as well as a ridiculous collection of wired headphones. My current mp3 player has a quarter of a terabyte of albums stored on its microSD card and if I could find one that had more storage available, I'd buy it without a moment's hesitation.

I write, play, and produce my own music, too. I've done so since the 70s, when all I had to work with was an acoustic guitar, a cassette recorder, and some pots and pans from the kitchen that could be used as a makeshift drum kit. As you can see from the photo at the top of this page, these days my approach to home recording is rather more sophisticated; I play lots of different musical instruments and—inevitably—computers are involved in the creative process as well. I've become good enough at the recording, mixing and mastering process that people have started asking me to work on their music, too—and paying me to do so. I really didn't see that coming!

For the last fifteen years or so I've been a regular participant in the dual songwriting challenges of February Album Writing Month (where the target is to write 14 songs in 28 days), and its sister site 50/90 (where the target is to write 50 songs in the 90 days between July 4th and October 1st). I think it's safe to say that I've become more than a little bit obsessed with taking part. Doing so has had a huge effect on my songwriting skills. It's also helped me boost my musical output to around 100 new tracks each year and it's even helped me to develop a singing voice that I'm comfortable with inflicting on other people, something which I really didn't see coming at all. During the pandemic I would live stream from my bedroom studio on my Twitch channel once or twice a week, but the lack of any return after putting in hundreds and hundreds of man-hours of work made no economic sense whatsoever, so now I don't.

With taking part in FAWM and Fifty/Ninety I've become confident enough in my own abilities to have started offering my music to the general public, and much to my surprise, it's proved rather popular. If you fancy listening to what I do, the best place to start is my Bandcamp page. There, you can also get a copy of the eBook I wrote about getting very carried away in 2022 when I ended up writing not just fifty songs for Fifty/Ninety but 117 of them. The book (and the album of some of those songs that comes with it) is called A Grand Adventure.

The music I create has been shaped and moulded by the music that I've listened to for pretty much my whole life. On my Page o'musicians you can find out about the artists I love.

Finally, as if you hadn't already realised, I spend more time than is good for me in front of my computer. It's a trait I share with a lot of other autistic people. I first put together this website back in 1996 and maintaining the blog here has been a part of my routine since 2003. First and foremost, I use it as a diary, but it's also proved to be a useful repository for the piles of trivia and other Internet rubbish I accumulate every day (even if many of the links on earlier pages no longer lead anywhere). It's all archived here for you to browse through, should you wish to do so.

The discipline of coming up with something every week or so for more than two decades also led me to discover that I really enjoy writing as a pastime in its own right. I think I've become quite good at it. I've even written a few novels (as part of the sadly now defunct National Novel Writing Month event, commonly referred to as Nanowrimo) and usually I have a bunch of short stories in various stages of development. You never know; one day I might even start trying to get some of them published. If I do, you'll hear about it on the blog.

Chris