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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.

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Maybe I’m Amazed by John Harris review – with a little help from John, Paul, George and Ringo

@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...

theguardian.com

The Guardian journalist’s tender account of how music became a bridge between him and his autistic son, James, is full of wit and wisdom

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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.

board full of text explaining all the amazing things Oxfordshire charity Yellow Submarine does to support young people and adults with learning disabilities and autism to lead full lives

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Hard Times Come Again No More

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 …

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YouTube video by Yo-Yo Ma - Topic

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…

Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) @iddonews.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Kudos to 16yo son, Joe, who has a learning disability due to #ADNP syndrome, for completing his 50th #parkrun last week in Abingdon. Inspired by @johnharris1969.bsky.social ’s new book Maybe I'm Amazed www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/serie... Joe’s post-run chill-out was spent drumming to Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.

Joe running in a parkrun event in a field next to the Thames in Abingdon

Joe lost in music while listening to Kraftwerk's Autobahn and drumming on a small Kenyan drum. In the background is John Harris's book Maybe I'm amazed next to lava lamp

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Reposted by Ben Cooper

Track news reports of #SubstandardMedicines and #FalsifiedMedicine in your country. View our Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe, which filters by key words, time-periods, locations, and language. #medswecantrust @tropicalmedicine.ox.ac.uk @wellcometrust.bsky.social @moru-mip.bsky.social

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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 🤩

Joe, a 16 year old neurodivergent boy, deeply lost in music, plays a drum set assembled from from roughly cut lumber in front of a tree covered with ivy in a style that combines the instinctual energy of Moe Tucker, legendary drummer from the Velvet Underground, with the distinctive hi-hat style of Topper Headon, legendary drummer from The Clash.

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Smells Like Teen Spirit - The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

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...

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YouTube video by UkuleleOrchestra

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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.

Rachel Otuko (@missotuko.bsky.social), on the left of the picture, an Oxford DPhil student and teacher on the workshop explains a graph plotted on the laptop screen to a student from the Africa CDC attending the workshop. The room is filled with other students who are deep in thought while staring at computer screens which are running the same R Shiny Application.

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