Special Interests

I don't mind calling an obsession an obsession if it occupies every waking hour of my day, though it seems to be increasingly un-PC and now we talk about 'special interests.' All that aside, what's everyone interested in?

For me as a child it was dinosaurs, then Ancient Egypt and then Pokemon, in that order.

  • Fuchsia said:
    Class Vll C U Boots

    What are they??

  • Reading other peoples diaries - spent years of my life reading the writer James Boswell's diaries, Pepys etc. And piano playing was great, all those repetetive scales and arpeggios. Also Class Vll C U Boots - not sure what that was about but I ended up knowing a heck of a lot about them!

  • I saw him live back in 2006 - would love to see the Savage tour, but a bit difficult for me (I'm in west Cornwall).  Would love to hear how it went.

  • Yes Savage is a great album and I am seeing him at Manchester Academy next Friday so can't wait for that!

    Yes I understand how your interests link and lead onto others.  I also revisit interests as well from time to time.

  • I am a long term Numan fan, so I am with you on this - very pleased to see how his new album 'Savage' is doing in the indie charts.

    I subject hop a lot, but somehow I am able to tie the subjects together, if that makes any sense.

  • Glad I found this thread as I was going to post something similar.

    I find I have a few key interests that remain long-term with a few short term intense ones that vary.

    Long-term interests are:

     - rabbits

     - collecting and analysing personal data (weight, steps, miles covered etc.)

     - motorbikes and cars

     - nutrition and food

    Current short term ones are:

     - planners

     - architecture

     - All music by Gary Numan

     - search engine optimisation

     - environmental technology (wind farms, solar, smart grids) although this is becoming more of a long-term interest

    Does anyone else find they have short term very intense 'obsessions/interests' in particular things?  For me these can last anything from a couple of weeks to months, but I find I have to know everything about it and completely exhaust it before I can move on to the next interest.

  • A rather cliched special interest for one on the spectrum: Maps. It started when I was very ill during early childhood, when an elderly neighbor felt that I needed something to take my mind off my rather lengthy recuperation, He used to draw pictorial maps of local countryside and even imaginary places. It was very therapeutic.And I started to draw my own maps. It probably helped me to begin conversing with more than one word at a time. Now it took a very long time to fit that obsession together with a diagnosis, but it was one of those things that made self-identification rather obvious. Yep, I'm afraid I also have another special interest which is rather classic:steam railways - but it is a bit less obsessional than maps. Hardly surprising when there a steam railway in clear view. I note, however, that I'm not really obsessional enough about it to be a true railnut. I probably wouldn't bore the pants off Bill Bryson if he was unfortunate enough to sit next to me on a train. I rarely even travel by train these days. Nevertheless, my even deeper special interest could probably be best described as railways on maps - past, present and future, with more recent slight digressions into Google Streetview and archived maps online.

  • As a teenager, it was the weather.  I kept detailed daily records of the temperature, measured rain water in the garden and even copied the pressure charts from the TV into my books.

    Ten years later I threw away all the books as rubbish.