Despite my best efforts to forestall it – ignoring my diary, avoiding the newspaper and keeping the calendar on last month – time is marching inexorably onwards. Izzie has been registered and is now a member of a wider community to which I must soon return, and although I’m still swimming against the current, I can’t delay the inevitable much longer.

For the past week I’ve lived a wonderfully wholesome routine. I rise around 7.30 and prepare a bottle, and while Lizzie feeds Izzie I feed the animals, make breakfast, and have my sacred first coffee of the day. Then I load up the car and take Izzie and Ozzie for a walk in the forest. When I return, I sort out a few things, have lunch, deal with visitors, have a nap, and then all of us go for a walk around the village, which is the closest thing to heaven I can imagine.

After dinner I prepare the night feeds, Lizzie has a bath and goes to bed, I work on this blog or watch something while cuddling the baby, and head upstairs around 22.30. It generally takes till midnight to settle Izzie, with a couple of nappy changes and feeds overnight lasting around an hour each. This is my routine, and I love it.

People with Asperger’s Syndrome live by routines and struggle to cope with change. This is to be expected, given our rigid thinking and the difficulties we have processing new information, but Temple Grandin has an alternate theory. A remarkable woman with autism who designs slaughter houses, she believes that those of us on the spectrum are like prey animals with an overactive nervous system no longer useful in modern life. If a cow hears a sudden noise, it could be natural but it could be a predator, so it reacts. If it sees something new, it could be nothing or it could be the cause of its death, so it avoids it. The cow is happiest doing its usual thing of chewing cud and pooping pats because that keeps it safe.

People with autism are those cows. When we encounter anything new, different, unexpected, it sets off a fight or flight response disproportionate to the reality. Our bodies are flooded with adrenalin, increasing our stress levels and making it even more difficult to think clearly and cope with the situation. Hence we structure our lives to keep the unknown to a minimum and avoid stressful encounters.

Unfortunately, people with AS are also highly susceptible to forming obsessions, and when these combine with our love of routines and aversion to change, we can lose ourselves in a ‘perfect storm’ of self-imposed dissociative isolation.

I am in a baby bubble and I don’t want to come out.

Ten years ago I was part of a crew of fifty that sailed a tall ship across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. Those four weeks were some of the best of my life. Not because I was popular – I was unanimously voted the person most likely to be thrown overboard and they even printed me out a certificate that said as much – but because time was divided into a rigid, unchanging rotation of the watch system and the whole world existed in a space less than two-hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. I knew where I was meant to be, what I was meant to do, and who I was meant to do it with. I ate, worked, slept, in a fixed, tireless routine. And it suited me just fine.

As we neared our goal, after eighteen days with nothing between us and the horizon but whales, dolphins, flying fish and the occasional distant tanker, the rest of the crew looked forward to seeing land again. But I was so happy in my perfect bubble i wished there was no such thing as land and we could keep sailing forever. That first sight of Barbados, an ugly smudge between sea and sky, broke my heart.

The past three weeks my life has revolved around being the best dad and partner I can be. Even as I write this, Izzie is asleep in my arms with her mouth wide open, ‘catching flies’. The outside world has ceased to exist. I haven’t worked, paid any bills or checked my bank balance; I haven’t opened my post or returned my library books, and my emails remain unanswered. My life has become routine and obsession.

But there are smudges appearing on the horizon. If you lock the world out it has an insistent way of banging on the door until you have to let it in. I’m lucky in that I’m a (starving) writer so can work from home; if I had a regular job I’d have been back last week. But I can’t bring myself to send off another chapter to the publisher, another article to a magazine, write something that isn’t about Izzie and Lizzie and me. Not yet.

My baby bubble is going to burst and the real world is going to come flooding back in. But for today, at least, I have all that I need right here.