Appropriately for a goalkeeper, Middleton-Patel has green fingers, with tomato plants her favourites.
However, she can only eat small cherry tomatoes because she finds the big ones, with their slimy, jelly-like interior, repulsive – something plenty of neurodivergent people will agree with. Once hers are fully grown, she happily gives them away to friends and team-mates.
Asked where she stands on the debate about them being a fruit or a vegetable, she has no doubt, having researched the matter. “Oh!” she says, with the excitement of a true tomato enthusiast.
“I understand either side, but where I put it in my garden, in my little home allotment, it’s with the veg. I think it’s a veg, but scientists might say otherwise.”
One aspect of neurodivergency that is still not fully appreciated is the breadth and depth of sensory issues that can be a part of it.
Middleton-Patel struggles with sunlight – she is not alone in finding grey skies are, somehow, even brighter and more painful than clear blue, sunny ones – to the extent she often has to wear sunglasses in the gym because the windows are so big.
And then there’s cutlery – specifically the size of ‘normal’ forks, which to her make it look as though people are eating with a garden spade.
“I have my own set of forks in our lunch room,” she says. “They are officially kids’ cutlery – that’s what I use. I use them at home too. I have tactile issues and weight issues – the look of a, if you want to say ‘normal’, fork makes me really angry. I can’t explain the feeling but I want to throw it out of the window.”
While she stresses how supportive both her team-mates and the club are, there is one tight-knit band she is particularly close to – her fellow ‘Lego Club’ members Jess Simpson, Leah Galton and Rachel Williams.
“We all bounce off each other, but they also know when I just need a hand on the leg to be like: ‘Calm down. You can breathe. You’re fine. You’re safe here,'” she says.
“I don’t know how they do it, but when I can’t get my words out, they know what I’m trying to say. They’ll speak on my behalf and I think that is massive for me because sometimes I’ll be sat in a meeting and I will go mute.
“People are looking at me and I’ll stare at the floor, and they’ll be there: ‘She’s trying to say this. We’ve just discussed it, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ And they’re just perfect. They understand me. They don’t want me to fake anything, they just want me to be me. As simple as that.”
If only life itself were that simple, for activities many people undertake with barely a second thought – shopping for example – can lead to her taking fairly unusual measures.
Buying clothes is difficult enough already, because her issues with texture make it difficult to find items she feels comfortable in, but the process itself is also very stressful, and she now does almost all of her shopping online as a result.
“One thing I think people don’t consider is the anxiety side,” she says.
“When clothes shop assistants come up to me, like ‘can I help you?’ Er, no. Are you meant to help? Am I meant to say yes? No, I’m fine. But then I say it so bluntly they’re like ‘Okaaay…’ And I’m like ‘oh no, I didn’t mean it like that’.
“One thing that makes me laugh is – and I wish I could overcome this – when I go to get petrol I have to go to a ‘pay at pump’ station. I will drive an extra 15 minutes just to avoid going into a till one because of the fear of that conversation and not knowing what they’re going to say.
“The only store I can go into is Lego because I know what I’m going in for. I can actually make conversation because they love Lego as much as I love Lego, but that’s literally the only store.”
Lego is derived from the Danish ‘leg godt’, which means ‘play well’ in English. As she heads to the Euros, surely it will not only be Wales fans sending her off with the message ‘leg godt Safia, leg godt’.