The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

I recently read Neil Gaiman’s collection of non-fiction,  The View From the Cheap Seats,  and one of the many brilliant articles in it was sharing memories of four bookshops. This is my version of that. 1 The Ashley Bookshop was the place I demanded my parents take me at the weekend when I was very young. Located in Boscombe (Bournemouth) it was an unusual place. My memories of it are fairly limited. I couldn’t tell you for example if it sold new or second hand books. I do know though that in a former life it was a church but the pews had been removed and replaced with long rows of bookshelves. My main goal in visiting was to buy a  Blackberry Farm  book. They were stories of anthropomorphised animals on the titular farm. I would read the list of titles in the series on the back of the books over and over again and be hugely satisfied when I filled in a gap. Sadly at some point the bookshop closed down and I never had the opportunity to look for more grow...

I’ve popped up a day early because today is World Blood Donor Day. It’s a cause that’s very important to me and I’ve donated blood since I started university six years ago. Most people are horrified at the thought of giving blood. The very idea of a needle being stuck into your arm and blood flowing out of it is not pleasant. Even as a regular blood donor I can’t say it’s pleasant. I find the actual process of giving blood uncomfortable and still can’t actually bring myself to look at my arm when it’s happening. Physically though, it’s not really that bad. There’s a slight pain but it’s nothing compared to standing on a plug for example. There’s a lot of things which are worse. There is a reasonable chance that you’ve had a blood test or at least an injection before. It was probably unpleasant but the vast majority of people will cope with it OK. Giving blood is the same and the more you do it the more you get used to it. I don’t feel I have very much to offer to the world. I do...

The wilderness months are over. I’m back. I lost my blogging inspiration back in the latter stages of 2015 and this blog was neglected. It evens turns out some people miss it. But suddenly it’s late spring of 2016 and I want to write. If this blog was a TV show (an unsettling thought), this is the start of a new season after a hiatus. Like a new TV show season, there is a slight change of direction. It’ll still be ostensibly the same but I’m thinking that the blog will focus less on what I’ve been doing and more on my opinions on things. On which note, time to talk about what I’ve been doing. For a start, I’ve written a novel. An actual 50,000 and a bit word story that you can actually download as an eBook anywhere in the world. I still find it a little odd that I can actually say that. I wrote a short post about the book and how you can get it  here . I am still in the same job, a teaching assistant working with children who have autism. If anything it’s more fulfilling tha...

How an astronaut helped give me a new perspective on life We’re already a fair chunk of the way into 2016 so I thought it was about time I updated things here. As you get older time seems to pass ever more quickly and it stuns me that it’s the 13th February 2016 already. It’s been an eventful year for me so far, though internally rather than externally. It is impossible to begin a new year in the modern world without being surrounded by people embarking on the idea of “new year, new me”. I suspect by this point the majority of new year’s resolutions will have fallen by the wayside. Since becoming an adult I have ignored the idea of new year resolutions and this year was was ostensibly no different. Somehow though, I think a little bit of the sudden increase in my peers attempting to improve themselves rubbed off on me. Whilst I didn’t have a concrete resolution I began to think that 2016 should be the year I sorted myself out. I gave up on the idea of becoming a teacher...

2015 is stumbling to an end. Another year been and gone. Time to look back at the year that’s been and ahead at the year to come because that’s sort of mandatory on a personal blog. If I had to sum up 2015 in a word, the word would be “dull”. My life has never exactly been thrilling but 2015 was my first year spent entirely in employment. Day after day driving to work, running around after children and then driving home again. It’s the first year in quite a while that I’ve not had any sort of holiday, not even a few days away in the UK. One thing I did achieve in 2015 was passing my driving test. It was something I should have achieved in 2014 but I finally succeeded in February. Now that I’ve been driving for the best part of a year I struggle to imagine how there was ever a time I couldn’t pass a driving test. It seems natural to me and I barely need to think about what I am doing. Driving has changed my life, although perhaps not as much as I might have imagined. I certainly do...

It has been a couple of weeks since I last wrote, which was somewhat inevitable over the first few weeks of the academic year. It’s always challenging coming back to work after the summer break and the new class I’m working in is hard work. But actually, it’s good hard work. Yes, readers of this blog are no doubt used to me complaining about feeling miserable and generally unhappy with the way my life has turned out. But that’s changed, for now at least. Am unfamiliar but warm, satisfactory feeling has suddenly appeared. I’m enjoying my teaching assistant job more than ever, with a lovely set of children and a strong staff team. It also helps that we’ve been fully-staffed and the staff team is not going to change, which is the total opposite of how things were last September. I still feel I should be earning more money but living with my parents means I don’t spend very much at all and after a year of earning I’ve already got a reasonable amount of money saved. Having spent some t...

I have  talked in the past  about the relatively recent discovery that I have dyspraxia. It’s not something I really think about every day but having a special need which has affected me all my life feels like a big thing. Every now and then I discover that dyspraxia explains yet another small part of my life. I thought it would be interesting to take a dyspraxia questionnaire I found online and see just how much of an impact it had and has on my life. As a baby / young child were you aware of any problem in the following areas : Milestones: Crawling, Walking, Speaking: Nothing significant has ever been told to me about this milestones, that they were late or anything. Dressing for P.E, managing small buttons, fastening zips: I can’t really remember as a child but I do have difficulty with these things now. I work with young children who often need these things doing for them and I find it really difficult, especially because I am doing it from a different angle to the ...