The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

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 ...

It’s another dark time for Europe. Thousands upon thousands of migrants are travelling into the continent, mostly Syrian, desperately trying to escape the horrors that their home country has become. It’s been constantly in the news here in the UK as groups of migrants desperately try to make it into the channel tunnel at Calais and boats full of barely alive people are found by various authorities. And then there was this photo, which is devastatingly sad: Immigration was a big issue in the last election here, and I found that a bit strange. The idea of people owning a country seems ridiculous. I really struggle to understand that people don’t like foreigners and think Britain should be for the British. We’re a country that has constantly evolved from waves of immigration, right back to Vikings, Saxons and Romans. Why on Earth have we suddenly decided this should stop? My experience of what people in other countries believe is limited but I suspect there are foreigner-haters pre...

As I write, it’s the final day of the summer holidays and the familiar but unpleasant feeling of having to go back to work tomorrow has arrived. It’s silly really as things won’t really be much different to the way they were six weeks but there’s a feeling of anxiety nonetheless. Damn you, brain! It’s been longer than I intended since my last post, and that’s mainly because I’ve mostly been working. I did 21 hours paid work last week (as well as driving to and from the various workplaces), which is quite a lot considering it was supposed to be my last week of holiday. As well as filling my time, it also means I didn’t do anything to inspire a decent blog post so you’re just getting this ramble instead. One child at work described me as a “clumsy ninja” which I think is a hilarious and somehow apt description of me. Being dyspraxic I am certainly clumsy but I like to think I have some qualities of a ninja about me. I’m generally fairly quiet and ninjas are quiet so there’s definite...

You wouldn’t think watching tea time quiz shows would lead me to an idea for a blog post but nonetheless it has. There’s a show entitled ‘Two Tribes’ in which two teams compete at answering questions against each other. In each round the teams are decided by a yes or no statement. I figured that these sorts of questions can actually tell you quite a lot about someone- thus, I arrived at a blog post idea. I have a tattoo – NO I really, really don’t like tattoos, to the extreme that I would struggle to go out with a woman who has one. It’s difficult to really come up with a rational reason why- maybe it’s just the idea of permanently altering your body. I can just about accept a small token about someone you love but tattoos as art or just for the sake of them are not good things. It feels like an attempt at trying to express yourself without really knowing what you want to say.  In summary, there is no way I will ever have a tattoo.   I believe in the afterlife – NO ...

I do believe it is time for my pretty-much monthly mish-mash of thoughts about things. Now that’s a sentence that is difficult to say out loud! I’m now in the early stages of my summer holiday. It feels a bit odd still having the same 6-week period to relax in at 23 as I did when I was 6. That’s the oddity of working in a school. In fact because I went straight from school to university and then straight onto working in a school I’ve only ever known that life where I have a long summer holiday. It’s pretty hard to imagine working through the summer. I suspect must people would be thrilled to begin six weeks of not having to work. I am less so. It’s not because I love my job so much. I’m obviously pleased that I don’t have to work, it’s just that six weeks is a lot of time to fill. I will be doing a few shifts of my summer job but not many because I desperately need a break from working. But beyond that I have literally nothing to fill my time with. It’s Day 5 as I write this and a...

So this is a completely 100% original idea for a post which was not at all inspired by posts from  Samantha ,  Tim  and  Tabitha . I thought if an idea is good enough for such excellent and entertaining bloggers then little old me could certainly have a go at it. I have really had to avoid a discussion on the time travelling logistics of this feature. I did wonder if I was allowed to say things that would dramatically change my life because if the younger me did actually read the letter and dramatically changed my life than the current me would not have to have given the advice, thus creating a paradox. If that makes sense. And surely if my advice in one letter works, the content of a later letter would not be valid. Basically, it’s all a bit timey-wimey so I’m just going to ignore that worry and get the hell on with it. To Dan, Aged 5 Don’t swing back on that chair whilst you are eating Christmas dinner. Mummy and Daddy will be sad when you fall through ...

Every now and then I like to write a blog post which is a mish-mash of thoughts. There’s no real connection beyond the fact that I have been thinking about them. Sometimes it’s major world news, sometimes it’s closer to home. So, let’s see the kaleidoscope of stuff my brain has come up with this month. Gay Marriage Or as we now simply call it, marriage. The supreme court in the USA has voted that marriage between two people of the same gender should be legal, like it is in most of the Western world. I am delighted. I have mentioned here before about how equality is so important to me and although there are issues in other areas, the biggest one globally is how gay people are treated. I cannot imagine how horrible it would be not to be allowed to marry the person you love because the government has decided that person is the wrong gender for you to love. It’s ridiculous. I once had quite a heated argument with a Christian about gay marriage. It seems silly that some parts of a r...