The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

2018 has been a rough year in many ways. Much loved celebrities have turned out to be sexual predators, in the US Donald Trump is still somehow president and in the UK we've had endless talk of Brexit without any results whatsoever. The weather has been too cold and then too hot and then too wet. Personally too it's been a pretty bad year for one reason or another but thankfully we've reached the end of this depressing year. I thought it would be nice to end on something of a positive note and so I'm sharing some of the things I've enjoyed most this year (all items were released this year in the UK so far as I'm aware). Best TV Show: Killing Eve In any year with a Doctor Who series I expect that to be at the top of my list and as much as I enjoyed the new series with Jodie Whittaker's Doctor it didn't make the top spot. Other highlights include the BBC's two Agatha Christie adaptions ( Ordeal by Innocence and The ABC Murders ) and conspiracy-th...

One of the most familiar Christmas traditions is little children performing a nativity. The kids look cute in their costumes mostly made from towels whilst their parents sit on plastic chairs being either bored or tearful depending on their personality. Teachers work extremely hard to put it all together and one of their biggest challenges is trying to give all the children roles in a show where there are at best about ten human parts to play.  It's for this reason that modern nativities often have a range of obscure animals turning up to witness the birth of Jesus Christ. I suppose that just because the bible does mention some lobsters being present in the stable does not mean there weren't any. One of the most obvious choices to fill roles is sheep. The shepherds famously watched their flocks by night and the word 'flocks' is a useful to those casting a nativity as it allows many of the children to be present on stage covered in cotton wool and occasionally ma...

I was driving to work last Friday when it hit me. On this occasion I am not talking about an epiphany, I am talking about being physically struck. "It" can refer to any noun but this time it refers to an airbag. It was a gloomy morning with the sun still rising and failing to make much of impression through the December rain. 'Close to Me' by Ellie Goulding, Diplo and Swae Lee was playing on the radio as I turned the corner to join the dual carriageway as I do everyday. It seemed to be quite busy, probably due to the poor weather, and the headlights refracting off the rain made visibility poor. I had to really concentrate to confirm it was safe to pull onto the road and eventually I concluded it was. My foot pushed down on the pedal and the car began to accelerate. WHAM! "WHAM" is never a good noise to hear when you are in a car. I sat for a moment inspecting my surroundings. My car was now motionless on the edge of the dual carriageway with other vehicl...

You may have seen or heard about a video this week which shows a teenage boy bullying a Syrian refugee. This attack was clearly motivated by race but across the country and indeed the world there are people bullying others over any differences they might perceive. There were several reasons I think I was bullied as a child. I was fairly bright and enjoyed learning, something which inexplicably is not deemed as cool. Being dyspraxic, though I didn't know it at the time, meant I was generally awkward and useless at anything remotely practical. In films or TV shows the format is fairly clear. You are bullied by one person, sometimes with help from their friends, for years until eventually you crack or end up gaining superpowers. My experience was never quite like that. For me, it was more a series of disturbed personalities that sought me out as a way of making them better about themselves. Usually it would last until they got bored or the school would change the classes around....

Today NASA have landed a spacecraft on Mars and I’m delighted to have a link to it. On board Insight is a fingernail-sized microchip which contains my name (along with 2.4 million others). Whilst it’s extremely unlikely I’ll ever go into space myself, there’s something brilliant knowing that my name is currently 34 million miles away on another planet.  I’ve also been reaching for the stars in another way lately. In this case it’s the more figurative meaning, to have high or ambitious aims. About six weeks ago an internal job application was announced at work for an HLTA, a higher level teaching assistant. It’s essentially a middle ground between being a teaching assistant and a teacher, exactly the sort of thing I’ve been seeking for some time. It would be a big step on terms of both responsibility and pay. Immediately after it was advertised my lack of self-confidence bubbled up as it tends to do in such situations. I think any job application requires some leve...

This weekend marks the hundred anniversary of the end of the First World War. Better people than me have written about the horror and pointlessness of that and every other war so I'm not going to try and be overly profound but simply share my own experiences and how they helped me to understand what it must have been like to be fighting in that terrible war. When I was thirteen I went on a trip to the First World War battlefields and cemeteries in France and Belgium. It was an experience I think that made me reassess the world and perhaps the time when the fairy tale innocence of childhood vanished forever. At thirteen, I was only a few years younger than many people who actually fought in the war. Indeed, the youngest person to have fought and died in the war was only twelve. Here are five things I saw on that trip. This is the Lochnagar Crater, left by a mine during the Battle of the Somme. It's huge, some thirty metres (98 feet) deep and a hundred metres (330 feet...

We need to talk about The Great British Bake Off.  This year's winner was crowned this week and everyone seems to have an opinion on them. Obviously there will be spoilers but I'm assuming if you've come this far then you are ready for them. Rahul Mandal is the winner of the 2018 series. He is an amazing baker who got more infamous Hollywood handshakes than anyone else and won "Star Baker" two times. Some people feel he should have been eliminated in the latter stages of the competition where he had a few slip-ups but really only Prue and Paul know what the right decision was. I was surprised to discover some people don't like Rahul- I've heard them say things like "he should be feeling more confident now" to the extent that some people even believe he was pretending to be shy. This comes from people who have never really suffered major issues with their self-confidence. I have and I know exactly how it goes. It doesn't matter how many...

I have a strange relationship with Halloween. I actively participate in all the other "holidays" as Americans would call them but I've always found the notion of Halloween a bit odd. All Hallows Eve was first used as a phrase around 1556 and there's debate about where it came from. All Hallows Eve was certainly a Christian religious observance and still is in many places with services and the lighting of candles on the graves of the dead. Most people think Halloween traditions originated from Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic Samhain, which probably had pagan roots. There is debate about whether modern Halloween is a combination of the two or was a Christian event which later had some old pagan ideas attached to it. Samhain marked the end of the summer and start of the winter with people believing that this was a liminal time when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld, where 'spirits' or 'fairies' could more easily c...

We all know that there are major issues with the way society treats women. But there is also a problem with the way society treats men. It's all part of the same issue really, where gender roles are still defined like they were hundreds of years ago. I'm not saying that being a man is harder than being a woman, far from it, but I thought I'd talk about my negative experiences with growing up male. I certainly look masculine. I'm big and hairy and for many that makes me intimidating. I watch as people greet someone in front of me and then completely ignore me, avoiding eye contact let alone conversation. Sometimes people cross over the street from me. I completely understand why people have that attitude. Men that look like me commit all sorts of horrible crimes. But it's still an unpleasant feeling to have people totally avoid you because of how you look. The 'me too' movement is something I really support but it adds an unnerving element to approaching ...

I'm excited because this weekend sees Doctor Who return to TV. I am a huge fan. I've often felt that being a Whovian is not a cool thing to be and many others look down at fandom. But I think most people have a obsession over something. Why is loving and being knowledgeable about Doctor Who any different from loving and being knowledgeable about a football team? For me it began on 26th March 2006 when Billie Piper's character Rose Tyler met the Doctor, then Christopher Eccleston. I had seen a few repeats of old episodes when I was much younger and went to a Doctor Who museum with a load of the costumes on a family holiday to Wales but this was my first proper encounter with the show. And I loved it. Since then I've watched every episode from the 1963 debut through to the modern day. I've read countless Doctor Who novels and magazines and own a range of Who stuff from T-shirts to pencil cases. I've visited the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff and also been ...

On one day last week I accidentally left my phone at home. I sat at lunch time feeling a bit twitchy about not having it with me and not knowing what to do with myself. Then I thought this is silly, humans have lived without smartphones for the vast majority of their existence. Why am I addicted to my device? This gave me an idea. This week, I limited my screen time to just thirty minutes a day. For the rest of the day my phone would be switched off. I know I spend far more time on my phone than is healthy. I'm endlessly scrolling through social media and news sites as well as filling time by playing inane games rather than doing something productive. I also find that my phone serves as a convenient barrier from having to actually talk to people, which perhaps doesn't serve my best interests. According to an Ofcom survey, people in the UK check their smartphones on average every 12 minutes of the waking day. 40% of under 35s look at their phone within five minutes of wak...

Tomorrow is the first day of Autumn, probably my favourite season. The world becomes alive with colours as the leaves change from green to a rainbow of yellows, oranges, reds and browns. It gives you a range of smells and sights you only get as this time of year. These sights and smells evoke memories of the season in previous years, ghosts of Autumns past... September 2000, 8AM "Dad, I need something to take in for the harvest assembly!" I chirp. I'm dressed in the bright blue jumper that signifies I go to the local junior school rather than the dark green of the rival school on the other side of town. "Why have you left it to now?" my Dad grumbles and heads into the kitchen to fish around in the tin cupboard. I think most kitchens have a similar cupboard where inexplicably purchased tinned goods are stored until the time someone finally sorts through them or an event such as a harvest assembly calls upon the services of the cupboard. Eventually Dad p...

I regularly spend time thinking about who I am. Part of that is being dyspraxic, something I've discussed from time to time here. Dyspraxia, or "developmental coordination disorder" is a mild learning difficulty, historically referred to as 'clumsy child syndrome', though it continues into adulthood. It essentially means I'm incredibly clumsy, have terrible balance and am terrible at sport or anything that requires dexterity. I sometimes wonder how much it affects other areas of my life. There are plenty of other traits beyond the physical ones and I question how much the direction of my life has been unknowingly shaped by this disorder. I should point out that I only discovered I have dyspraxia in my early twenties when I was studying special needs for a module at university and suddenly discovered a perfect description of my childhood. Even now I know relatively little about it so today I'm looking into some of the non-physical traits. "Some ...

Today I'm going to discuss my frankly ridiculous hobby, geocaching. Geocaching is most poetically described as using multi-million pound satellites to find tupperware in the woods. Here's how it works: someone hides a container, often but not limited to tupperware, in a location worth visiting, again not limited to woods. As they do so they take get the GPS co-ordinates of the location of the container, or "geocache", and these are listed online. Using a GPS device or just an app on a phone you can find the exact location of the container. When you get there you sign your name in the log book within the container and then write up your adventure online. It's all very silly but also a lot of fun. What I really love about geocaching is the way it takes me to all sorts of places I wouldn't otherwise visit. Often there's lots of information about the place within the online listing. I like looking at the local map and then heading to an are where there...

Earlier in the year I shared my favorite books that I'd read during the first four months of 2018. Well we are now approaching the end of August so it's time to share my favourite books from May to August! Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Brave New World is usually described as a dystopian novel but for me that's simplistic.Huxley gives us a near future world where through the use of genetic conditioning and what is essentially brainwashing, everyone is bred for their place in society and is perfectly happy to inhabit it. When they do occasionally start having emotions they take the side-effect free drug soma to stop them. Everyone compares this to George Orwell's 1984 though they are very different books. 1984 is about a government using technology to control its citizens for their own purposes. Whilst there's a similar idea here, the world controllers of Brave New World aren't really controlling the people to suppress them- they are doing it to make t...