The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

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...