The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

Before we get into the meat of this post, welcome to The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan . In my last post I explained how I feel I have finally completed the upgrade and have become Dan 2.0. I have spent considerable time this week trying to decide on a new name. My first thought was 'Good Grief' inspired by Charlie Brown but it turns out that is the name of several bereavement blogs. I considered using my love for walking with titles like 'The Wanderer' but that is used by endless travel blogs. Both of those elements find a place in the title image but The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan  became the new title, mainly because it allows me to title individual posts like they are Sherlock Holmes stories.  Like many Sundays, I found myself walking down a gravel track. This week I was in Cannon Hill near the Dorset town of Wimborne. It's a rather charming woodland and the Spring sunshine made it a rather pleasant day. Despite the warmer weather it was surprisingly q...

Since I last wrote, I became twenty-seven. It's a number that seem inconceivably big. It's perhaps appropriate that new research from Cambridge University was published this week which claims that your brain doesn't mature until you are thirty- essentially you do not become an adult until around the time of your thirtieth birthday. This seems plausible to me. Sometimes I still feel like I'm sixteen, barely knowing how to function. I am however starting to have a feeling like I know what I'm doing more regularly. I can have a week where I drive a reasonable distance to do a quite challenging course one day and then teach a class of autistic children all day the next. Yet it's still perfectly plausible to find me in the evening watching Scooby-Doo 2  whilst eating jelly popping candy chocolate. Whilst my brain is developing, it sometimes feels like my body is starting to do the opposite. I awoke just two days after my twenty-seventh birthday to find that most ...

I discovered some new things about myself this week. I've known for a few years now that I have dyspraxia, a developmental coordination disorder. It's the reason why the fiddly petrol cap on my new car caused enormous anxiety for the first six weeks I owned it and why I fell flat on my face in the middle of a PE lesson at work last week. I think there is at least one moment every single day when I struggle with something delicate or trip over. I've lived with these issues all my life and over the last five years since discovering the cause I've begun to understand it. I've also been aware that dyspraxia is more than just being clumsy and that it affects my life in other ways, but my understanding of this side of things is limited. If I spot an article about dyspraxia I tend to read it because I usually learn something and occasionally I find one which teaches me a lot. ' Studying with dyspraxia ' was published on The Guardian online this week- I'm...

During our lives, we accumulate stuff. Every object we own tells a story and I think with just five well-selected objects we can tell the story of a life. Here is my life in five objects. This is Mexico, a bear I have had for as long as I can remember. He is called Mexico apparently after Tom Jones song The Young New Mexican Puppeteer  on the basis he is also a hand puppet- I think my parents can be blamed for the name. My grandparents bought him in Guernsey when they went on holiday and once he arrived in my hands he became something very special. Why Mexico became the special one over all other toys I do not know but he went pretty much everywhere with me. He was the bear that accompanied me when we did a teddy bear's picnic at school and the bear that my parents rushed around Southampton city centre trying to find when I lost him on a Christmas shopping trip. Indeed, I can distinctly remember being in a Boot's store and realised he was missing and eventually finding h...