The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

I found myself feeling deeply uncomfortable at one point this week. I was at a training session at work and, for reasons I won't get into, we were discussing failure. We were asked to make a note of a failure we've had and what we learned form it before sharing it with others. I immediately knew what my answer ought to be but I brushed it aside knowing I would find talking about it uncomfortable. In the end I selected my GCSE music result instead. I have fairly respectable GCSEs, an A in Science and a B in eight other subjects. On top of that I got an E for music. I can distinctly remember a conversation with a teacher when discussing my GCSE options and they said that I didn't need to play an instrument in order to do GCSE music. Given that part of the grades is formed by a performance this statement wasn't true and my limited clarinet skills were of little sue. I squeaked my way through an ABBA piece whilst my peers performed classical music masterpieces. I wor...

Climate change has been in the news a lot this week, as it always should be. David Attenborough presented a documentary called Climate Change: The Facts and protesters under the banner of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ have been holding up traffic & generally causing a nuisance  in London.  *Finally* an excuse to use Snoopy's brother Spike as an image! I regularly consider whether I am personally doing enough to combat climate change. The biggest thing that contributes to my personal carbon footprint is my car. I do less than 250 miles a week which is not an enormous amount but still has an impact. I do what I can to keep the amount low- my car has fairly low emissions, I never sit with the engine running and I tend to walk short journeys. In an ideal world I’d travel by public transport but I don’t live in a city, there’s no rail line running through the town and buses are limited & don’t start or stop anywhere near where I need them to.  Food is probably t...

I'm a big fan of lateral thinking BBC quiz show Only Connect . Contestants on the show get the most bizarre introductions along the lines of "Bob, a fitness instructor from Manchester who once nearly ran over Noel Gallagher". Often an unusual encounter with a celebrity is a key part of the statement. This got me wondering about what my introduction might be were I to ever appear on the show and one possibility would be "Dan, a teaching assistant from Hampshire who once accidentally gave Alan Titchmarsh a pen". On the show these snippets are rarely explained further but I cannot resist sharing my Titchmarsh tale. Like many British teenagers, I did the Duke of Edinburgh award. In my case this involving learning Japanese, doing conservation work and trekking through the forest with a group of people I mostly did not like. Apart from the odd sticky moment like failing to identify a medical acronym put to me by the assessor or getting told we were trespassing by an...

Many people around my age were first drawn into the world of literature by Harry Potter. Whilst I too enjoyed the boy wizard, my love for books had long since been cemented by the time I discovered the wizarding world. Once my reading ability reached a decent level I was exploring all sorts of incredible worlds. I was really lucky to become a teenager when fiction aimed at teenagers underwent a huge boom. One of the earliest series I discovered was The Edge Chronicles . Written by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell with Riddell's gorgeous line drawings throughout, the series tells the stories of young adventurers exploring and surviving the fantasy world of The Edge. I can remember my Dad reading the first book Beyond the Deepwoods  to me and being enthralled by the journey and the monstrous creatures young Twig encounters on the way.  The Edge I loved, and indeed still do, the way books can take you anywhere. I enjoyed Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, the boy genius c...