The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

Prime Minister Theresa May announced her resignation this week as she's totally failed to make any progress with Brexit. Whilst I don't really agree with her politics, I do have sympathy for her. Trying to keep both the EU and all the British MPs happy was an impossible task. She's been blamed for Grenfell Tower and Universal Credit but these were caused by her predecessor, who can also be blamed for the whole mess that is Brexit.  As endless Tory MPs announce they want to be the next PM, I started to wonder what I would do if I was prime minister. Welcome to the Danifesto.  Spending My big plan is to increase spending on public services in order to start fixing problems caused by years of austerity. "Where would the money come from to do this?" I hear you ask. My idea is to undertake a major review into the structure of public services and work to cut both the excessive wages that many in managerial roles have and the number of managers there are....

I recently joined a Facebook group for adults with dyspraxia and it's been something of an eye-opener. I often think that certain things I do are a bit weird but it turns out that in this community they are perfectly normal. Recently something that has been discussed is 'verbal dyspraxia', a phrase I'd heard of but didn't really know much about. A Google search gives you this definition: "A child with verbal dyspraxia has difficulty planning and coordinating their movement of muscles used (e.g. tongue, lips, jaw, palate) to produce the right speech sounds or words." That was very much me, to the extent that as a young child I regularly saw a speech therapist. I spent years doing tongue twisters and can now say "Lucy likes lemon lollies least" with ease thanks to significant practice in order to be able to say the "l" sound. I was also told I needed help with my speech because I used to get a lot of ear infections. The belief seem...

I have an ever-growing love of cinema which really ramped up a notch when I discovered Letterboxd , a website for film lovers where you can record the films you watch. Then I discovered the Letterbox Season Challenge. The basic premise is that every week for nine months you watch a film with a certain theme that you've never seen before. This included different genres, directors, film movements and more. It's an odyssey into cinema and I had such a great time doing it. It started fairly sedately with "Coming of Age in the 2010s" for which I watched a lovely British film called Submarine . It wasn't long before I was delving into new territory though and in week two for "Australian New Wave" I found myself watching Kangaroo , an obscure Aussie film based on an obscure D.H. Lawrence novel. By week three I found myself watching Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai , a film entirely in Japanese. It was all a bit bonkers. I ended up watching some really brill...