The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

As 2020 limps through it's final days, we've reached the point where I reflect on what the past year has been like for me. As we keep hearing endlessly at the moment, it's been a year like no another (though I suspect anyone who lived through the Spanish 'flu pandemic of 1919 or most of the middle ages who argue differently).  Things began fairly normally, with the vague notion of a nasty bug somewhere in China that we'd never heard of being mentioned on the news occasionally. I returned to work after the Christmas holidays and quickly life began to get tricky. I found myself in ever more stressful scenarios and my mind struggled to cope with this to an extreme I'd never quite experienced before. The anxiety and stress even began to make me physically ill as my immune system began to fight the trauma that it assumed must be coming from.  Then suddenly Boris Johnson popped up to talk about something other than Brexit for the first time. Covid-19 had arrived in th...

We're finally approaching the end of this very long year so the time has come for my annual 'best of' post where I share the things I've enjoyed this year. TV There's actually been some decent TV on this year and it's been impressive how many TV productions have managed to adapt to working safely during the pandemic. I'm not generally a huge viewer of reality TV shows but I do love Masterchef  and have enjoyed the amateur, celebrity and professional versions of the show this year a lot. A pandemic-TV highlight was Staged  where fictionalised versions David Tennant and Martin Sheen rehearsed a play over Zoom, complete with massive special guests like Samuel L. Jackson and Dame Judi Dench. It was utterly hilarious and I'm looking forward to the new series coming in the new year.  It's been a decent year for genre TV. On the whole I enjoyed series 12 of Doctor Who  though I wasn't really sold on the massive re-writing of the show's canon at the ...

Previously on The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan: I finally found myself in a financial position to start looking for a home of my own to buy and grappled with a world of jargon and estate agent bullshit .  I've been holding off writing this post for some time as I didn't want to curse things but I am very excited to share the news that I'm mere weeks away from moving into my own home.  I'd spent quite a long time looking through online listings and had driven around the areas I was looking at to get a sense of which areas and streets were better than others. Then I began to book viewings to some of the places that looked good. The first viewing fell through as the flat sold but the estate agent had a similar property on her books so I went to look at that one instead.  It can only be described as a shithole. As I waited for the estate agent in the rain I couldn't help but notice the terrible state of the exterior. The interior was better and I suppose habitable if...

You can't really work in education and not get some exposure to children's TV. I'm always interested in it- for one thing I think it's really important to understand kids interests and using those interests has led me to teaching some of my best lessons. But beyond that, children's TV shows are strangely fascinating, especially when you start diving into their logic.  Some kids TV shows intentionally reflect the real world. Balamory for example is basically a soap for young children with less murders than Eastenders and everyone wearing outfits which match the exterior of their house for some reason. Shows like Postman Pat  and Fireman Sam  reflect real world jobs.  Pat's career appears to be going well and since my childhood he has been promoted from a neighbourhood postman to being in charge of special deliveries and has the use of a whole fleet of vehicles from a snowmobile to a helicopter. Every delivery seems to involve more drama than the average postal wo...

 This week is anti-bullying week and it got me thinking about my own experiences of bullying.  I was bullied a lot during my childhood. I often don't feel like a normal adult but I was certainly even less normal as a child. I had a love for learning and that probably contributed to me being more academic than at least three quarters of my peers at school (this is not meant as a brag and there is certainly much more to life than knowing things and getting good results). My dyspraxia meant I was pretty rubbish at sport and generally disliked it and it also meant I was generally awkward and clumsy, not that I realised this at the time. I don't believe there is every a reason to be bullied but from my experience at least bullies seek out points of difference. I was certainly different to the norm- I wasn't obsessed with football, I loved school and I had an awkwardness about me. In films bullying is usually portrayed as an endless persecution my one nasty child, usually with tw...

I've spent far too much time over the last twenty-four hours considering possible names for the sequel to lockdown. Lockdown- The Revenge? Lockdown 2: Electric Boogaloo? Lockdown 2: Judgement Day? Lockdown with a Vengeance? 2 Lockdown 2 Furious? Honestly, there's plenty more where those came from.  The point is, here in England we're going into lockdown once again. I think most sensible people understand that it's a necessity (we've all seen the graphs with the edges cut off the screen) but it's still not something any of us really want.  This image has been very useful this year The feeling is that the government could have handled things better. Over the summer they encouraged people to 'eat out to help out', a scheme which this week was shown to cause an increase in Covid cases. Then they started telling people to go back to work before realising this was also not a good idea and making a U-turn, a regular occurrence this year.  The biggest point of c...

In my last blog post, I wrote about trauma and a few days later I thought about one of the most traumatic moments of my childhood. I should point out that this tale isn't meant to be taken as a genuine trauma before I start recounting it.  So let's travel back to the late 90s. I was maybe six or seven and was enjoying primary school and my prized possession was a bouncy ball- I've always been easy to please. As bouncy balls go, this was top of the range. The top half was clear and the bottom half was a translucent blue which represented the sea because embedded in the centre of this bouncy ball was a plastic dolphin. For a short period, this ball accompanied me everywhere.  One day I had a day off school, presumably an INSET day, and so I had to accompany my Dad to pick up my younger brother from nursery. My Dad, very much in character, was talking for what felt like some time to another parent so as we waited my brother and I played on the long disabled ramp which led to t...

I've been thinking about trauma lately.  Pretty much of all of us go through some sort of trauma in our lives. It will affect us and change who we are but most of us can find ways to move beyond it, even if we'll never quite be over it. Of course, there are some traumas that are too great and traumas in childhood (the technical name is Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs) are likely to have lasting damage to adulthood.  When we think of trauma we probably think of some violent event and though that sort of thing does happen far too often, the majority of us don't face something quite so extreme. For me, my life changed towards the end of my time at university when I found myself in my final teaching placement. I'd been making steady progress over my time at university and suddenly I found it all crashing down around me.    For a long time, I blamed my failures on myself but over time that has changed. I can't ever fully distance myself from them because ultimately...

This week is Dyspraxia Awareness Week 2020 and this year I came up with an idea for a dyspraxic alphabet. I asked the dyspraxia community online for some inspiration and the result is a collection of things which I think sum up what it's like to be dyspraxic really well. Obviously, experiences vary and no two people are the same so some things on the list may reflect more people than others. I can also only write my own personal experiences so other people may or may not feel the same way about these things. Auditory Processing - Though it's easy to perceive dyspraxia as simply a condition that makes you clumsy, really it's all to do with how the brain processes information. Auditory processing is something I can find difficult and I often find myself anticipating a question and answering it quickly, only to find I've wrongly anticipated and have said something really odd. The alternative is an uncomfortable pause which feels like it lasts forever as my brain tries to p...

I find myself edging ever closer to being a fully functioning adult as the wheels are very much in motion to begin the process of owning my own home. It is of course hugely exciting and I keep coming up with ever more reasons why it will be fantastic- the latest being the realisation that I will be able to live in a town that actually has pizza places that will deliver to the door. There's an element of fear to it as well- whilst I know I can look after myself, I lived away from home for four years when I was a student, living with no other human beings in the home is a little daunting.  Before all that though, I've got what is essentially a sea of admin ahead of me. My mortgage offer in principle will be confirmed any day now and so I'm finding myself wading through a seemingly endless online property listings. It turns out looking at houses is complicated and I'm basically having to learn a whole new language. So far I've discovered that the word 'maisonette...

Yesterday was the day I'd been building up to for most of the year, the day I would be walking twenty-six miles around Salisbury and Stonehenge to raise money for Alzheimer's Society. When I signed up back in December I obviously hadn't anticipated that 2020 would be such an odd year and this led to the trek coming at the end of my first week back at work after six months. This had both the advantage of giving me far more time to train than I had anticipated but also the worry that I would be exhausted after adjusting back to work life.  Fortunately, I had a great first week back and the 5AM start felt surprisingly straightforward. After traveling to Salisbury and then getting a shuttle bus to the start (once the driver had gone around most of the city to find it) we were ready to go.  The first eleven miles were easy. We wandered along a long tarmac cycle path and through Salisbury city centre, passing its magnificent cathedral so beloved by members of the KGB. Eventually,...

Whilst I generally consider myself a modern millennial, in some ways I am quite old-fashioned. One such example is that I keep a long-form diary.  I've been doing it for so long that I can't remember why I started. I know that I first experimented with a diary on a holiday to Cornwall when I was ten years old. By that point, my English skills were surprisingly advanced and the week's journey reports on a variety of trips out, all of which were hugely exciting to the ten-year-old me.  I must have decided I liked it because the following year I began a proper, permanent diary. I wasn't particularly disciplined at writing in it for a few years but I wrote every now and then. Initially, it seemed to mostly focus on the minor dramas in my ten and eleven-year-old life, like who my best friend was. As my teenage years began and hormones kicked in it seemed to focus increasingly more on which girl I fancied at any given moment in time and my constant inner battle of whether to ...

Since lockdown began I've got into quite a few podcasts on a variety of subjects. One of these is 'Films to be Buried With', hosted by comedian and actor Brett Goldstein. Every week he has a famous guest who shares their favourite films through a series of questions- it's a bit like 'Desert Island Discs' for film. Now I'm never likely to be famous to be invited on the podcast but I thought I could use the format for a blog post... I'm really sorry to have to tell you this but you died... Oh shit! Typical of it to happen without me noticing.  How did you die? I expect I tripped over something. I probably tripped over a slightly uneven paving slab, fell into the road and was hit by a large lorry. At least it was quick.  Do you worry about death? Do you believe in an afterlife? Well, I'm certainly not comfortable with the concept of dying and I suppose that's because I don't believe in an afterlife. I believe you just stop and that's it.  Fo...