The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

This month I'm taking part in the Wildlife Trusts' 30 Days Wild challenge. The idea is to do something 'wild' every day in June. I've been sharing what I've been up to on social media a little but I thought it would be good to do a more detailed summary.  Day 1 : A walk around the local fishing lake led me to an encounter with a family of moorhens. Initially I just saw the adult on the footpath ahead of me but it was soon followed by three chicks. They headed into the lake and were kept undercover but I could still see them clearly.    Day 2: I was sat out in the garden in the afternoon and to my surprise a hedgehog appeared under the fence. Hedgehogs aren't normally seen out during the day and it can often be a sign they are unwell. At this time of year though breeding females will venture out in order to gather resources. This one had a long drink and ate some cat food before eventually returning under the fence and going under next door's shed where w...

This week I listened to an interview with Dr. Amanda Kirby, the UK's leading expert in dyspraxia. One of the things she talked about was how people who are neurodivergent, the general term for being dyspraxic, autistic and many other things, are extremely likely to have a co-occurrence of conditions. She uses an analogy where each diagnosis is a bucket and each trait is a ball thrown into the bucket. In order to obtain a full diagnosis you need to fill the bucket with balls, so you can end up with a bucket that has quite a few balls in but don't have enough to have a diagnosis of that condition.  One day I'll find a subject which doesn't have a related Peanuts image... This got me thinking about my own brain. I know that my dyspraxic bucket is full, but what of the other buckets? It's something I've always wondered- just how neurodivergent am I? Before I go on, I should point out that self-diagnosis is not the way forward and you should speak to a GP or other pr...

Like most of you, I've been shocked at what's been happening in the USA over the last couple of weeks. A police officer kneeled on George Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes and the traumatizing video shows Floyd saying "I can't breathe". Floyd died and this was undeniably murder. It was a particularly shocking example of the inherent racism of many US police officers and sadly Floyd was the latest in a long line of black people who have been killed by the police.  Quite rightly, this led to huge levels of anger and huge protests across America and beyond. Many of these turned unpleasant with looting and arson. I can totally understand the anger that drives such actions but I believe that protests should always be peaceful. Even so, there's no excuse for the utter brutality that the police have used on rioters and protesters. From the outside at least, America seems to be a country at war with it's own people.  In all this, I wonder how I, a white man...