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...