The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

I should being this post by stating that I have great affection for my Father. He stayed at home to look after me whilst my Mum went to work in a time where that was still highly unusual. He's therefore perhaps the biggest influence on who I am today.  He's also full of rubbish. I suspect he would agree with me. We spent quite a lot of time together during 2020 thanks to lockdown and I began to notice he was a constant source of irrelevant and often banal trivia. I began to make a note of the trivia he spouted on my phone under the title "Dad Facts". I use the word 'fact' quite loosely as I suspect many of these may not be entirely true and I have not looked into them any further.  Here are twenty Dad Facts from the last year: 1. The town of Blandford in Dorset burnt down in 1731 and was rebuilt in brick and tile. This is why houses are not generally built of wood and thatch anymore.   It seems quite a stretch to me that one large fire could be considered resp...

Sometimes things don’t quite end up going as you imagine them. Shortly after discovering I was going to be able to have the Covid vaccination, I had a thought about a blog post. Knowing that I would probably have received the vaccination before most people that read this, I thought it would be a good opportunity to reassure people and I would write about how easy it was and how I had, at worst, minor side-effects. But that’s not what happened. I’m well aware that there is a lot of debate at the moment about who should be next in line for receiving the vaccinations, and I don’t think there’s really any right answers to that. In reality everybody needs to have it soon as possible (at least it now looks like we'll all have had it by August). All I know is that due to the high risk of working with children with special needs that are vulnerable and unable to socially distance, I found myself suddenly eligible to have the vaccination. To my surprise, I found I was able to book to have i...

Previously on The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan : I finally moved into my own flat and the UK entered yet another national lockdown. The last few weeks have felt like a real rollercoaster. I've faced boredom, stress, frustration and elation from one day to the next. Working through lockdown has provided all sorts of challenges I wouldn't have foreseen and sometimes it can feel overwhelming when staffing is affected by a Covid-outbreak and I head off to work whilst most people I know remain at home. There's a certain pride in being there for our students though, a feeling of purpose that I didn't really feel during the first lockdown.   Life in the new flat is, on the whole, excellent. There's a sense of freedom that I've never had in my life before which is so lovely. Whether it was at home with Mum and Dad or at uni with my various housemates I'd always shared kitchens and bathrooms and suddenly I have my own space that I use freely. I can go to bed...