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...

I found myself feeling deeply uncomfortable at one point this week. I was at a training session at work and, for reasons I won't get into, we were discussing failure. We were asked to make a note of a failure we've had and what we learned form it before sharing it with others. I immediately knew what my answer ought to be but I brushed it aside knowing I would find talking about it uncomfortable. In the end I selected my GCSE music result instead. I have fairly respectable GCSEs, an A in Science and a B in eight other subjects. On top of that I got an E for music. I can distinctly remember a conversation with a teacher when discussing my GCSE options and they said that I didn't need to play an instrument in order to do GCSE music. Given that part of the grades is formed by a performance this statement wasn't true and my limited clarinet skills were of little sue. I squeaked my way through an ABBA piece whilst my peers performed classical music masterpieces. I wor...

Climate change has been in the news a lot this week, as it always should be. David Attenborough presented a documentary called Climate Change: The Facts and protesters under the banner of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ have been holding up traffic & generally causing a nuisance  in London.  *Finally* an excuse to use Snoopy's brother Spike as an image! I regularly consider whether I am personally doing enough to combat climate change. The biggest thing that contributes to my personal carbon footprint is my car. I do less than 250 miles a week which is not an enormous amount but still has an impact. I do what I can to keep the amount low- my car has fairly low emissions, I never sit with the engine running and I tend to walk short journeys. In an ideal world I’d travel by public transport but I don’t live in a city, there’s no rail line running through the town and buses are limited & don’t start or stop anywhere near where I need them to.  Food is probably t...

I'm a big fan of lateral thinking BBC quiz show Only Connect . Contestants on the show get the most bizarre introductions along the lines of "Bob, a fitness instructor from Manchester who once nearly ran over Noel Gallagher". Often an unusual encounter with a celebrity is a key part of the statement. This got me wondering about what my introduction might be were I to ever appear on the show and one possibility would be "Dan, a teaching assistant from Hampshire who once accidentally gave Alan Titchmarsh a pen". On the show these snippets are rarely explained further but I cannot resist sharing my Titchmarsh tale. Like many British teenagers, I did the Duke of Edinburgh award. In my case this involving learning Japanese, doing conservation work and trekking through the forest with a group of people I mostly did not like. Apart from the odd sticky moment like failing to identify a medical acronym put to me by the assessor or getting told we were trespassing by an...

Many people around my age were first drawn into the world of literature by Harry Potter. Whilst I too enjoyed the boy wizard, my love for books had long since been cemented by the time I discovered the wizarding world. Once my reading ability reached a decent level I was exploring all sorts of incredible worlds. I was really lucky to become a teenager when fiction aimed at teenagers underwent a huge boom. One of the earliest series I discovered was The Edge Chronicles . Written by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell with Riddell's gorgeous line drawings throughout, the series tells the stories of young adventurers exploring and surviving the fantasy world of The Edge. I can remember my Dad reading the first book Beyond the Deepwoods  to me and being enthralled by the journey and the monstrous creatures young Twig encounters on the way.  The Edge I loved, and indeed still do, the way books can take you anywhere. I enjoyed Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, the boy genius c...