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...

Lockdown here in the UK is gradually being eased, though it appears to be a political decision rather than a scientific one. Though few governments can sail through a pandemic, it feels like our own leader's have been shockingly awful at managing the situation. Years of not following long established pandemic preparations, an initial stubborn reluctance to consider that the virus might arrive in the UK and unclear advice, it's been a shit show eclipsed globally only by the ineptitude of a certain orange-faced president. When we thought they couldn't really be any more awful, out comes the news that the prime minister's chief advisor casually broke lockdown rules. Whilst millions of people struggled with not seeing their families, even many with symptoms doing the correct thing, Dominic Cummings drove from London to Durham. The cherry on top of the shit cake was when he drove to Barnard Castle because he was worried about his eyesight. It's the most absurd excuse...

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week so I thought I'd write about my own experiences. I'm always a little uncertain talking about my mental health. The thought of seeing someone professional about it brings an enormous fear to me and I'm aware that in all likelihood the best they'd offer would be a link to a website that I could just Google. It's also difficult to work out how normal what I'm feeling is. Everyone goes through highs and lows and that's perfectly normal. I suspect though that when I've experienced extreme lows that is less normal, though far from unique.  That's one of the big problems with discussing mental health and why initiatives like awareness week exist. As much as we're regularly reminded that it's healthy to discuss our mental health, it's not something most of us do very much. There are very few people in the world I would feel genuinely comfortable discussing mine with. Mind you, there are a very ...

It's been a few weeks since I last wrote and that's because life continues to roll monotonously on as lockdown continues. It's difficult to write about life when it's been put on hold. Mentally, I'm finding lockdown something of a rollercoaster. I really thrived in the first month or so as all the everyday pressures of life were taken away and I could do whatever the hell I liked- well, within the confines of my own home. As the weeks rolled by I began to get a bit down and felt a bit useless. There's only so much time you can spend doing nothing before you start to feel like you really ought to be doing something. I keep imagining being asked by a grandchild one day what I did during the pandemic and the answer will be 'fuck all'. The feeling of uselessness is not a new one to me but it rarely seeps to the forefront quite so strongly as it has recently. That phase seems to have been put behind me, for now at least. One thing which really helped ...

This week I've written a short piece of fiction which was inspired by being in lockdown, with some influence from the Korean film Oldboy  too. I did begin a zombie-story but actually I felt like my lockdown fiction ought to be more about the joy of the real world than virus-related horror. I hope you like it! For a moment, the sunlight blinds me. It takes several minutes before my eyes really adjust- they've not had to process natural light for such a long time. The sunlight triggers the memory of the last time I saw it.  It was early one summer morning, the sun just staring to rise. I was making my way home but was so inebriated that the ten minute walk home from the pub had so far taken nearly an hour. Then suddenly everything went dark.  I awoke to find myself in what looked like a dingy hotel room- there was a bed and a wooden table with a 9 inch TV on it, an en-suite bathroom to one side and nothing else. There was no window, just hideous flocked wal...