The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

A little while I was gifted a copy of the book 1000 Movies You Must See Before You Die . I occasionally used it to look things up but last autumn I had a crazy thought- what if I attempted to watch all thousand films, in chronological order of when they were released. It's a mammoth undertaking and last week I finally left the 1920s and moved into the strange new world of the 1930s.  Watching my way through 1920s cinema history has been fascinating. Fortunately the majority of films of this era are freely available on YouTube and most of the rest haven't been too difficult to get hold of either. The first sound film or 'talkie' wasn't released until 1927 and really until the turn of the decade most films were silent. Watching a silent film feels like a very different experience. It requires a level of concentration that we're not used as modern film and TV viewers. There's no way you can follow a silent film whilst scrolling on your phone- you have to watch ...

Let me take you back to the early 2010s. One evening my social group ended up going to Winchester's one and only nightclub, a rare occurrence when we were neither at the student union or one of the many local pubs. I don't think we ever returned to this club because the experience was awful. Drunken men, many more than twice the age of us, were constantly touching up and generally giving unwanted sexual attention. I remember being full of anger and doing everything I could to fend them off.  Bar a few other occasions, that's pretty much the limit of my experience in this area. One of the many privileges of being male is that on the whole you don't have to worry about being sexually harassed. My experiences may be limited but I have no doubt that pretty much all the women I know have been sexually harassed repeatedly during their lives- a recent survey found that 97% of young women in the UK have been sexually harassed.  This week allegations surfaced about the actor, wr...

The time has come for my annual post about the films nominated for the Best Picture award at this year's Oscars. Due to the pandemic the ceremony is happening a few months later this year and the rules have been tweaked so that for this year only films do not have to had a cinema release in order to be eligible. I've managed to watch six of the eight nominees this year which is not bad going considering that most were delayed from their planned cinema releases. The Father I don't think a film has ever made me cry before but this one caused literal tears. The Father sees Anthony Hopkins play a man with dementia and the film is told from his confused perspective- different actors occasionally pop up as the same characters, the timeline just around all over the place and some events happen more than once and characters tell him differing things. It's a clever idea which effectively puts you in the shoes of someone with dementia. The moment the character understands that hi...

Prince Philip died last week and the news has been full of stories from people that met him. It's estimated that about 22% of the UK's population either saw or met Prince Philip at some point and this has resulted in some excellent tales. A woman named Cat saw the Queen and Philip one Christmas at Sandringham and Philip said to her "You look like you've had a heavy Christmas". Unfortunately I don't have an amusing anecdote to tell but Prince Philip did have an influence on my life in a way- he launched the Duke of Edinburgh Awards.  I did the bronze D of E award when I was about fifteen. There were four sections to the award: skill, service, physical and the expedition.  For the skill section I learned Japanese, admittedly to a very basic level. For some reason our school had some arrangement with a school in Japan and for one academic year a Japanese teacher was based at our school. Each week I went to Japanese club and over four or five years I learned a fai...

So here's a sentence I'd never thought I'd write: I've got into yoga.  It all began in the Autumn when I was suffering from the latest bout of back pain. Every so often I have back pain and around once a year or so I get it really badly. The last bad one occurred when I was carrying three sheets of paper back from the photocopier, which is an indication that there isn't really a trigger. I did some research for things that would make a difference. One thing that kept coming up was "lose some weight" which is fine but that can't happen overnight. Another was yoga and I hesitantly gave it a go. I did some Googling and found some stuff online by a lady called Adriene. To my surprise, I found out I rather liked it. Doing it in my small bedroom at my parents house wasn't very easy so I didn't really do it very often but when I moved into my flat I started doing in from my living room. It went from an occasional thing to me buying a yoga mat and now ...

Sometimes I have a carefully thought out plan for a blog post but sometimes inspiration has not struck and I never quite know where things are going to go. This is one of the latter.  So, what's been happening in my life? Well, I turned twenty-nine. My birthday itself was actually rather nice with my friends and colleagues putting the effort in to do something nice and my parents coming round for a Nando's via Deliveroo. Whilst Nando's always tastes great, this one was extra lovely. I felt very fortunate to have such lovely people in my life who showed they care about me. Of course, turning twenty-nine means that next year I'll be thirty. I feel a weird paradox of understanding that thirty is not all that old in the grand scheme of things yet at the same time it seems somehow ancient. I stumbled across a Twitter thread where someone was talking about millennials and their attitude towards age. They suggested part of feeling old is about not really knowing what being an ...

This week marks a year since the UK first went into lockdown and we really began to feel the effects of living through a pandemic so today I thought I'd reflect on this time.  Back in late 2019 we heard reports of this new disease spreading in China. The media went a bit mad about it but we could all remember bird flu and swine flu and endless other viruses which led to hysteria among journalists but didn't affect our lives in any way. As 2020 dawned, it became apparent that Covid-19 would reach our shores and would kill people but the message we seemed to be given was that it was pretty much the same as regular flu and you'd be fine if you were young and healthy. Next thing we knew, the government were announcing that the country would shut down, we'd have to stay at home and could only leave for exercise once a day, and the world as we knew had changed. On the whole, I didn't mind the first lockdown. I'd been having a really stressful time at work and some tim...