Mummascribbles meets – DannyUK – Mummascribbles

This week we meet the brilliant Danny from the blog Danny UK. Thanks so much for taking part Danny.

Tell me a little bit about yourself and your family
My name is Danny and I blog at DannyUK.com

I live in the heart of Essex and have four kids – Charisma, aged 15, Aaliyah, aged 13, Brooke, aged 11 and Chance aged 9. That’s three girls and a boy , in that order, in case the names confused you!

Their mum, Mel, and I split up years and years ago. I am now dating a girl from the Wirral proving to myself that second-time love can be more spectacular than first-time love. As a result I feel that I am single-handedly keeping the petrol price down across the UK due to the sheer volume I use.

The love of my life lives with her two kids, aged 9 and 7 who I count as my step kids. Can they be step kids when they are 200 miles away? I’m pretty sure they can.

My blog tends to include stories about my four kids, and sometimes my OAP mum who is funnier than she realises. I tend to steer clear of talking too much about my step kids, simply because they aren’t my kids to plaster all over social media, if that makes sense.

If you want to know how I met my other half, I recently wrote about it in a guest post right here.

What do you like doing to be you, when you are not parenting, working (if you do), or blogging?
Well, having just been let go by work a week before Christmas (bah, humbug!) I am currently “between jobs” as they say. I’ve spent over 11 years in the finance industry – the end of the scale where the workers pick up all of the grief of the financial crash with none of the bonuses – which ties into when I started writing the blog.

If you ever want to find me, I’ll be in the local Costa Coffee, drinking a large latte and ignoring the world.

What is your biggest achievement to date?
Having four kids. Not the experience of childbirth and the miracle that goes with it, but that I’ve got so many years down the line with them and that they are still alive!

From your own experiences, what do you find the hardest part of parenting and what is the easiest/most rewarding part?
Hmmmm. That’s a difficult one.To be serious for a moment, the hardest part in the 15 years of parenting to date was leaving the marital home. I could accept that my marriage was over, but it took years to really get used to the fact that I wasn’t living with the kids any more. Even though I was a 2 minute walk from their home, and would speak to them every day by phone, you never really realise what an impact it is to have that ripped from your life.

The most rewarding is probably tied between being appreciated by the kids (every other parent in the world can probably join me on the rarity of that one) or when someone else comments on what great kids they are.

Parenting in itself is no mean feat; how do you juggle everything you need to in order to get everything done on a daily basis?
The first thing that people say to me when they learn that I have four kids is “How on earth do you manage to cope with four?!”, and my answer rarely differs. “I got divorced and only have them every other weekend.” It’s funny because it’s true in a way.

Having four kids was never overly stressful when I lived with them. But having them at weekends means that they are living by different rules to the ones I would set. If I have heard the words “But when we are at mummys…” once, I’ve heard them a thousand times.

Fortunately, Mel (the ex-wife) and I have always had a remarkably friendly relationship, even in divorce. The ground rules that we set before the birth of Charisma (which pretty much amounted to the fact that we would back each other in terms of decisions made) still apply today. There are differences to the way things work in our respective homes, but it’s made easier by the fact that kids can’t (and to be fair to them, don’t try to) play us off against each other.

As for getting things done when I have the kids. Well. Things just get done. I don’t think that’s any different to when I was with them full time. They get dragged to the shops to buy food, they get in the way and make a mess when I’m trying to tidy, and they have no qualms about doing their own thing. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Actually, scratch that. I’d have it exactly the same, but in a tidier, neater setting please.

Why did you decide to start blogging?
I’ve always loved the thought of having a diary. Keeping things written down and recorded. I’m also incredibly lazy, so any attempts in the past to diarise what I have been doing have failed to be maintained.

I’d long thought about writing a diary of sorts in Microsoft Word. Something I could password protect, save and update as and when I wanted to. I then stumbled across LiveJournal. This was back in 2004ish. I signed up, started writing and went from there. It was mostly private stuff and was rarely read by anyone. Those entries are still up on the blog today, though anything too private (or too bitchy in a lot of cases) has either been edited or locked away.

Tell me a bit about your blog?
A few years back I decided to take the step of being more serious about the blog. I have some good things to say, and a half decent writing style which wasn’t being read by many. Stepping up a gear got my voice heard by more people. It was then that I realised I didn’t have as much to say as I originally thought. Isn’t that always the way?

I know lots of bloggers out there who write several times a day, and who would attend the opening of an envelope given the opportunity. I tentatively tread the line between being too proud to do this, and being too lazy. After blogging for several years I decided that I would blog about what I wanted, when I wanted and how often I wanted. Truth be known, I’m only ever a small pro-active step away from being “that” blogger. But for now I find myself turning down opportunities to write about stuff that I’m not overly interested in, and saying no to things that don’t feel as they belong on the blog. As a result the blog is less cluttered than it could be, and less popular than it would be. But that’s fine by me.

I’m not knocking anyone, by the way. Although I have my tongue firmly planted in cheek when I speak about some bloggers, I am more in awe of someone that can write about anything and everything, even if I do sound like a condescending dickhead when I say it.

It’s noticeable for me that my blog goes through waves of productivity, with blog posts lapping against the sands of the internet with alarming regularity, before suddenly falling quieter than the awkward silence that follows an old person’s fart in doctors waiting room.

But it’s my blog, so I don’t care 😀

(Now ignore all of the pretentiousness above. Daddy needs blog hits! Go and read some stuff. Hurry, hurry. And to prove that I’m not kidding, there’s competitions running all the time to bring in additional readers!)

What do you want your blog to achieve and where do you hope to see it go as it grows?
Damn. Really should have read the questions first before answering them one by one.

I don’t want my blog to achieve anything. I’d like more readers. More nice comments. More good PR opportunities (and by “good” I basically mean something with Costa Coffee, damn them and their blog-rejecting ways). But then I also want to win the lottery. And be an astronaut. And have the ability to teleport.

“I want” doesn’t get.

That’s a line that I often trundle out for the kids, and it’s true.

As for where I hope to see the blog go as it grows. Who knows?

What advice would you give someone who is thinking about starting a blog?
Don’t do it. I don’t need the competition! 😉

Or, more realistically: Do it. But do it because you enjoy it. Not because you think you will get some freebies. Trust me, it’s easier to work stacking shelves, earn a wage and buy the things you want than it is to get everything free through blog reviews. Plus the shelf-stacking is probably more rewarding on some levels. At least with shelf stacking you’re not constantly wondering how many people are looking at the beans you’ve put on display this morning.

If you could have dinner with three people (dead or alive), who would it be and why?
They say that you should never meet your heroes. I don’t know how true that is, but I do know that whenever I meet a box of Heroes chocolates, it always ends badly. Normally with the Heroes decimated and me feeling sick.

Also, there’s nothing worse than expecting the best and experiencing the worst, so as much as I’d love the chance to meet and speak to people like Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and many others, I dare say that the meeting could never live up to the billing I’d give it. Or if I chose someone like Freddie Mercury and it turns out that he was just an insufferable bore? I’d be devastated.

So dinner for four people of my choosing would be me, my girlfriends (aka Mrs DannyUK) and my best friend Tasha. That leaves one spare seat, which would remain empty and the starter, main and dessert for the fourth place would be shared amongst the three of us.

We’d have a whale of a time, as we always do, and we’d be bloody well fed too.

Tell me three random facts about you

1) I once scored 1% in an end of year exam in senior school. (The teacher called me retarded. The early 90s were a different time…)

2) I have a dent in my forehead from being whacked, full pelt, with a hockey stick in a game at school. (I was never really fond of school as a boy)

3) A good friend often used to joke that she thought I was autistic (I was in my 30s at the time!). In a bid to shut her up, I took an online autism test. I scored (and I quote) “A higher than average score that is above the clinical threshold”. 80% of people who scored the same were deemed autistic. I now avoid taking online tests. However, the results DO go some way to explaining number 1, above, where I happily spent 90 minutes looking out of a window.

You can find Danny over at www.dannyuk.com and also on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+. He also writes over at the Essex Chronicle.

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