The summer holidays are always the busiest time of year at work and all three of the children’s projects I help run started their playschemes on Monday. My role includes lots of fundraising, developing services, and supporting more than fifty volunteers.…

Over the last few months the organisation I work for has been gearing up for the Ruby Do – a big, accessible, family event celebrating creativity, inclusion and forty years of providing adventurous play opportunities for local children.

All week I’d been obsessively checking the weather forecast, hoping for a beaming sun symbol, but instead I was greeted with icons for thunderstorms and rain.…

At work today I had a ‘ticcing fit’ in the toilet. This has happened a number of times before, and even though my support worker stays just outside the door it can take them a while to realise I’m in trouble.…

A couple of nights ago I started singing a new song so sweetly it might almost have been described as saccharine – but the ticced lyrics were anything but.

“I’m having sex with animals again,
I’m having sex with animals again,
I’m having sex with animals again,
And they all like it hard in the face.”…

Well, it’s been over a week and my potentially problematic ‘Alan fucks buses’ tic is showing no sign of letting up. In fact, it’s expanding. I now have a long list of other accusations of what else Alan’s slept with that would almost certainly result in a long prison sentence (and or a trip to hospital) if any of them turned out to be true.…

For several months at work my colleagues and I have been debating where to put a new swing and finally, a few weeks ago we all agreed on a location in the heart of our adventure playground. Then all we had to do was build it, and last week we decided we’d put aside our usual tasks and put it up today.…

At the end of last year I found myself ticcing about ‘Brian’ so often that we decided to hold a surprise party in his honour. Fortunately I don’t actually know any ‘Brians’ so the tic didn’t create any confusion.

But somewhere between then and now, ‘Brian’ has mutated into ‘Alan’ – and this is where it gets more complicated.…

Fran, Leftwing Idiot and I have just been at a training day on safeguarding disabled children. Part of it involved simulating a conversation with a child who has limited verbal communication.

The group was split into pairs, one person taking the role of the child and the other the adult.…

My tics rarely embarrass me, but yesterday one did. I caught myself by surprise during a normal day at work. Here’s how:

I was in the office – everyone was busy so the atmosphere was quiet and concentrated. My regular tics punctuated the silence as always, but no one was taking any notice.…

Last night we had our work Christmas party at and it was utterly lovely! We had an amazing meal cooked in the kitchen of our new building and nearly all 39 of the staff team sat down and ate together in our cosy multi-purpose room.…