Dan Brotzel found himself dressing up as a gorilla, eating fish fingers with custard, and trying to sneak veg on to his neighbour’s porch

A Southgate author who spent a whole year celebrating different awareness days is publishing a novel based on his unusual experience.

National Bubble Bath Day, British Pie Week, Adopt A Rescued Guinea Pig Month; Dan Brotzel’s new novel Thank You For The Days began with his own experience of attempting to observe a different fake holiday or awareness-raising day every single day for a whole year.

While some of these days are very important and well recognised, like Holocaust Memorial Day or World Cancer Day, some are commercial, like National Nutella Day, and some are just silly, like CAPS LOCK DAY and Meow Like A Pirate Day.

“I’d always been tickled by these funny pseudo-holidays,” says Dan. “I know DJs and teachers and journos often use them when they’re short of inspiration. But I wanted to now more. How many are there? And who decides which days get created?”

When Dan discovered there are now in fact several thousand of them, a strange idea gripped him. “I began wondering; what would happen to a person if they tried to observe a different one every day for a year? A very silly idea, but I couldn’t shake it off.”

Dan completed his challenge across the whole of 2022. He found himself dressing up as a gorilla and as a daffodil, eating fish fingers with custard, and getting caught trying to sneak veg on to his neighbour’s porch. He began working for a foodbank, turned veggie (sort of), amassed a huge collection of wristbands, and signed up for a marathon.

Along the way, Dan met some fascinating people; a town crier, a lighthouse keeper, an international matchmaker, a hermit, the founder of the world’s only umbrella cover museum. He talked with people facing life-changing challenges with quiet courage, from deaf-blindness to lupus to cerebral palsy. And he also encountered some of the movers and shakers in the strange world of made-up holidays — creators, curators and cosplay fans.

Gradually, however, what started out as a silly stunt turned into something much more thought-provoking. “We live in a world where World Lymphoma Awareness Day falls on the same day as National Double Cheeseburger Day,” says Dan. “The fake-holiday calendar is full of these odd juxtapositions, but no-one seems to notice.

“I found myself researching lots of causes. There’s just so much need out there, and it’s to see how hard charities have to compete in a sort of awareness-raising marketplace to get their voice heard.”

Dan was alarmed at his own lack of awareness too. “From delayed cancer diagnoses to food poverty, many things I discovered shocked and appalled me,” he writes, “though none more than my own ignorance.”

After a year of observing different days, Dan’s book – entitled Awareness Daze – hit a sudden roadblock when his publisher went into liquidation just days before printing. Eventually Dan found another publisher who was interested in the project – but as a novel! So Dan sat down again and wrote Thank You For The Days, a romantic comedy based on his experiences. And he recently learned that Awareness Daze is now coming out after all, too, as an audiobook next year.

“We got there in the end,” he says.

Thank You For The Days is out from Bloodhound Books on 6th December. Pre-order online:
Visit amzn.to/40yOfXr

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