This is the new super-trim JD – since we got him he’s lost around 8kg or around 16-17lbs depending on whether you are a metric or an imperial weight person. Either way, he’s now looking pretty good with his new shape.

At a time when photography isn’t really turning me on (as you’ll probably notice by the unashamed infrequently posted and snapshot nature of my photo blog of late) I’m finding it quite hard to get off my arse and make a photo to go with a story.

Today I’m going to use this photo of a misfit dog to talk about something about people that I’ve realised. Some folks might have thought that JD was not going to be a good bet when he’s already been through three owners at the tender age of just two – we are the fourth people to take him on. Yet he’s turned out to be a complete joy. It’s hard to imagine a dog with a nicer nature. He gets on with everyone and has become devoted to us in the shortest of times. It just goes to show that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

In much the same way as JD was a misfit, I too have found myself feeling that I am a misfit in this world many, many times. As a child, I went to 14 schools in 10 years and at each one I found myself on the fringes of the school community. The kid that no-one liked and my fate was to hang around with the “other misfits and losers” – the people that no-one wanted to be friends with. Throughout my childhood this was a given. It’s very easy to imagine then that that is exactly what I was too. A misfit and a loser. This may sound like self-pity and perhaps it was but the truth of the situation was there to see. Perhaps this makes me as bad as everyone else because I saw some of my fellow students as misfits and losers but I defy anyone to say they don't know, in their heart of hearts that there were kids in their class that they didn't feel like that about.

In one particular school, I spent the three months that I went there dreading the start of each school day because the only “spare” desk in the classroom really belonged to a girl who was off school with glandular fever. Would she turn up for school that day and reclaim her desk? I lost so much sleep over the possibility of her recovering and me having nowhere to sit that I lost the ability to feel sorry that she was so ill.

When I started at University I thought I would suffer the same fate only with knobs on because not only was I the same misfit and loser that I’d always been, by now I had something else that pulled me apart from my fellow students. I was more than twice the age of almost everyone else on the course – old enough to be their mother and some.

In my first few days, I looked about me and worked out who I would end up spending time with as the friendships of other people would be formed and I’d again find myself hanging around with the people no-one else wanted.

Strangely now I reach the end of my first year, I find myself in a very different situation. I have a group of lovely friends, none of whom could be described as a misfit or a loser and all of whom seem to appreciate me for me. By me I mean my own qualities rather than just because there was no-one else to talk to.

I have friends that have supported me in my dark hours when I lost my beloved Archie. I have friends that looked out for me when I found things tough in college and when there have been occasions when we have had to form groups to do a task or a project I have been sought out as a good partner to have. All of this is a long way away from being the one sat alone in the school canteen or the one who was never chosen to be on a sports team by fellow students….I was the sad loser who went to the team that had no choice because there was no-one else to pick.

What has this taught me? It has taught me that I was probably nothing worse than a victim of circumstance at school. Because I always pitched up in schools mid-term when the friendships had already been formed I was destined to be the outsider through nothing other than circumstance. I now see that to break into those friendship groups would have required poise and confidence that I simply didn’t possess. It didn’t mean that there was anything particularly un-likable about me, simply that I was late to the party. If I’d realised that at the time it would have saved me a whole load of heartache.

Just like JD, there is nothing fundamentally WRONG with me (other than what a good diet could solve), it’s just that I was not in the right place at the right time.

Now, JD is settled in a new home with people who will love and care for him and I am about to progress onto my “proper” degree course (this year, in case anyone didn’t realise it was a foundation course designed for people returning to study after a break or for people who didn’t do as well as they needed to in their A levels).

I go into this course with friendships already formed – again a demonstration of my newly discovered self is that several other students on my course have sought me out delighted that we’re going to be on the same course next year and looking forward to being in my company again.