Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

At the beginning of 2011, I accepted the WordPress challenge, to blog more, to post one unique blog post for each of the 52 weeks of the year. This is blog number fifty-two, where I look back at some of the highlights and thank, you - the people who read them and come back time and time again. I haven't got a favourite post, so I thought I'd have a look at the analytics and find out which was most popular with the people that read them, so here they are: 1) Regeneration, not a Grave End Gravesend is currently in the beginnings of a major transformation. Both the 'civic quarter' and 'transport quarter' are being redeveloped as part of a multi-million pound regeneration scheme, which will eventually see a new one-way traffic system, a new bus terminus, a vastly improved train station and much improved pedestrian areas and access routes. However, if Gravesham Council had their way, the redevelopment wouldn't stop there. 2) I've a Stalker in Jesus ...

Standing in the tunnel, looking out at the stadium. It’s packed, a pre-christmas ticket bonanza that has put an extra three thousand bums on seats. The smell of grass, of fried food and the intoxicatingly pleasant sharpness of deep-heat which tickles the nostrils as the ears cope with the roar of the crowd and the stomach deals with the nerves. You’re dressed in the blue of your team, standing there at not yet five years old holding the hand of a total stranger. A man who leads out ten others to do battle against the other group of men dressed in green and black standing side by side in the long, deep space where shouts of encouragement bounce around the walls. The referee signals that it is time and off you go, into the noise which has reached a crescendo, eight thousand people on their feet to welcome their heroes, you leading the way, across the pitch and lining up in front of the main stand, with your Daddy standing by watching, tears in his eyes, feelings of pride swelling up an...

Heading towards the end of the year, one cannot help but look back at the last twelve months and onwards to the dawn of the new year. Depending upon each and every one of us, we’ll all have different plans, different aspirations and feelings of excitement, apprehension or even damn right fear. For me, the beginning of 2012 is somewhat an unknown quantity, the start of a new journey for sure, but the question is - where will that journey take me? Life has a habit of throwing a curve-ball every once in a while. Work this year has been good, I’ve settled in nicely into an agency that contains many of the nicest people I’ve had the fortune to meet. But sadly, we received the news that our biggest client is taking their business elsewhere and what was looking forward to another successful year changed into something that is filled with, at least for now, uncertainty and lies very much in the realms of the unknown. Sometimes, things happen for the better, bad things happen, bu...

Behind every Facebook status update lies a bigger story. A thought we’ve shared that only has meaning to a select few, or from time to time, our view on a story much bigger than ourselves. These last few days, it has been like that. The sadness behind the status I posted on Friday and then last night, something new, something profound, something that helped one come to terms with an act of despicable evil that arrived and landed, allegedly upon our doorsteps. Thursday night, I came home from work, I was running late, so went straight upstairs to say goodnight to Oliver before he fell asleep. I came downstairs afterwards to say hello to Stephanie, my wife and I immediately saw that something was wrong? “Are you okay?” I asked, but she wasn’t and burst into tears. A couple who we’d met at a party two weekends ago had given birth to a beautiful baby boy, shared his name with our own son, but sadly complications during the pregnancy meant that the baby passed away two days lat...

With the pregnancy and a million other things happening, Stephanie and I haven’t really paid much thought to Christmas and now that life has calmed down somewhat it is about time that we did! Growing up, Stephanie and I had very different Christmas’s, which means as a couple, we have quite contrasting views as to what Christmas means to either of us. Stephanie would spend her day surrounded by extended family around a huge table tucking into turkey and trimmings whilst for me, it was always a smaller affair, just the four of us, toys, tears and tantrums, which to me is what Christmas is all about. Now that Phoebe has arrived safely and our family unit is complete, I wanted our first Christmas together to be a quiet one, with just the four of us. I’ve no romantic ideals about sitting around a roaring fire, toasting chestnuts and listening to Good King Wenceslas playing quietly in the background. Phoebe is far too young to appreciate the experience anyway, but to me, having a quiet...

Time seems to have very elastic properties right now. The past two weeks have flown by in a blur of babies and excitement and yet, life as we knew it seems so distant and long ago. November has been a monumental month in the grand scheme of things, not only did I witness the safe arrival of my daughter Phoebe, I was published for the very first time. ' Things that go bump in the night ' is an anthology of Ghost Stories written by students and collated by tutors of The Write Place , a creative writing school in Dartford that I have been attending this year as a part of a work sponsored initiative. The “Me, Me, Me” fund allows each staff member £200 to learn something new and being published as part of the anthology is the unexpected but delightful climax of a year where I have learnt a huge amount. The book itself is available from Amazon at a bargain price of £3.16 in e-book format, which makes it compatible with their Kindle e-book reader, or any associated Kindle softwa...

The human body is an amazing machine, the mechanics of thought, the intricacies and subtle nuances of the mind which stand us out as individuals as well as our own bodies carved out to provide us with our own identities aren’t things we consider on a routine basis. But last week, I witnessed my wife bring my daughter into the world and once again, reaffirmed for me just how blessed and precious life really is. Phoebe Anne Bird was born on Wednesday 9th of November 2011 after a short, sharp labour that was in stark contrast to her older brother who took twenty-nine hours to reach us back in 2006. I only had Oliver’s birth as a guide to the whole process and as detailed here , it wasn’t an experience that I particularly enjoyed, purely for the duration and the feeling as a husband of being very much a spare part. An awful lot has changed in the five years that Oliver was born and I am sorry to say, not for the better. With local hospitals closing and birthing policies amended our s...

Yesterday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sir Alex Ferguson’s tenure as manager of Manchester United, a record which is staggering considering the trigger-happy culture which runs through modern day football like a shameful cancer - but then nothing about Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign can be called ordinary. I was just six years old when Sir Alex Ferguson walked through the doors of Old Trafford for the first time and took over a struggling Manchester United side that had the likes of Norman Whiteside, Paul McGrath and the England captain Bryan Robson. I hadn’t heard of those names at that age, I don’t even think I took an interest in the game at all. But as my interest grew, the one remaining constant is that man, 'Old Red Nose' from Govan in Glasgow, a ship-builders son who has gone on to be knighted, rewrite the history books and become, in my opinion the greatest football manager of all time. Twenty-five years in the same job, for the same company is a good innings...

One of the highlights of any year is that time in the calendar when a favourite author brings a new novel out. Everything you read in between just plugs the gaps and anything read afterwards are just half digested words as you sit wondering how long until the next novel comes out. I’ve just closed the back cover of one of my favourite writers, Roger Ellory, his new book Bad Signs and as is customary, I thought I’d write a review and share it with you. Bad Signs tells the story of two boys, two half-brothers and their journey growing up together, the loss of their mother at a young age to an act of senseless violence and being put in juvenile detention for nothing other than what else to do with them. The younger brother Clarence Luckman, the thinker, the boy so very unlike his violent father attributed his life to growing up under a bad star, a bad sign that follows him around like an impenetrable shadow. Clarence, along with his half-brother Elliot Danziger, known as as “Digger”...

At the beginning of the year I explained about the agency I work for; Archibald Ingall Stretton - how they give each member of staff £200 every twelve months to go off and learn something new. I also explained that I’d be enrolling on a writing course and using my allowance to see if I had it in me to write something greater than the words you find inside of my blog. With that allowance now expired, I thought I’d share with you how it has been and what I hope to do next. With anything new, when one enters a space that is outside of ones comfort zone there comes a period of time where everything encountered comes as a surprise - my first few lessons were just like that. My first piece of homework, set after we’d spent two hours talking about famous fairy tales and were asked to retell a fairy tale from the perspective of the first person I went off and wrote a version of Hansel and Gretel which came in as a 10,000 word story! I later found out that this was in fact around 8,500 mor...

Earlier this year, I read the heartbreaking story of a young girl named Alice , who had written a “bucket list” after hearing that she that had a terminal form of cancer. I hadn’t heard of the term before, which apparently comes from the movie of the same name starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. Alice isn’t the only person to have been inspired by the movie, thousands of ordinary bloggers have done the exact same thing. A ‘Bucket List', according to the movie, is a list of items one would like to do before dying, or kicking the bucket . It might sound rather morbid, but we are all dying in an inevitable kind of way, and having now watched the film and seen the list of items that were depicted by two fictional characters from the minds of Hollywood writers - I thought I’d have a go myself. Firstly, this task isn’t as straight forward as it might look. It’s easy to write a list of things, but in my view, they need to be things that are achievable. I’d like to land on t...

On Saturday evening just gone, I went to the O2 arena with my sister, her husband and my mother for an evening out at an event called Sencity 2011 , which was held within the Indigo nightclub which sits under the famous O2 tent. Sencity is a club night promotion held for deaf people and their friends and family, who can enjoy a multi-sensory experience where music isn’t the main attraction. For someone who was rather nonplussed about going, the night turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Firstly, a little bit of history. Deafness in our family is like a badge, it is who we are. Mum is the eldest of five siblings - all of whom are deaf, born to a deaf mother. The sisters, all have deaf children of varying severity. The boys, as we’ve now scientifically discovered, help prevent the gene which carries the defect from being passed on as it’s carried within the tail of the sperm which fertilises the egg (it’s amazing what men in white coats can do nowadays). Which for me comes with a sl...

As in life, users of the Internet can be loosely grouped into demographics, or categories dependent upon age, or behaviour. We use them at work in planning for a website, add a little bit of fictional background information, give them a name and call them ‘persona's’ which are designed to try and work out ways in which the project we are building can be used to serve them purposely. The other night, a chance conversation led me into taking my own persona and dissecting it into pieces, not for research but to stand up for who I am and what I work and believe in. A friend of mine greeted me on Friday night by saying “how are you doing, how is your second life?” which I wasn’t quite sure how to take. Originally, I took it as it was intended, as a bit of banter, taking the piss - we do it all the time, nobody is, or should be immune. But being a sensitive creature and one prone to over analysis, I pondered the question over the space of a few days and thought, actually, this might ...

As the months roll by and we head into October, we become ever closer to finally meeting Baby Bird II, who has slowly been growing within the confines of Stephanie’s womb and will make an appearance when he or she deems themselves to be perfectly ready - in or around their due date of November 3rd. As pregnancies go, we have been fortunate with this one, no precautionary overnight stops at the hospital or worries about minor things that first time around seem like major obstacles. It is generally perceived that the second pregnancy is easier for parents to cope with and fortunately, so far that seems to be the case. If anything, the only real worry that Stephanie has faced, has been having to cope with the baby’s sporting process. It’s a bit of a footballer apparently with Stephanie’s inside being kicked, booted, twisted and pulled on a regular basis, which anyone who knows and has seen this in action will testify to being quite a sight! We have also spent the past eight months o...

Yesterday afternoon, west of here as I write this, six hardy souls boarded a Clayton Skiff, or a boat between you and I - and rowed it twenty-one miles from Poplar Rowing Club to Richmond in West London as part of this years Great River Race , passing under twenty eight bridges and passing sites; the Tower of London, Houses of Parliament and the London Eye to name a few, that tourists only ever really see from the safety of dry land. They did it despite rain not since biblical times, which threatened to sap the energy from them and ruin what is meant to be a fun afternoon on the river. I was one of those fortunate six - and here is my account of the race yesterday afternoon. I had originally been pencilled in as being passenger, which all entrants are required to carry - but due to issues within the crew a vacant spot for cox became available. I received a surprising text message only 78 hours before the race from Will, who is skipper of the Oarsome Foursome crew informing me of my...

Exactly a year today, Stephanie and I married at the Little Silver Country Hotel in Tenterden. I could sit and write about the whole day, how much it meant to us to be surrounded by our friends and family and having them enjoy the day with us. Or the romance, or the fear and nervous excitement in the build up. But then, pictures sometimes speak louder than words - here is a selection of photos that tell the story of a day we'll never forget.