Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

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 ...