Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

The first England International I watched in the flesh was against Chile, way back on 11th February 1998 - I remember it for all the wrong reasons. Not the fact that a certain Michael Owen made his England debut or that Marcelo Salas and his Chilean compatriots showed England a footballing masterclass. But because of the pre-match warm-up; being served at 17 years old and ‘aving it large with the England ‘massive’, singing ‘no surrender’ stood upon a bar stool because everyone else was and because it seemed the cool thing to do at the time. How times change. Over the past few months Oliver has been getting into his football. He has been learning the rules and feeling the raw emotion of the beautiful game. A season ticket at the Gills has helped (strangely enough), but so has Sky and the often daily diet of Premier League or La Liga. He has also started to play too, joining a team on Saturday mornings for training and will make his league debut once his registration with the FA is ...

Nor would it seem does it wait for the errant blogger! This little corner of cyberspace has been home for the past eight years to varying biographical accounts of entering fatherhood, married life and the odd look back at more innocent times. I’ve written travel diaries and the odd opinion piece and random thoughts that don’t make much sense. But so far, 2013 has only seen me hit the ‘Publish’ button hit three times in anger and it’s about time I got back on track. I’d love to say that the void since April when I wrote about our trip to Disneyland Paris has been filled with adventure, the wild and the unpredictable. But the truth, as always is a much more grounded affair. Life has been lived, work has been done and not a huge amount has happened in between. Nothing different then to the past eight years, so what has changed? In fact, nothing has changed at all except one minor little thing - I’ve stopped reading. Working in London afforded me two hours of the day in which was sol...

It’s been a while since my last post, three months in fact since I wrote about leaving London and starting a new job. Much has happened in that intervening time, most of it work related, some of it home improvement, but mostly stuff too insignificant to warrant writing about. However, last weekend we spent valuable time together, the four of us for the first time on foreign shores as guests of Walt Disney in Paris - a place which for Stephanie and I holds such fond memories. In recent years our breaks, holidays and time away have been spontaneous, unplanned affairs. Either we’ve been rewarded for work done for others or we’ve earned the right by winning inter-family competitions and our weekend this time around was equally the same. In return for our trip to Paris, Stephanie and I are looking after my parents foster children whilst they are away at Christmas, ironically to Florida, another home of Disney and all the magic it provides. Which is exactly what we were looking forward...

In 2006 I made two life-defining decisions. One, was to agree with Stephanie’s request for a baby, the second was to seek new employment, to work in London and try and perfect the art of website development. Now, almost seven years later the tide has turned and I’m heading back to where I came from. I had been working in Maidstone for a company called Qube Data Management , I was answering the phones and dealing with database queries as part of the Renault Trade Parts project. My boss asked me to build a website, something for a father-in-law about building your own home. “Okay”, I said “There is just one problem, I don’t know how to build websites...” He had already second guessed my answer and told me that I’d better start learning. He gave me a book on how to build websites using Microsoft Front Page and off I went. That book ultimately proved to be a turning point in my career. In fact, it was the start of my career. I’d been presented with a unknown gift which opened a part o...

My last blog post was way back at the end of last year in memory of my departed Grandmother. Writing something new would make that old news and I’ve not wanted to archive it just yet. Life however, moves on and barely at the end of the first month of the new year, there is so much that has happened and so much to look forward to. Already this year we’ve had new babies, a wedding, a trip booked and for me personally a huge and exciting change with the promise of a new job. After three years at ais London , I decided to seek ventures new and have secured a new position at James Villa Holidays , which means not only am I going from agency to client-side, but it means that after seven years I’ll be leaving London and returning to the bright lights of Maidstone. I’ll probably take a nostalgic look back at my time in London over the next few weeks, but for now I wanted to write something for myself, something therapeutic, something argumentative, a dear diary piece that helps channel s...