Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

I knew that my Grandfather was special from a very young age. Everyone at school had a Grandad, whereas I had a Gramps. He was the man with the cheeky laugh and smile who used to give us satsumas whenever we visited. I can't peel an orange, or smell the peel without being transported back to Nan and Gramps's house and their dimly lit front room. After the free fruit it was rock cakes. Depending on how high the oven was turned up depended how much your teeth hurt as you bit into one of his sultana filled surprises. Gramps was always generously giving out something or another. Food, bottles of pop or one of his endless supplies of knick-knacks he'd obtained from Readers Digest. In fact Gramps had everything stashed away somewhere. "What do you want one of them for?" He'd say, "I've got one of them". Before disappearing and coming back with whatever it was you'd been talking about. Invariably the item would be brand new, 40 years old, bu...

I started writing a blog out of an interest in writing and technology, which over the past nine years has helped document events in mine and my family’s life. It has helped me come to terms with becoming a dad, a husband and document things that have happened, my role in them and its helped me learn more about myself as a man as well as a father. Except I’ve let life take over for a bit, more living, less writing, which is why there is a bit of a gap - a nine month long one. After all, it isn’t like I’ve not had anything to write about, in fact I could easily have filled the pages of this blog with news on a daily basis, but if I had to write one post about the past nine months it would be summed up with the title of “Eat, Work, Sleep, Repeat”, all the rest is merely a collection of sub-plots, namely: - Phoebe’s Little Sister Dreams - Oliver's Footballing Ambitions - Stephanie’s Birthing Nightmare Which brings me nicely up date. When we found out that we were expecting ...

When Stephanie and I discussed children, our magic number was always and never any more than two. We were blessed with a beautiful blue one, and a pink one completed the set. Our lives were happy and content, until a recent late night bum squeeze under the covers turned into something a little more energetic, which is where we find ourselves once again... at the beginning of another nine month long adventure. Oliver had a code name, “Baby Bird”, Phoebe was imaginatively labelled “Baby Bird 2”. Our as yet unborn third child has been given, the (perhaps unfair) moniker of “Oops”. Which, in the event that he/she reads this in the forthcoming years is a term of endearment (we promise), but we won’t hide behind the fact that when we do eventually meet he or she, it will be behind the eyes of a blessing that we never expected. Inevitably, I guess, when something happens that catches you by surprise is a sense of denial and perhaps a sense of regret that we’d done things differently, no...

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...

Someone approached me once, a colleague whilst I was working at Safeway, “Your nan isn’t it, the Lady in White gloves, what a character! She’s been asking after you.” I had never considered it before, how she was known to others, to complete strangers. I just knew her and loved her as my Nan, a lady who sadly passed away this week at the fine old age of 93. In looking back, as one does when one is faced with the reality of such news I cannot do anything other than smile. The cherished memories that I have of her are of humour and laughter, drawn from her character, - that word again which defines us as individuals, along with personality, of which undoubtedly she was one. That same colleague of mine, after I had confirmed my relationship status asked the inevitable next question “Why does she wear white gloves?” And the answer was to help combat psoriasis, a dermatological disease that caused her serious discomfort with itching around her hands and fingers, which was by far the w...

Over the past two weeks Mrs B has been asking me some rather strange questions, mainly about what we should buy Phoebe for her first birthday. Questions that, at first might not seem odd at all, but for me highlights another difference in nearly a year of subtle nuances I’ve noticed between the sexes. How has having a girl in the family been so different from having a boy? Each and every one of us are of course different, our characters and personalities define us and make us who we are. Phoebe and Oliver may share the same genetic building blocks and at times scare us as parents with looks and the odd stare that give the impression that they are very much the same person. But throughout Phoebe’s first year there have been moments when I’ve felt uncomfortable not being able to handle certain situations as I’ve not been able to relate to the female point of view - or have suddenly realised to myself, “Ooh, she doesn’t like that, it must be a girl thing”. The first, big, noticeable...

Last weekend Gillingham Football Club kicked off the new football season with a home game against Bradford City. It was the first time in... well, perhaps ever, I wasn’t there to see the start of a new campaign. In fact, as much as it pains me to say, it was the first time in twelve years that I began the football season as a non season ticket holder. The past few seasons have been a difficult time for us Gillingham fans. The reappointment of Andy Hessenthaler after the shambles that was our relegation season was a move aimed to rebuild the fans relationship with its players after deteriorating so badly under previous manager Mark Stimson. But ultimately, it was the wrong move as time and time again the players at the managers disposal were not playing to their full potential and two eighth place finishes meant that once again Gillingham Football Club found themselves looking for a new manager during the close season. It would be easy for me to turn around and say that on the fie...

As way of a thank you for the work that I did earlier this year for King’s Church Medway, Stephanie, Oliver, Phoebe and I were invited to join the church on their annual summer holiday to Center Parcs. Which is where we spent the past week wearing ourselves out surrounded by woodland, nature and fine company. Center Parcs is one of those places that I always wanted to visit as a child, a seemingly magical, exciting place with water slides and activities galore. So when Uncle Matthew invited us along, I was happy to accept - rest assured that it wouldn’t be all “kumbaya” around the campfire (his words not mine!) We were to share a cabin with my cousin Rebecca, her husband James, their two children and Ricky, my soon to be cousin-in-law which helped as we would be sharing with people we knew and not complete strangers. In fact, it wasn’t just my cousin Rebecca and my Uncle Matthew who would be going on the holiday, my Auntie Mara, Auntie Mandy, Uncle Tubby, cousins Amy and Victoria...

Sometimes things happen coincidentally, like winning a weekend away the same time a wedding invite to a foreign city lands on your doorstep. Sometimes things happen for a reason, like two people from different countries meeting some place altogether neutral and falling in love - the place they meet being an environment for where they both share a passion and lifelong enjoyment. Sometimes coincidence meets reason and it becomes altogether something entirely different - in this case, it all came together in Poznan, Poland. A place that Stephanie and I won’t ever forget. Whilst I worked at RMG, I met Paul, who became a part of our development team. Over the course of the time we worked together, we became good friends along with the rest of the small team that we had, including Iqbal, another developer. Before Paul left the agency, he told Iqbal and I of a girl that he had met on his holiday. A girl that Stephanie and I subsequently met for the first time a little later, ironically at...

Last week I wrote about the family and our Easter break in Cornwall. What I didn’t mention at the time was how I’d spent the entire week digitally disconnected, or as I’d left it on Facebook “Adam is Rebooting”. What this meant was, one whole week, no laptop. no Internet, no phone, no iPad, no nothing at all. Question is now, how on earth did I cope? I have a little line of copy on the banner of this site, proclaiming myself as something of a digital evangelist. What I mean by this, is that I believe strongly in the Internet, that it is a tool for empowering people and that by making use of it productively, can improve peoples lives by a) giving them access to opportunity or b) providing a platform to communicate. Why then would I want to leave it all behind? The truth is, so far during this calendar year, I’ve been working pretty much nonstop on either the King’s Church Medway project, work in general or another one of the projects that has landed on me and taken up some of ...

What happens when you get a group of six adults, six children and a five month old baby into three cars and travel for five hours across two-hundred and ninety miles to spend seven whole days filled with fun and frolics? You get one broken down vehicle, one irate nurse, six hyper children, six tired adults, twelve pairs of sand-filled shoes, one half-drowned three year old boy and one glorious, mesmerising sunset - and that was just the first day! Firstly, as is always the case with blogs of this type, I make no apologies for the length and the amount of waffle that spews from my keyboard. Afterall, this is a personal blog which accounts for the mundane and uninteresting events of a mundane and uninteresting life, so that when I’m old and more senile than I already am I can look back at these things with some form of guidance and hopefully add a bit colour to what will one day be black and white memories. Anyhow, I shall begin... When Mum and Dad invited us to spend a week with t...