Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

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...

At the beginning of the year I shared details of the private competition that we, as a family were taking part in. The challenge, devised by my father was to see which couple out of me and my wife, my sister, her husband and both of my parents could lose the most amount of weight over the course of three months. On Sunday evening the final results were in! In third place we had my sister and her husband who automatically finished last on account that neither of them turned up to for the final weigh-in. My sister might have used her car being repaired as mitigating circumstances, but truth be told, neither of them really entered into the spirit of the competition in the first place! In runner up spot, my parents finished, with a fairly non-spectacular weight-loss. I won’t indulge any figures here, but suffice to say, I thought that it would have been higher considering it is their own finances that are funding the eventual prize winners, which went to... Stephanie and I. To be ...

I have known for some time that the people of Caring Hands in the Community provide a wonderful service for homeless people in Medway. I’m also aware that whilst their hard work hasn’t gone unrecognised, there has been a lack of information available online about the work that they do. This reason, out of many is why I asked my Uncle Matthew if I could be involved in re-purposing their web offering. On Monday evening, I witnessed for myself a small element of their work which reinforced my opinion and desire to succeed in the project we are working on. Caring Hands was initially started by my Uncle Matthew over ten years ago after a conversation he had with a man outside King’s Church where he worked whilst sweeping the drive. The man was homeless, and without wanting to go into specifics (see the website when it launches!) Matthew felt compelled to do something and shortly afterwards Caring Hands in the Community was born. In conversations over the years Matthew has always been ...

Being a Gillingham fan isn’t glamorous. We don’t play beautiful, flowing, intricate football. Nor do we play football in an arena fit for gladiators, surrounded by stands that rise up to the God’s in homage to the heroes what ply their trade on that stretch of finally manicured turf. Which is why, when the chance comes along to see a different side to the game, I try and take it when I can. On Monday, I paid my second visit to the Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal as they met Newcastle United in the Premier League, live on Sky. Arsenal have been in great form of late, chasing down third place Tottenham Hotspur, their fierce local rivals in battle for the automatic entry into the prestigious Champions league. My friend Will is a season ticket holder at the Emirates and due to work commitments was unable to attend the game. My email response to his invite was “I’ll go, but if nobody more deserving wants to”. As it was, there were no other, so it was I who made a lonely pilgrimage t...

Towards the end of last year I entered a writing competition. The subject was 'life-writing' which for me is what this blog is all about, however uninteresting it appears to anyone from the outside looking in. Unfortunately, I didn't make the final long-list, but in celebrating my 200th post last week I thought that now would be as good a time to share it as any. The following "story" for me, encapsulates everything I've learned about myself in the previous two hundred posts. Premature Perfection Gravesend 1980. July the 26th if I am going to be exact. I don’t remember it. Of course I am not expected to, nobody does. It was the date of my birth. Nothing remarkable about that. People are born every minute, every hour of every day. It’s life. Like mine; nothing really remarkable about that either. I am married now, I have a child. Have another one due next month. Married for just over a year to the women I started dating thirteen years ago. I have a semi-su...

Having had the last week off work due to holiday accrued during 2011-2012, I sit asking just where the time as gone! I know exactly where, working hard on the rebuild of the King’s Church Website which has been the focus of my blogs over the past few weeks. I wanted to take a step away from the project for a while and have a look at some of the other things I’ve done whilst being away from the office. On Monday nights after school Oliver has a swimming lesson at Cascades, our local swimming pool and with me being home for the week it was a perfect opportunity for me to see how he was getting on. As a family, we are not well known for our sporting process. I hardly have any great anticipation that Oliver or Phoebe will grow up to to become sporting legends but both Stephanie and I understand the importance of being healthy and active even if we aren’t the worlds finest examples at putting our principles into practice. Even so, through our children we have a great chance to rever...

Towards the end of last month, I read a status update from my Uncle Matthew who is Pastor of King's Church in Medway. His status championed the launch of his church’s new website and encouraged his Facebook connections to visit. Except that when I did, I wasn’t enthused by what I saw. After I put across my point of view he agreed with my assessment and accepted my invitation to review the current site and work with him and his team to start again - pretty much from the ground up. Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited the church several times. On each occasion we’ve had a proactive discussion on what a potential new website should feature, how it should look and most importantly of all, how it should communicate - not just to visitors of the website, but to friends of people who belong to the church, or organisations that help on a daily basis to do good for the greater church community. We made a decision early on that we were actually dealing with multiple websites rather t...

For a long time I’ve had this belief that Sky are evil and as a corporation have done more harm than good for English football, that they’ve taken the working class soul out of the game and made it a rich persons plaything. The only problem is, last night - I became its latest victim. I sold out. Sacrificed my team for the comfort of my lounge and added my last few pennies into the bottomless Rupert Murdoch honeypot instead of being there for the team I love. Gillingham vs Southend on a Monday night. Nothing glamorous about that, but being a Gillingham supporter has never been about glamour. The closest I’ll ever get to see Gillingham in Europe was a friendly in Calais a couple of years ago and the Premier League seems just as far away. We were close once, not so long ago in fact, finishing 11th in what is now the Championship, but it is the ghost of those glory days that make the current level of mediocrity so difficult to bare. When it was announced that Gillingham vs Southend ...