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...

During my self-imposed blogging sabbatical I started writing several posts, all half-heartedly and never got around to finishing them. I had a look through to see if any were worth saving - then I came across this one. Oliver’s ninth birthday and a trip to the Nou Camp. Now a little out of date contextually, but all finally finished for the record. I’ve long held aspirations to mix two of my favourite things; travel and football. A wannabe tourist if you like of the beautiful game. But life as a Gills fan comes with restrictions, there are no European nights against the continent's finest. The closest we are ever likely to get to any form of foreign opposition is the odd pre-season game in northern France against a local side, which is treated as nothing more than a glorified training session. But last weekend I ticked a big box off of my footballing bucket list, namely a visit to the Nou Camp stadium, home of FC Barcelona. An experience far, far removed from the previous groun...

I started blogging over ten years ago as a means to document becoming a father for the first time and coming to terms with growing up. It took me on a magical mystery tour beyond accounts of childbirth, marriage proposals, family trips and unlocked an interest in writing and prompted the beginnings of a novel and other journeys into the world of creative writing. But then as suddenly as it started, it stopped and real life took over instead. 18 months of unpublished thoughts lay left unsaid and whilst that time hasn’t been filled with notable tales of adventure, dismay and excitement, the preceding years before it hadn’t either. It was merely the minutiae of an ordinary, everyday life left behind as a legacy to remind myself and those closest to me what had happened, when it had happened and how we all went about it. Any comments, likes and shares were a welcome surprise and gladly received, but the motive behind my words was not for others benefit, it was for mine and mine alone -...

For several years, mainly whilst drinking in the British Legion Club before Gillingham home games, my Dad, my friends and I would talk about visiting France or Belgium to tour some of the battlefields and visit the cemeteries of the fallen during World War One. We talked about Belgian beer and how we might be able to combine the two for a weekend of history, culture and light entertainment. But after talking about it once too many times, a decisive action was required and plans were drawn up once and for all. History as a child didn't interest me, not in the slightest. I had to choose a humanity subject when I chose my options and the joy of dropping history felt wonderful. It was all in the past, black and white pictures that had no relevance to the ‘real-world’. It was nothing more than ignorance and whilst I wouldn't say that I've developed an insatiable thirst for the subject I've learnt that its relevance cannot be understated and in actually fact, our very exi...

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...

Admittedly we are not the most cultured of families, our collective experience of the theatre amounts to a few pantomime performances and the odd West End show. So when we were offered the opportunity to visit Greenwich to watch a performance of Alice and Wonderland we set off not really knowing what to expect. Sell a Door theatre company is a mid-scale touring theatre whose aim it is to attract young adults and teenages who wouldn’t ordinarily attend live theatre and excite them of the possibilities in which live theatre provides. Alice in Wonderland is their latest work and is running at Greenwich until the 1st June. Yesterdays performance was the first live showing to an audience and we were invited to the preview and to enjoy the celebratory Mad Hatters tea party beforehand. The communal areas of the theatre had been decorated with props and themed around the whole Wonderland world as written by the author Lewis Carroll and brought to life in many forms of media ever since. ...

As a child was it just me who used to devise imaginary play areas and build the world longest slide and the highest swing ever known to man? Did others dream as I did about being offered a job as a toy tester like Tom Hanks’s character did in the movie Big? No, you did too? Oh good, I’m glad about that, as that is exactly what happened to us last week! When an old friend sent me a message via Facebook wanting to know if I was interested in taking the kids to Greenwich to test elements of a new exhibition at the National Maritime Museum I jumped at the chance. As a family we love spending time in Greenwich, there is so much to do -  we didn’t need asking twice! Besides the park, which is a global treat, you have the iconic Cutty Sark and masses of Maritime History. The Old Royal Naval College is a must see, particular for us as my Grandfather used to school there. Also, as it was Saturday and with the wife working I invited my mother along, her foster child and for good measu...

A work colleague of mine shared her account of a weekend spent by the sea in celebration of her birthday. Whilst she recounted her various stops around East Kent the hopeless romantic in me dreamt up visions of walking along a wintry seafront with a brisk chill in the air, before warming up inside a cafe on the beach with steamed up windows and drinking hot chocolate with sticky marshmallows floating on the top. Which is exactly what we did last weekend except I left with an even bigger romantic desire than the one that lead me there in the first place. Margate , a seaside town that evokes memories of hot summer days, childhood, sunburn and laughter. Memories of my dearly departed grandmother and my great-grandmother too, ladies who loved Margate and everything it used to stand for, namely good old-fashioned fun. I have fond recollections of riding the Scenic Railway , the Mary Rose and the Looping Star as both ladies watched on by with smiles just as big as mine. But as time pas...

When I was a kid growing up, football kind of passed me by. It wasn’t until Italia 90, Gazza and the heartbreak of Turin that the beautiful game become a conscious thing to me. I knew that my Dad went out on Saturday’s and came home smelling of beer and that sometimes his van broke down which meant he had to stay in the pub, but the association with that and football wasn’t something I remember with much clarity. After Italia 90 things changed, I fell in love. The Gills, football and everything about the game; except one thing - I couldn’t play. Which is not true really, anyone can play, its the easiest game in the world, jumpers for goalposts, simple. I just couldn’t play very well. Once I started secondary school and saw all of the other kids running around with a ball stuck to their feet doing Cruyff turns and keepy uppies like circus seals I grew jealous and wanted to be just like them but didn’t know how. Apparently they went training and played boys football and I didn’t/coul...

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...