{"id":81,"date":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/?p=81"},"modified":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","slug":"where-it-all-began","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/2020\/10\/01\/where-it-all-began\/","title":{"rendered":"Where It All Began"},"content":{"rendered":"My upbringing was pretty unique. My dad had a job as a computer consultant travelling the
world. It might sound nice and glamorous, but in fact it\u2019s a lot of being in very loud airports,
dingy hotels, being away from friends and family, and eating in restaurants by yourself. He was
working long hours, and I would go for weeks sometimes without seeing him at all. That went on
for a couple years until I was nearly 10. He was literally all over the world for weeks on end, and
then he finally got a placement in Zurich, Switzerland. When he came home, my mum would
say, \u201cWhere are you going next week?\u201d He would reply: \u201cI\u2019ve got to go back to Switzerland.\u201d
And this went on and on. He said to his bosses, \u201cYou seem to keep wanting me to go out to
Switzerland. Do you want me to stay for a bit longer? I\u2019d like to arrange for my family to come
over if it\u2019s for a serious amount of time.\u201d And they confessed, \u201cOkay, cards on the table, we

2

want you to be there for a year.\u201d Me and my mum packed up our bags and moved there; we
didn\u2019t speak one word of German. I got put in a foreigners\u2019 school where they concentrated on
German for pretty much your whole day. Once you became fluent in German, they allowed you
to go to a normal Swiss school. On my 11 th birthday, I took a cake in with a knife so I could share
it with my classmates. Literally, as soon as the teacher walked out of the room, one of the kids
picked up the knife and I narrowly avoided getting stabbed straight through the stomach.
Unfortunately, I was in a class with people that were coming from war-torn countries, with
bombs going off all the time, and it seemed violence was the only way that they could express
their feelings. Strangely enough, I didn\u2019t like being in that school with all the bullying.
As soon as I had that knife turned on me, I decided the only way to get out of that hellhole was to
learn German. So I learned German pretty rapidly. A little after my 12 th birthday, I had just
settled in my final Swiss school, and my dad said, \u201cI\u2019m going to send you back to England, with
your mum, so you can go to a big school. I\u2019m just going to commute to Switzerland for four
months: I\u2019m going to leave at four o\u2019clock on a Monday morning, and I\u2019ll come back on Friday
evening, so I\u2019ll still get to spend the weekends with you.\u201d I said, \u201cOk, you\u2019ve got to do what
you\u2019ve got to do.\u201d
It became a bit of running joke, because it got to the 1st January and my dad was starting to pack
up his suitcase, ready to go back to Switzerland, and my mum said, \u201cHang on, I thought you\u2019d
finished?\u201d \u201cOh yeah, they\u2019ve asked me to go back out again.\u201d Then it got extended, but he said,
\u201cDon\u2019t worry, I\u2019m going to come back at the end of this year.\u201d And then the following year,
again he said, \u201cI\u2019m going to be back at the end of this year.\u201d As it turned out, there was no job
option for my dad back in England. In the end, he didn\u2019t move back from Switzerland for 21
years!","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My upbringing was pretty unique. My dad had a job as a computer consultant travelling theworld. It might sound nice and glamorous, but in fact it\u2019s a lot of being in very loud airports,dingy hotels, being away from friends and family, and eating in restaurants by yourself. He wasworking long hours, and I would go…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}