April is drawing to a close with a nice sense of completion.  Sus & I are preparing to go on a wee break next week – a bit of chillout time after all the activity and emotion of the past month.  April 2012 – the big deadline for so long – has been and (almost) gone, and it is with all my heart that I can say that this Titanic Centenary month surpassed all my expectations and wildest hopes – as an individual, for The Dock, and for Belfast City.  It’s a month we’ll never forget.

And now, a few wee treats to just round off the month in style.  The first was my first-ever visit to the last-ever resting place of Titanic on dry ground – the bottom of the awe-inspiring Thompson Graving Dock in the TQ.  After two-and-a-half years of peering into the dock from the railings, leading tours around it, Dock Walking past it, praying near it, finding out about it, watching it leak (eek!) and then get patched-up again – what an experience to finally walk along it!

If you want to share the experience for yourself (and I heartily recommend that you do), it’s now a daily part of the Dock and Pump House tours run by Colin and his fantastic team of guides.  You approach the dock by means of a temporary staircase within a block of scaffolding (complete with disclaimer form!) – down and down, modern life gradually diappearing from view as you sink into the 44-foot depths of the dock…

Down at dock level, one of the guides (Ashlin was doing a cracking job when I visited) shows you round the keel blocks, the workers’ entrance steps, the gratings leading to the old steampowered pumps, the notches for the stabilising timbers… all staggeringly well-preserved, yet still with the patina of 100 years of use and history…

You also get up-close to that gorgeous slab of riveted metal, the caisson gate – built at the same time by the same men with the same metal as the hulls of the Olympic class liners…

Down at the bottom of the dock, most of the new glass-and-chrome additions to the TQ skyline disappear – you can see occasional glimpses of White Star house, the Pump House clocktower catches your eye, but mostly you’re looking up at stone and sky – the exact same view as the men preparing the Dock for Titanic’s arrival in February 1912…

There’s nothing like it for appreciating the scale of the ships – even in 2012, you feel dwarfed by the huge concrete walls and the long echoing strip of the dock floor stretching around you.  The keel blocks, which look so neat and manageable from above in a nice straight line, are huge when you get down beside them.  Up close and personal, you can really understand that this was world-leading technology – Cape Canaverel stuff – in the world of 1912.

The Thompson Dock is one of those great, unrepeatable pieces of heritage with which Belfast is so abundantly blessed – in this case, the last place the ship rested on dry ground, the end of the story of its construction and its last point of contact with Belfast soil.  So it was quite neat to go straight from an end to a beginning: The release of Titanic in 1997 was really the first time we started talking about the ship in Belfast again since it left the dock all those years ago.  And so it didn’t seem right to end Titanic Month without going to see the re-release – Celine Dion and all.

I remember seeing the movie in Dublin (I was a student at that stage) back in ’97, and at that point in time I’m not sure whether I knew with any certainty that she was built in Belfast… how times change!  What hasn’t changed (other than its 3D makeover) is Cameron’s movie – so has it aged well?

A couple of things struck me.  Cameron had clearly done his homework – all the facts, details and dates which are now drilled into me are casually namechecked in throwaway lines of dialogue (much more neatly, it must be said, than in Julian Fellowes’ recent version…let us speak of it no more.)  Loads of the stuff to do with the ship, the real-life characters on board, and the representation of the sinking are even better than I’d remembered.  Everything to do with Kate and Leo and their drippy little love story is thousands of times worse than I remembered, and you do have to grit your teeth and think happy thoughts to make it through certain lines of dialogue (unless you, too, are a piece of tumbleweed blowing in the wind).

But… beneath all the cheesiness beats the heart of a great movie. It certainly isn’t short of passion.  It’s hard to stay cross at a movie that puts you so thoroughly through the emotional wringer before the end credits roll.  And it’s even harder to stay cross when you remember that this movie really did re-ignite global interest in Titanic, which started the reversal of Belfast’s “we don’t talk about Titanic” policy, which led to the dream of the Titanic Quarter, which is leading to the reality of the Titanic Quarter, which leads to the outpouring of hope and creativity and Good News that we try to celebrate on this blog…

And I did notice – on Eleanor‘s behalf – that there are loads of close-ups of her dad’s fireplaces…