An historic handshake happened today!  At a line-up in Titanic Belfast, during a swanky lunch hosted in honour of the Jubilee, I got to shake hands with the Queen!

(Oh, and apparently someone called Martin shook her hand today too.)

It actually, genuinely was a great honour to be in the “handshake queue” along with many of the great people from the world of Titanic Quarter.  And, I’ve to tell ya, it’s actually very nerve-wracking!  As this tiny figure in apple green approaches, you go through your mental inventory of correct forms of address, things not to say, things you should say…  Until eventually my moment arrived, and I gabbled something incoherent about the chance for the churches to work together in the Titanic Quarter.  To which HM the Q gave her verdict: “That’s a lovely idea!”

Just in case that got me feeling too cocky, a few minutes later I had the same moment with Prince Philip – who responded to my babbled one-line description of the vision of The Dock by moving wordlessly on the next person in the queue!  (respect!)

So – to compensate for the lack of pictures with this post (I was a good obedient boy and kept my phone & camera switched off for the whole event, as ordered on the invite!), I hereby present the new version of the Dock logo complete with Royal Seal Of Approval:

And, in the interests of balance:

I’m off to put up my feet now – I’m knackered!  And I was only at a small part of the day of activities – how do the royals do it?!  Great respect and love to them from The Dock – and what a fantastic, hopeful day for Northern Ireland as we provided a Good News headline which echoed around the world.

***EDIT FROM YEARS LATER:

Fantastically, although I was obviously unaware of it at the time, someone did manage to snap a pic of this Historic Encounter as it happened:

and after a hard-fought battle to come up with the best caption for it, we went with: