As if you needed another reason to visit Belfast’s best (only) Honesty Box Cafe…!

The Dock is hosting a fantastic photographic exhibition (starting this week and on display until Christmas) – winners of a photography competition run by the Shorts Camera Club.  All the photos have a local connection – familiar and unfamiliar sights from around the Titanic Quarter and East Belfast – seen from new angles and perspectives, taken by people with an eye for a great photo.  Don’t miss the chance to come in and have a look while they’re on public display!

And a few of my own humble efforts – not exactly photography-competition-worthy, but a few snapshots of life in Dock Cafe…  On one side of the cafe today, along with the usual mix of cafe customers chilling, eating, drinking, playing chess and strumming the Titanic Guitars, this group from the Met College held their seminar (they’re all studying fashion) over coffees and krispie buns:

And on the other side of the coffee bar, Ken and David dangled acrobatically on ladders and scaffolding to complete a long-intended Dock Cafe project: to fit curtains at the dividing wall so that all our lovely toasty warmth doesn’t disappear into the unused area of the shop unit:

Last night we gathered in that toasty warmth for Titanic Quarter’s first ever community forum – an chance for residents, developers and neighbourhood police to meet over mince pies and fruit punch (my own recipe, after every single shop had run out of pre-prepared stuff!)  It was great to be part of a new community just beginning to connect and write the first chapter of its story.  And, if I do say so myself, the mulled fruit punch was awesome.