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…

Apologies to anyone who’s been trying to email me over the last few weeks – I’m afraid the email mountain got a bit neglected during the past few tumultuous weeks.  If you’ve got in contact with the Dock and you’re wondering if you’ll ever get a reply – sorry! – and hopefully it won’t be long, I’m starting to catch up with myself over the last few days!

One really lovely email that was waiting for me in the backlog came from someone who was part of the recording of the ‘virtual choir’ which was used to commemorate the 11:40pm centenary of Titanic’s collision with the iceberg.  This beautiful piece of music was created from thousands of separate voices, all recorded individually by people using their home computers, submitted online and stitched together into this breathtaking wash of harmonies and voices.

If you haven’t already given it a listen, I’ve attached the link again below – along with the message from one of those thousands of voices.  Lovely to hear that such a huge, ambitious global undertaking had a personal individual impact.

When I sat down to watch the first showing of the New York stream, I got emotional yes..seeing us all up there, ‘alone together’ (quote from Mr Whitacre) but when a (now) dear VC3 friend of mine, showed us the pictures from the Titanic Belfast Remembrance – that’s when I really choked up.

So the Dock has been popping up on TV screens all across the land over the last few weeks – so, as promised/threatened, here are a few examples…

Some diligent iPlayer searching has revealed that a lot of those appearances are now lost to the mists of time; alas and alack, many encounters between myself and Mark Simpson off of the BBC have now disappeared from the web, while the TV coverage of the service at the Drawing Offices has now also passed its sell-by date.  And to my great relief, my attempt to get myself out of a tricky sentence by describing the curves of the Titanica sculpture using only hand-gestures, has also gone (I was worried it would make its way onto YouTube compete with AWOOGA! sound effects…)

But the Dock is still out there… on the RTE player I found this clip of me being interviewed by the terrifyingly-professional 12-year-old Gabrielle:

…while the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – we’re international baby!) sent me a link to their piece on Titanic Belfast, which includes the Grand Opening of Dock Cafe:

(I’ll forgive them for clearly cutting me off mid-sentence – I probably blathered on for ages…)

It’s not just TV that suffered the blitzkrieg either – I was on Radio Ulster a couple of times, including Thought for the Day on Sunday 15th (now disappeared from iPlayer, but the script made its way on to the blog here).  And two separate programmes featured the Dock Walk – first of all Great British Faith on Radio 2 (which was a fantastic hour-long exploration of the faith life of the city – I’ll try to track down a way of putting it on the web if possible) and then a feature on Radio 4, in which reporter Mark McCleary followed our windswept and rain-lashed Dock Walk on Easter Day – it’s still on iPlayer, 15:32 into the programme here.

But of course the gold standard, the big cheese, the numero uno of all possible TV appearances… repeated last Sunday on BBC2 to mark the anniversary, it’s (dah-dee-de-dah, dah-dee-de-daaaah) the one and only Songs of Praise…

So as I promised, an update on the Dock publicity blitzkrieg…  I may have been lying low for a day or two this week, but The Dock has featured in a whole host of interviews, photo ops, media opportunities and general shameless showing-off…

So, today – appearances in print:
We’ve featured in Rejoice Always magazine… (a really thorough interview if you can get hold of the mag (or there’s a copy in Dock Cafe) – probably the best way to catch up on the Dock Story So Far!  So we’ll forgive them for putting a boat that’s Not The Titanic on the front cover…)

We’ve been in Christian Today… (link brings you directly to the article – another good interview, although why do English people often rename the Titanic Quarter ‘Titanic Quarters’?  There’s only one – it’s unique!)

We’re on the front of the Church of Ireland Gazette… (great picture of Karen & the Dean – but a description of Sunday afternoon’s service which doesn’t mention the walk or the service at the Drawing Office – boo!)

We’re on the cover of the Christian Aid magazine… (messing around on bicycles to advertise the Titanic Cycle Challenge – more info on the link – and in response to several people who have asked on Facebook, errr… no, we’re not doing the full 300-mile challenge.  We are making breakfast at Dock Cafe for the cyclists before they depart…is that enough??)

We’re also featured in Evangelical Alliance’s Reach e-zine (sorry, this one’s a few weeks old – forgot to post the link when it first came out!)

And I don’t know exactly where or when, but I’ve heard from a few people that the pictures of our ‘Shared Medley’ of ministers have appeared in a couple of outlets throughout the week as well.  Yep I’m wearing a ‘proper minister’ collar – enjoy it while it lasts!!

I think that’s all in print for now… Tomorrow: TV and radio – the invasion continues!

Well hello again, after a little bit of a breather to recover from perhaps the most phenomenal two weeks of my life!  And the idea was to give you all a little bit of a breather too, from my regular appearances on your TV screens, radio sets and magazine covers – didn’t work out quite like that – more about that tomorrow!

For now I just thought I’d better finish off the story of the last few weeks.  Those of you who have been following this blog (you brave souls) will have seen the posts growing longer and more frequent, your trusty blogger becoming more emotional, and my beard growing ever longer and scruffier (don’t worry, it’s all shaved off now – it was starting to scare children).  And as each event seemed to be more powerful, more moving, more beautiful than the last, the question emerged – would there be enough superlatives left in the English language if it just kept getting better and better?

And the answer is quite simply – no.  It’s hard to put into words why this whole story has come to mean so much.  Andrew Marr may be leading the sarky backlash to the Titanic overload, Julian Fellowes is (quite rightly I reckon) getting a bit of a kicking for the terribleness of his half-hearted take on the whole affair, and it’s becoming increasingly trendy to profess a world-weary Titanic-cynicism (Titanicism…?) whenever the subject is mentioned.  All that I can say is that for those of us in the middle of the story for the last few weeks, the commemoration of this Titanic story, with its extremes of hope and sorrow, its uncountable fascinating facets and angles, was a profound experience we will never forget.

And I think (hope!) it was a profound weekend not just for me but the whole Dock gang.  We had the huge privilege of manning (and womanning) a Prayer Room right at the heart of events (in the pavilion at Titanic Belfast) throughout the weekend, offering prayer, chat and space to those (and there were plenty) who chose to step aside and come in through the doors.

I got to see sunset on 14th April and sunrise on 15th – and wonder what it must have been like to see both, on both dates, on the Atlantic 100 years ago:

We got to meet some fantastic people; Gayle got to meet Dr Robert Ballard, who discovered Titanic’s final resting place on the seabed; I got to meet Eric Kuhne, the visionary designer who master-planned the Titanic Quarter development (and left his own unique mark in the Book of Commoration at the Prayer Room):
 And I had the unique, immense privilege of leading the service at Titanic Belfast to mark the exact centenary of Titanic’s fateful collision at 11:40pm on 14th April.

 Gathered on the balconies of Titanic Belfast, we heard the complex, ethereal harmonies of Eric Whitacre’s Water Night; gathered in the Drawing Office, we listened to the words of Thomas Hardy’s unmatched poem The Convergence of the Twain and the terse, tragic SOS messages from Titanic (which have a kind of poetry of their own); and gathered in the night air, surrounded by the design offices and slipways where Titanic’s story began, we read aloud the names of the individuals whose earthly stories ended when Titanic sank.

And the next morning, we gathered at the City Hall as the striking new brass-and-stone monument to those names was unveiled.  (Although, if I can jump on my soapbox again, has nobody been down to see the beautiful work that’s been done on Titanic’s slipways? – many commentators claimed that the monument at the City Hall contained the first public display of those names, but if I’m not much mistaken, they are also etched in the glass panels surrounding the old concrete ramps on the slipway – just one more thoughtful detail of the superb slipway restoration… Rant over.)

And then – the afternoon.  A dignified and moving service at St Anne’s Cathedral.  Followed by the biggest-ever Dock Walk, leading a tremendous crowd of the worshippers from St Anne’s down to the Drawing Offices in the TQ – and enjoying the expressions on the faces of the many people who hadn’t visited Titanic Quarter before, and watching their delight and surprise and hope that this superb, beautiful new community is becoming reality in Belfast:
 …and finishing off at the Drawing Office with a service involving contributions from all the different voices of the Shared Medley – thoughts, readings, reflections, prayers, personal stories, Titanic stories, stories of hope and vision for our future as a city…  And to cap it all off, worship – beautiful old hymns, raising the roof of that beautiful room, such an immensely significant and important part of our past – and now at the centre of our hope for the future too…

So – yeah, I’ve run out of words.  I’ll either have to start translating into French or Spanish or Latin, or maybe just stop now!  A weekend full of the past and the future, full of great people, and full of a great God.  It was… [superlative overload reached]