Dock Cafe is back in action – hurrah!

(Tegan has been rescued from the snowdrifts of the Holywood hills)

There’s no better place in Belfast to enjoy a mug of steaming Hot Choc while looking out over the snow-covered mountains surrounding Belfast…

A little slice of cafe life just before our snow-enforced temporary closure – Fiona’s fundraiser for her trip to Kenya filled the Dock with warmth, music, chat and life on a cold March night last week:

And a meeting in the Prayer Garden today as the setting sun blazed through the cafe windows – the Dock Chaplaincy Team – Methodist, Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian – chatting and praying and sharing together.  This is what it’s all about…!

Sorry folks – Dock Cafe is closed again today (Saturday) – unless we all want to walk up into the hills and help Tegan dig her car out of a snowdrift…?!

Colin’s market stall will re-appear another day and Dock Cafe life will return to normal as soon as any of us can actually get near the place!

For all of you contemplating journeys and activities today, please take care out there…. Sometimes the great thing about a Snow Day is that you realise that the world still turns without you rushing around doing all the things you had planned to do.  If you can, stay in and stay safe!

Remember Snow Days from school?  If the bus hadn’t come by the time of the school bell, you could slide happily back home to a day of snowball fights and hot chocolates in front of the fire – bliss!

Which is a way of letting you know that The Dock is taking a Snow Day today, as most of the volunteers are, by the sounds of things, back in a hunter-gatherer dark age, trapped behind snowdrifts and surviving without electricity (especially spare a thought for Tegan, co-ordinating cancelling the volunteers and the bakery order with her mobile phone’s fading battery, with no electricity to recharge it when it dies – gulp!)

For those of you who can, batten down the hatches, light the fire and relax!

And in the hope that our second ice-age might have abated a little by tomorrow, Saturday in Dock Cafe will see another new idea tried-out in the new pop-up market stall:  Colin’s range of funky-sounding health and beauty products.  Come and bag a (healthy) bargain!

(Or: An Ace Space To Place A Mace…)

Exciting developments at The ARC apartments: Dock Cafe is about to have some next-door neighbours!

Work began this week fitting-out the unit on the other side of Dock Cafe’s partition-wall – it’s going to be a Mace local shop.  At long last the Titanic Quarter will have somewhere to buy Sunday papers, Pot Noodles, loo rolls and all the other necessities of life!

It’s great news for Dock Cafe – as anyone looking for a comfy seat to eat their Mace sandwiches (or hot food – there’s going to be a deli counter) and read their Mace newspapers can pop next door into The Dock – our ‘Eat Your Piece In Peace’ policy will still be in force!

And the Mace isn’t the end of the story – more new neighbours are due to start using some of the neighbouring units over the next few months, offering everything from Segway tours to sail training…  watch this space…

Life in the Titanic Quarter is happening!