Pink T-shirts are here!

The Giro is coming… the Giro is coming… The Titanic Quarter is abuzz with excitement as we prepare for another mad, busy, wonderful global event in our wee city…

As you can imagine, we’re prepared for a crazy weekend in The Dock.  Every volunteer has been refused any leave, illness, absence or any other shilly-shallying: it’s all hands on deck for our extending opening from 9am – 7pm on Friday and 9am – 5pm on Saturday.

We’ve laid on suitable amounts of coffee: James reckons this lot is enough to make 7000 cuppas!

And just in case all 7000 customers arrive at once, we’re spreading out for the weekend!  Joachim and the team have been busy all week setting up an overflow area in Block A of the ARC (that’s the shop unit at the far end of the apartments from Dock Cafe).  As well as overflow seating for Honesty Box cuppas, we’re setting this section up as a pop-up market featuring the very best of local entrepreneurs and suppliers.

It’s all overseen by Elaine – who you’ll recognise from the Dock Pop-Up Market (where she began her Waffle Hut selling tasty sweet and savoury waffles).  She’s bringing along some of her cohorts from the We Make Belfast pop-up shop – sweet-makers, illustrators, textile and pottery makers, home-made ice-cream, jewellery makers, photographers, purveyors of fresh seafood chowder and street food, and many more…

Watching them painting, furnishing and decorating the empty unit ready for Giro-Day brings me back to the rush to get ready for Eamonn all those moons ago…

Another Giro-related activity of the last few days saw an energetic team of Dock volunteers pick up the shovels to do some repair work to the amazing Wish land artwork beside Dock Cafe.  Having been slightly damaged by winter winds and puddles, we hope we’ve brought it back to its original splendour… we’ll find out from the helicopter footage at the start of the Giro!

And a sure sign that the Giro is nearly here: The Dock loo is (temporarily) no longer the only public loo at the ARC apartments (although it might just still be the nicest)

And one more reason (as if you needed one more) to visit The Dock over the Giro weekend: Look who’s back!!

Titanic Quarter in a nutshell: the starting point for the Giro D’Italia, home for thousands of  residents and students, the unique skyline of the gleaming Samson and Goliath cranes – and of course the world’s best/only honesty box cafe at the heart of it all.

Just how many good news stories are crammed into that one picture? – and of course if the panorama stretched further, Titanic Belfast and the SS Nomadic would hove into view.  Belfast history, tourism, industry, education, commerce, church, and community – all visible from one spot.

It’s a great time for our great city  – and so this Sunday night at our monthly service on SS Nomadic, the theme is ‘good news stories for Belfast’.  We’ll be hearing stories from last year’s World Police and Fire Games, the opening of Titanic Belfast, the G8, the tall ships, and loads more – as well as getting ready for more colour and life in the upcoming Giro D’Italia.

Although we’ll be coming prepared with some good news stories, there’ll also be an open mic for anyone who wants to share any more great stories from the city.  They can be big international events or small individual encounters – as long as they’re good news!

I think we too easily believe the worst in Northern Ireland.  When a fantastic, positive event (the WPFG springs to mind) seems to move us a step forward, it’s too easy for some bad news to knock us two steps back.  We need to tell, and keep retelling, the true, important, honest-to-goodness good news stories if that’s the future we want to build.

The sunshine seems to have taken a temporary leave of absence this morning – so to brighten things up, a few snaps of summery Dock life over the last few days…

This is the life, eh!  Staff meetings in the sunshine… extracting the deckchairs from their winter hibernation… cool customers and cute doggies chilling out in the sunshine… cyclists arriving over the new Sam Thompson bridge…

And last Sunday, our sun-baked Dock Walk took us right underneath Samson and Goliath to check out the new feature on the Belfast skyline, the oil rig in the Musgrave Channel.  When we were there, some massive lengths of photogenically-rusted chain had just been laid out along the length of the channel.  I’m sure they have some prosaic practical purpose, but what a cool photo op!

(And a great discussion starter for the Dock Walkers – we talked and prayed about the chains that can sometimes weigh us down, and the links that bind us together.  What a great picture of the interconnected world of The Dock – all our different traditions, linked and mingled, without visible beginning or end.)

And the TQ even looks cool when the sun starts to disappear – on our Dock Walk the previous Sunday we passed Titanic Belfast gleaming in blazing sunshine, but with gloriously ominous storm cloud gathering in the distance…

And of course if you call into The Dock for an early evening cuppa during our new extended opening hours (until 7pm every weekday), you can watch the sun start to sink behind the Belfast hills… Dock sunsets are the best!

Just before the close of Easter Day – this is what (or rather who) it’s all about:

The speaker is S.M. Lockridge, (awesomely, the S.M. stands for Shadrach Meshach) – a fantastic old-school Baptist revival preacher.  I love the way his words just seem to flow out of a deep-seated passion, a lifetime of learning and theology and truth expressed in one stream of praise.  “I wish I could describe him to you” – I think he doesn’t do a bad job!

A quick post to say Happy Birthday, Howdy Neighbour! and How-Did-We-Ever-Live-Without-You? to our wonderful friends next door in the Titanic Quarter Mace.  It’s exactly one year ago today that they opened their doors and Dock Life (and Titanic Quarter life) changed forever.

At last, a place to buy milk when you run out, or a fresh deli sandwich, or a curry chip, or emergency bin bags/light bulbs/smoke alarm batteries/jam/napkins/loo roll/soap/whatever we’ve run out of today!  And, as of the last few weeks, to post a letter too – the Mace now also contains the TQ’s first Post Office.  Cue more what-did-we-ever-do-without-you-moments.

Things move so fast in the Titanic Quarter that we nearly missed this significant anniversary… Over coffee this afternoon,
Me: It must be nearly a year you’ve been open now?
Andy: Yeah, it’s next week sometime.  18th April.
Me: Isn’t 18th April…umm… today?
Andy:  Oh yeah!

So, in the nick of time, to our excellent neighbours:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!