Here at the Dock we try to keep telling Good News Stories about Belfast – and it’s amazing how many there are when you start to look.  Last week I was at an event in the Waterfront – the launch of ROC (Redeeming Our Communities) in Northern Ireland – an organisation which seeks to link together and energise anyone seeking to transform their local community.  The event – as hosted by Jim off of The Apprentice, no less! – was full of stories of good news – the difference that people can make when they work together.

And more stories this week: this is NoMoreTraffik week – a campaign taking a stand against human trafficking – more details here.  You maybe heard that the week of events kicked off with a flash mob in Belfast City Centre last Saturday:

– and continues throughout the week with a fantastic lineup of acts and creative stuff.  And the best news is that two of them are happening in Dock Cafe! – on Wednesday night we’re hosting ‘Stories of Hope’ at 8pm.  Lynda Bryans (UTV) will be sharing at the event, we will have amazing music from New Irish as well as stories from the International Justice Mission and Migrant Help. We will also have some excellent local photography and your chance to share your stories of hope for Belfast; that it will become one of many, many slavery free cities.  There will be no charge for the event and we’ll even throw in a cup of tea and a bun!  More details here

Then on Thursday at 7:30 we’re hosting a Chocolate and Fashion night – an evening of scrumptious fairtrade treats, including chocolate cakes, buns, cupcakes and even chocolate infused SAUSAGES! The A21 Campaign brings a sense of style to the evening with a Fair trade Fashion show with clothes designed & modelled by the students from Belfast Metropolitan College & Queens. With live music adding to the ambiance of the evening – come along to hear more about how you can join us in the fight to take the bitter taste of slavery out of our chocolate & by being informed about where your fashion comes from!  More details here

Just got word today that there could be an art event on Friday night as well – watch this space for more…

And still on the theme of good news, on Saturday i had the great pleasure of being present at the Run4Unity at Stormont Estate.  The Run4Unity gang had been in Dock Cafe a few weeks ago for one of their preparation sessions – the cafe was filled with colour and chat as they prepared banners, dance routines, songs…

And all their prep came good on Saturday – a glorious sun-kissed day at Stormont as the runners set off down that famous driveway – a mixture of different backgrounds, accents, nationalities and colours – united by the fun of doing something together and going for a run on a glorious afternoon in Belfast!

Good news – everywhere you look…

One of the Dock gang just spotted this video on Secret Belfast – an impromptu acoustic session in Dock Cafe last week – it’s fantastic!

Yep we’re back from a fabulous week in La France, chilling out in a variety of Parisian cafes, brasseries, gardens and Seine-side benches – bliss!

One thing really struck me about the Parisian culture: they are wonderfully social people.  They have a great way of splitting up the day: nice long lingering breakfast in the local neighbourhood boulangerie, fresh coffee and croissants.  Then nice long lingering lunch with friends from work, a few courses, a glass of wine, a short shot of coffee.  Then nice long lingering dinner avec famille, carafe of wine, much fine food, often in the open air under the stars in little sidestreet brasseries and restaurants.  All split up with nice long lingering breaks in coffee shops and creperies throughout the day.

It’s not that they work less hard than us (I don’t think) – they just seem to enjoy life so much more – spending the day eating, chatting, laughing, prioritising good food and good company over the demands of a To Do list.  Maybe I’m looking at them through rose-tinted specs – but it was a very admirable and enjoyable pace of life to taste for a week!

And it’s helped to come home to the beautiful, wonderful, social space of Dock Cafe with a new perspective: it’s very Parisian! – in the cafe we try to have that same space and time for good company, good food, good coffee, and space to enjoy life away from the rat race.  Will we have to change the motto – ‘La Vie Dans Le Quartier Titanique’…?!

It’s good to be back!

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.