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 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!

So, 20 reasons why I LOVE Dock Cafe:

1.  It’s all local…
(The tea is from local Belfast company Suki Tea… the coffee is roasted and ground just across the river on Dargan Road by Bailies Coffee… the traybakes and scones are baked fresh every morning at Valley Crust in East Belfast…)

2. There’s a fishtank!
(the fish are called Kate and Leo)

3.  Acoustic lunchtimes…
(both formal and informal – as well as invited guests filling the room with chilled-out vibes, our most unexpected acoustic session happened when one of the street performers from the Titanic Belfast festival – a chainsaw juggler (!) – did a great session of blues guitar one rainy afternoon – turns out that chainsaw jugglers are great guitarists!)

4.  The Honesty Box…
(As far as I know, we’re the only fully-fledged Honesty Box Cafe in the world (google it!) – everything in the cafe is free for you to eat, drink and enjoy – and if you want to pop something in the box on the way out, it’s totally up to you.  The Honesty Box is also a great conversation starter – and a Good News story for Belfast…are there many other capital cities where an Honesty Box Cafe would flourish?)

5.  Thomas Andrews’ door…
(There’s a story behind this one!  Brian, one of our great new contacts in the world of boating, is a builder by trade and in the 1980s his company was given the project of turning Ardara House in Comber, the Andrews family residence, into upmarket apartments.  The builders had to strip out lots of old doors and panelling – but Brian couldn’t bear to throw out Thomas Andrews’ bedroom door. So it lay unused in his shed for years – before Dock Cafe provided the perfect venue to display it…)

6.  Home-made Titanic fudge…
(Yum.)

7.  The superb artwork and photography…
(Again it’s all by local artists and photographers, most of whom can be glimpsed in the cafe from time-to-time keeping an eye on their handiwork…)

8.  Titanic guitars…
(these are a new range of limited-edition guitars built by a local craftsman – there are 3 display models in Dock Cafe and it’s OK to have a strum – we don’t believe in ‘Do Not Touch’ signs!)

9.  The scones are butter-based…
(So they’re not really a healthy option – but do you really want them to be?)

10.  The milk comes in bottles…
(Yep I think we’ve found the last milkman in Belfast who still delivers milk the way God intended it – in pint bottles with a nice bit of cream at the top.  There’s always a few extra bottles in the fridge so that locals can take some home with them…)

11.  There’s plenty of parking…
(I have heard it said that people are reluctant to come to the Dock Cafe because there’s nowhere to park – which is almost true, other than the spaces in the Odyssey Arena car parks (thousands of spaces), Premier Inn car park (always plenty of free spaces, right beside the cafe), Metropolitan College car park (hundreds of spaces), Titanic Belfast car park (hundreds of spaces),  Titanic Quarter surface car parks (plenty of pay-and-display spaces).  Or you could get the train (Titanic Quarter station is a few minutes’ walk away).  Or you could get the bus (there’s one to the college every 7 minutes).  Or you could walk across the bridge from the city centre along the riverside walkway in about 15 minutes.  So, completely inaccessible then.)

12.  The team behind the coffee bar are the actual nicest people in the world…
(Dock Cafe is run completely by volunteers – and volunteers tend to be people who actually like serving coffee, and talking to people, and passing the time of day, and enjoying a good laugh…)

13.  The Good News Wall…
(with more stories, pictures and random acts of kindness appearing all the time.  One story that was posted to the wall last week almost made Tegan cry – almost.)

14.  Titanic deckchairs…
(So that we can enact the saying “moving the deckchairs on the Titanic” every day.  And, sometimes, it’s sunny enough to sit on them outside the cafe!)

15.  The best views in the Titanic Quarter…
(We’ve seen rainbows, stormclouds, sunsets, we’ve watched the sunlight reflect off Titanic Belfast, we’ve been in prime position for the light shows, we’ve seen the progress of the restoration of SS Nomadic…)

16.  There’s loads of space for big groups to get together…
(We can do birthday parties – or work meetings, or events, or team gatherings, or…)

17.  There’s loads of places where you can chill out by yourself…
(And nobody will invade your space)

18.  There’s fresh bread and milk every morning for local residents…
(And you can just help yourself – pop a donation in the Honesty Box if you want to, but it’s totally up to you!)

19.  Even the tunes on the stereo are local
(We had great fun making CDs of all our favourite artists to hail from this island – from U2 to Foy Vance, Juliet Turner to Snow Patrol, Rend Collective to Van the Man…)

20.  It’s space for Life in the Titanic Quarter.  New friends, old friends, tears, laughter, chat, quiet, inspiration, relaxation, Life in all its fulness.

And that, my friends, is why I LOVE Dock Cafe! and why the last few weeks have been beyond my wildest hopes for the Dock project in the Titanic Quarter.  I am so, so proud of Tegan and all the creative team who have put this wonderful space together – and I hope that you visit it, and use it, and enjoy it as much as I do.  It’s something a bit unique.  See you there…

(And – just in case you need reminding of the basics! – it’s open 11-7 Tue-Fri and 11-5 Sat, and it’s located at the base of the Arc Apartments at the back of the Odyssey, looking out on SS Nomadic and the Abercorn Basin – here:)

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…

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.

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, 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!

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]

Some of those who stood on the deck of Carpathia that morning were haunted by the Titanic tragedy for the rest of their lives.    Some, like the famously unsinkable Molly Brown, became celebrities of the whole affair, and used their fame and their stories to raise money for those who had lost everything when Titanic sank.  One survivor, actress Dorothy Gibson, even starred in a film of the disaster – playing herself, of course (and, she claimed, wearing the same dress in which she had been rescued). Some, like the stewardess Violet Jessop, changed the direction of their lives; Violet became a nurse, only to find herself posted as a wartime nurse to the Britannic, Titanic’s sister ship, and in a strange case of history repeating itself, surviving its sinking during World War 1.  Some survivors never truly recovered, some refused to talk about it, some told their stories again and again for the rest of their days. All were changed forever as a result of their experiences. And I wonder how many of them reflected on those changes, reassessed their lives, made those internal promises, as they looked across the Atlantic from the decks of Carpathia exactly 100 years ago today.

It often happens that after a traumatic event or a narrow escape we find ourselves making those kind of promises. We will stop wasting our lives doing things of no significance. We will follow the dreams that we once had, take the risk to do the things we feel we were born to do. We will tell our loved ones that we love them while we have the chance. We will make amends, right wrongs, do our best to live our lives with no regrets. Tragedy often brings a kind of clarity that awakens us from the mundane and the everyday, and invites us to ask the big question: what am I doing with my one-and-only life?

It’s a good question, and we don’t have to wait for a time of trial to ask it. Let’s stand on the decks of Carpathia today and share in some of the insights of those shivering survivors. Every sunrise is a gift. Every day is a blessing. Every breath cannot be taken for granted. Every life is full of boundless possibilities and opportunities.  What would I do today if I truly realised how precious, how fragile and how beautiful life really is? Whatever that thing is, Lord God, help me to do it today.