Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

Friday was Culture Night in Belfast which means a very, very packed night of entertainment all over the city and all free too.

We took the opportunity to finish off some things that we didn’t manage to fit in to the Heritage Weekend earlier in the month. The easy way to include them turned out to be to go on one of the three Community Taster Tours. The listing for these was a little confusing in the booklet about the culture night but it turned out that there were three entirely different tours to choose from, each lasting three hours.

For our purposes the 4pm tour seemed best in that it included the Titanic pump house which we’d missed out on earlier and which normally has a very confusing car parking arrangement that seems best avoided. Surprisingly the tours weren’t anything like fully booked and we found ourselves on an open top bus that didn’t even have a dozen people on it.

Frankly the pump house was a major disappointment. Effectively it’s a small, very overpriced, cafe with one stand containing an assortment of Titanic gifts and a dozen or so panels about various aspects of the Titanic spaced around a very bare room. Next stop was the Engine Room Gallery which is nowhere near the Titanic area as you might expect but instead at Hollywood Arches.

From there we were off to what was supposed to be an Ulster Scots event at the Spectrum Centre on the Shankill Road. Unfortunately the organisation fell apart at that point so we only saw the Lambeg drummer and didn’t see the highland dancing, the flute band nor the lone piper.

Finally, it was on to the Indian Community Centre where they were rather optimistic about the amount that could be included in the short time available. Thus we missed out on the henna and sari demonstration, Hindi class information, Indian dance and musical performance and we just about managed to fit in the Indian tea, food and snacks.

Although three hours seemed like an awfully long time for a bus tour round Belfast when we read about it in the brochure, in practice the time just flew in and really it needed to be around twice as long to do justice to everything but then that’s only to be expected of a taster tour. In fact, it was almost perfect as a taster and has highlighted a couple of places that we will be revisiting at the next opportunity.

By the time we got back, it was almost the perfect time to go on the tour round the offices of the Belfast Telegraph. No smell of fire and brimstone as you sort-of expect from seeing newspaper back-offices in movies but rather a very automated newspaper production factory. Sadly we didn’t get to see the presses running as they don’t kick off ’til a couple of hours after the tours finish but a very interesting tour nonetheless and the hour just flew in.

Both the little guys were running on empty by this point so we finished off with a brief look round some of the activities going on before heading home.

We’ve had a Decathlon card since our time living in France but since we’re into our second year back here we’ve obviously not used it for a while. Almost two years in fact.

Anyway, Belfast happens to be one of the first places that Decathlon has opened a UK store so we thought we’d pop in. It’s very much a French Decathlon that happens to be in Belfast with seemingly all the same products and even the very same trollies which, of course, can’t be used as they need a euro in them rather than a pound. Even the prices seem much the same which makes it one of the more expensive stores around unless you pick something up on one of their 60%+ off opening offers.

Amazingly it’s even French to the point of being able to use my French Decathlon card which is a level of internationalisation that’s very, very rarely seen which is quite a surprise. The website isn’t 100% in English yet but I managed to change the address of the card to here which is also something that’s rarely considered when a company goes international.

The Liberals revealed their true colours today. It was never so much what was in the national interest as what was in the Liberal party interest.

Thus, whilst clearly the economic issues should have been the most important, there was always the demand for PR which, the Liberals think, will best suit them. If PR did pan out in the way that the Liberals think it will, coalitions will be the order of the day and the power of the Liberal party will rise as dramatically as it has done in the last week. Do they deserve such power. Clearly not, if the negotiations this week are anything to go by.

But, what should David Cameron do now? If I were him, I’d be calling Buckingham Palace tomorrow morning with a proposal. First, Brown would be out: he clearly doesn’t have the support of either the Commons or the country. Next, I would propose myself as the Prime Minister on the understanding that what I would do, within the shortest period administratively feasible, would be to dissolve Parliament and hold another election. Whilst this would ordinarily be a high risk option for him, both Labour and the Liberals are showing how bad they are more and more as the days go by and so the chances of a landslide Conservative victory are rising as each day passes.

Will he do it though? If Labour and the Liberals get together I’d say yes for sure, if not it’s increasingly likely.

All being well, I’ll be off to Mount Stewart with the school tomorrow though I’ll not know for sure about it ’til later today.

The problem is that two of the normal class helpers are stranded thanks to the grounding of the planes but then they’re opening up the airways again later today, or at least in some areas they are. Thus, I don’t know if they’ll be back today. It’ll really mess up James if I’m not there though as he’s really set on having either me or Wendy along with him.

One other downside is that the forecast isn’t looking too good for Wednesday at the moment and Mount Stewart doesn’t seem like a great place to be if it’s raining.

Over the last week or so we’ve woken to a white landscape but, so far, the white is only frost with perhaps a very light dusting of snow.

That frosty covering makes for rather slippy pavements of course yet you don’t seem to really get the pleasure that proper snowfall can bring. No snowmen to built, no snowball fights. Just slipping and scraping the windows on the car.

And, yesterday, an unannounced closure of the school for the day. Instead of a final lie-in before school started we’d everyone up early to make sure we weren’t late with the slippery roads and found ourselves in front of a closed school. Oh, sure, if it had been way out in the country we’d have expected that but there wasn’t any big problem in getting to it so it was just closed for no apparent reason.

Still, with the weather forecasts continuing in winter mode for the remainder of the week perhaps we’ll get a proper snowfall one of these days.