Foreign Perspectives

Stenaline have been running £10 daytrips to Glasgow on Wednesdays for the last couple of months which would have been rather handy except that it didn’t run over any holiday periods so I guess the numbers would have been relatively low.

However, they’ve taken the plunge and extended it right through to the end of November. Still only on Wednesdays mind you but at least we’ll get a chance to go sometime over the summer without needing to take the kids out of school for it.

It’s a bit of a long day as daytrips generally are. The boat leaves Belfast at 07.30 and gets back at 21.45 which is a fairly long day as you need to get to the dock before 7am. However, the actual time in Glasgow is only from 12.00 to 16.45. That makes it a bit of a whirlwind trip if you want to see some of the sites so you’d need to be quite selective and have your time planned out before you go.

For our first quick look, we’re having a skim through the Greater Glasgow guide put out by the tourist office. The Lonely Planet chapter from their Scotland guide probably has more information but for four hours, you don’t need a whole lot of information.

Actually, it’s Open Farm Weekend here and it’s on a different day. That’s kind of confusing as it means that when you look up the open farm day website, you find that Northern Ireland doesn’t have any farms open which I’m sure must drop the numbers attending somewhat.

Seeing as it was a lovely sunny day, we set off for Gordonall Farm near Greyabbey. which was open to schools on the 13th of June and to everybody on the 14th. It’s quite a mixed farm with some livestock (sheep and cows), some biomass plantations, cereals and even a guy demonstrating some country crafts. You don’t really appreciate the size of the farm ’til you go on their tractor ride which seems to go on forever and certainly much further than any we’ve paid for.

Sunday was another lovely day so it was off to Armagh Apple Farm which was quite a different experience. The farm itself seemed somewhat smaller though it’s hard to judge the scale of a farm as you don’t know where one ends and another begins. In their shed they’d a whole range of apple based products. This time of year, the apples themselves are tiny and there are apple festivals on later in the year around the time of the apple harvest.

Worth going to for sure but I’m not so sure we’d have enjoyed the days if the weather had been poor as most things are obviously outside.

John managed to have freshly prepared custard spilled over his hands last Monday and has ended up having to go to the doctors every day to get the dressing changed which is a bit of a nuisance.

Whilst plonking on cream and bandages seemed a sensible way to go initially, this far down the line it’s not so clear-cut as to whether or not it’s a good idea to continue. For instance, although he knows to be careful with that hand, little boys play and over the weekend he caught a ball with it which left it bleeding, unknowingly, under the bandages. Had it not been bandages up, we’d have known that it was bleeding right away instead of hours later.

Anyway, all being well, it’ll be healed up enough to leave the dressings off later this week.

With the end of primary school just over a week off, you’d think that things would be winding down but, if anything, they’ve been picking up the pace lately.

The P7 project is finally complete bar a couple of small spelling corrections so that’ll be out of the way tomorrow. It’s taken up quite a bit of time over the last few weeks as James has gotten fired up with a number of aspects of it. He wrote the text (just over 4000 words!) but I’d to gather together the photos to illustrate it which was fine for most of them but a few took quite a bit of time to track down. We printed it all out for the first time yesterday and it looks really good.

Alongside that, in school he’s getting ready for the school play which is Friday week. That’s supposed to be quite a big production so it’s keeping them quite busy during the day.

The P7 pupils are having their visits to their new schools at the moment. Priory (one of our fall-back choices) had theirs a few days ago and seems to have created a good impression on those that went along. We’re off to James’ new school next Monday evening.

The other little guy managed to spill custard over his hand on Monday and has had to be taken to the nurse every day to get the dressing changed. He’s also supposed to be getting ready for his part in the other school play so had to go to school today as otherwise he’d not get to do that.

The presentation on Cancer Research: Advancing Patient Care was a quite fascinating overview of the kind of things that Queen’s get up to in the area of cancer research and treatment.

You might have expected that it would have become quickly very apparent that the various speakers came from different outfits within the university but in fact it wasn’t clear at all. Their work is so intertwined that the speaker from the School of Pharmacy could easily have been thought of as from the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology and for that matter the clinical talk could easily have fallen into the realm of the research talks.

As they pointed out, that’s just how it should be. Cancer isn’t defeated yet and so patient treatment is driven by the research done in the centre and in related centres of expertise in the university. Related centres even includes the physics and engineering departments as they provide input into the design of the various scanners and radiation therapy devices.

The line blurs even between the university, the hospital and the health trust with each needing to work closely with the others. It was good to see that InvestNI was putting money into a project that not only should help the local economy but which will also help those who need cancer treatments.

Much as I’d prefer not to be needing their help, it is reassuring that they pull together so many experts for every case coming along at their joint meeting. Actually, it was quite a surprise to see just how many people would be there to discuss possible treatments for each case that comes to them. I know that some people would feel a bit intiminated by having so many people discussing their medical condition but, given the stage of cancer treatment, it seemed like a very practical way to ensure that each patient gets the most appropriate treatment. It was also good to see that in the Q&A at the end that it seemed very much that any of them could have answered any of the questions ie they have a good knowledge of each others fields.