Sunday at the Sunflower Festival 2012

This post on the topic Sunday has been written for the One Topic / Forty Opinions project run by Belfast Bloggers Unite.

Sundays as a kid for me always meant days out with my lovely family. We went all round NI, with picnics and maps of walks and alway had a great time, whatever the weather. As I got older (and older) Sundays began to have a different, much less energetic, feel to them. They usually included a massive hangover and watching films with Mr.G-S under a blanket, eating junk food. Or when I was studying part-time with Open University, Sundays meant cursing the computer and trying to wing together 2000 words for an assignment due in on the Monday.

With a little help from my friends

We’ve just had a great weekend, and most of it was down to spending time with friends and thoughtful things friends have done for us. It’s got me thinking about how lucky I am to have such a range of totally fantastic people who have come into my life through various different routes and how important these people are to me for all sorts of reasons.

Hansel of Film 2012

Last night my Dad, brother and I attended a great event in the Black Box, hosted by the Belfast Film Festival. The event was a showcase of short films made by the public that were being screened as part of the Hansel of Film – Shetland to Southampton and Back project, which is a relay of screenings of which has visited almost 20 venues throughout the UK and will finish up in Scotland this Saturday. A runner has been chosen to transport each set of films to the different  places, by various modes of transport, and the whole thing is part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad – the same crowd that funded Land of Giants.

Everybody danced and clapped their hands

My friend Stephen came back from the Electric Picnic festival in 2009 and raved about how seeing Chic play was one of the best gigs he had ever seen in his life. He has seen a lot of gigs in his time and is someone whose taste in music I trust implicitly. He was banging on about Chic and Nile Rodgers, and to my shame I had to wikipedia the names. My reasonably comprehensive knowledge of popular music is pretty much pre-1974 and post-1991 (save for a few exceptions such as Madonna and INXS!), skipping out the disco era completely. Which is how I had never really paid much attention to Chic and Mr Rodgers himself, but the more I read about the band and the man himself, along with his late musical partner Bernard Edwards, the more I was completely in awe of the talent and incredible legacy surrounding them.