March 1, 2010

• Holi Week(end)

  I had one of those weekends here in Belfast that remind me how good my decision was to leave my life in Birmingham behind and embrace this new and more social life.

  As I said in my last blog I successfully passed my Swedish Massage exam on Friday. I was told by the examiner that I was, " clearly an excellent therapist", "showed an excellent technique", had "an impressive portfolio" etc, etc. I tell you this mainly because I felt it was a vindication of my total approach to the course. I'm not sure if I said it before but all the other candidates were from a sports background and I always felt they had a rather one dimensional and simplistic approach to the massage. They clearly thought I was a bit of a nut with my mention of things like 'auras' and 'chakras'. I always saw the massage as being not just a way to treat a sore muscle but as method to improve the health of the whole of the physical body, the mind and 'soul' if you like. I know from the feedback that the external examiner agrees with my approach and now I have only to convince the citizens of Belfast!

  Saturday I met up with Eileen and Clare and their lovely baby Fionn (pron. Finn). I met Clare and Eileen in Austria last year when Patrick and I decided to have a holiday that was out of our usual comfort zone. Clare was pregnant then and we followed the pregnancy on Facebook up to and past the birth. They live in Manchester but Eileen is from Belfast so they pop back from time to time. We met in St George's Market - where I get my lovely fresh fish and fancy sausages on Saturday mornings and bumped into another lesbian couple who are considering parenting so I was sort of sidelined for a bit while they had a chat about A.I. and stuff like that! Once that was over it was back to the business of catching up and it was so lovely to see their child for the first time; sleeping like the little angel he undoubtably is!!

  After spending the morning with them I walked into Belfast proper and had a wander round before meeting another friend for a lovely lunch and another catch up. Patrick was still working and so it was lovely to just hang out with friends, friends that I would not have made had I not moved to Belfast.

  Sunday was the Holi festival in Belfast - that's the Indian festival where everone gets covered in brightly coloured powder paint! It was a wonderful afternoon listening to Bangra music, eating Indian snacks and watching the madness of the paint throwing - I didn't get involved in that! Afterwards a few of us went to the Black Box to see the Sunday Service speech that this week was the River Of Blood speech by Enoch Powell - talk about a contrast! If you don't know the speech or Enoch Powell for that matter you can google it of course but very briefly he was a Conservative MP for an area of England close to where I lived and in 1968 he gave a speech in which he suggested that immigration to the UK had to stop as in the near future the country would be over run and that the exisiting culture of 'Englishness'  and 'Britishness' would become so diluted as to become meaningless. The speech was presented by one of the lesbians I bumped into the day before, she is an American woman and so it made the speech all the more interesting to hear it performed by  someone so different from the original orator.

  The speech went down well - whatever people's opinions on the content were it was generally agreed that the idea behind the speeches is an interesting and challenging one. The Sunday Service is one of the many projects that Patrick is working on so of course I am biased!

  A great weekend all in all!

   

  • 3:17 pm
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