First view: on assignment in Ghent

Feeling a bit gloomy about the wasteland days at the start of a new year? I often do at this time of year.

But I was in Ghent just before Christmas and I saw light. Well, I had a preview of it anyway.

The second city in Flanders (after Antwerp) will be brightening up the historic centre of town with Light Festival Ghent, a series of public-art installations from January 27-29.

Light festivals are rather en vogue across Europe currently with Lyon the leading, err, light. But I also recently covered Lumiere in Durham, which brought the concept to the north of England.

It’s a good idea. Anything to brighten up the black-hole skies of January across northern Europe in the weeks to come.

It’s like Kaat Heirbrant, Project Leader for Light Festival Ghent, says.

“Light creates a sense of wonder. It provokes an emotional response in us. In the dark months of winter, it makes us move.”

Catch my story in the Independent later in January.

And look out for another major public-art event, TRACK, coming to Ghent in May. The manifesto is all over the city right now – more stories to follow.

Reporting from the front line of war correspondents

Martin Bells’s words are apposite.

“Our instinct is to publish and be damned. Theirs is to censor and be safe.”

The veteran reporter is one of the featured talking heads at the current War Correspondent special exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North in Salford Quays.

He describes the craft of the war reporter as one fading into rose-tinted history.

It’s an engaging exhibition, perfect for anyone interested in front-line reporting. But it also hammers home a difficult-to-swallow message: the day of the grizzled war correspondent has all but passed.

Rolling news, embedded reporters and social media have seen to that.

But at what cost?

Guardian journalist Maggie O’Kane says of the changing face of war reporting:

“The whole apparatus has been set up to feed the drip, drip, drip of journalism.”

Equally concerning is a chart of statistics from Committee to Protect Journalists, documenting the correlation between modern warfare journalists killed worldwide since 1992. The figure peaks at 92 in 2009.

In a world of story-hungry rolling news and fact-check free online publishing, is there still scope for the likes of Max Hastings on the front line in the Falklands, or Brian Hanrahan in Kosovo.

Or is it, as Martin Bell, says, “The death of news?”

You decide. Post your thoughts below.

First look: on assignment in northern Ireland

Hit the North has been tied up of late.

I’ve been working on a project in northern Ireland and spent much of last week in Belfast and along the Causeway Coast; more here.

It’s a supplement for the Daily Telegraph and a follow up to the piece I wrote for the Sunday paper earlier this year – read it here.

The supplement comes out on December 31 but, by way of a preview, I’ve been looking at a few key themes:

Personal stories around the Titanic Festival next April, marking the centenary of her doomed maiden voyage.

Folk legends and mythology along the Causeway Coastal route via the new project at the Giant’s Causeway for September 2012.

And interviews with people working in the arts and festivals across Belfast, including the 50th anniversary of the Belfast Festival at Queens.

Looks out for more in the weeks to come.

Hit the North is away

Hit the North is away at the World Travel Market down south next week. Normal service resumes afterwards.

The love-birds trail leads to Anglesey

Stuff Paris or Rome for Valentine’s Day next year. You should be heading to Anglesey, North Wales.

No, really.

Llanddwyn Island, a remote headland stretching out into the Irish Sea from southwest Anglesey, is a hotbed for Welsh romance. A place resonating with frissons of ancient spirituality and Celtic lust.

There will be more people getting down on one knee on Llanddwyn Beach this January than there are randy pensioners in Poundshops across North Wales.

I recently spent a weekend there, researching a story for the Sunday Telegraph.

The piece will be out around January 25, St Dwynwen’s Day, Wales’ answer to Valentine’s Day.

Make your own love pilgrimage this January. After all, it’s good enough for Kate and William.

Entrance to Llanddwyn Island

Celtic cross by ruins of Dwynwen's Church

Wood-carved effigy of St Dwynwen

Eurostar is on the wrong track – again

* Update 27/10. Eurostar have now been in touch to discuss compensation. Anyone else resolved this issue? Please post your update below.

* Update: Tues, 25/10. It’s one week on now from the great Eurostar PR disaster. In the aftermath, I was promised an official response to this blog from Eurostar. I was also told that customer relations would be in touch to discuss.

But so far: nothing. Is this yet another example of Eurostar handling the situation badly? Has anyone else had a follow up from the Eurostar team?

Or does Eurostar simply not give a %^& about its customers?

Please post your comments below.

Original post: 18/10/11

It happens to us all. The travel-chaos nightmare when flights/trains/boats are delayed or cancelled, leaving you feeling drained, bewildered and frustrated.

It happened to me last night aboard the 17.04 Eurostar from London St Pancras to Brussels Midi. It was hell.

Major delays

Short version: a ten-minute delay just outside the tunnel past Ashford, Kent, turned into a three-hour delay.

During this time, in coach eight we were offered water and biscuits.

We were eventually sent back to London, arriving around 11pm – some six hours after setting out.

The queue for Eurostar customer services to request hotels and taxis and looked like this:

Radio silence

The most frustrating thing about this experience – apart from the disruption and loosing work due to blown meetings – was the lack of information from Eurostar staff.

Passengers became increasingly irate as we were kept in the dark about the situation.

Should we cancel meetings? Arrange new connections? Contact loved ones? Nobody would tell us anything.

I turned to Twitter for information (check my increasingly irate feed from last night).

We soon established that it was a suicide on the line, all trains were cancelled and a Burger King in Kings Cross was far more likely than moules frites in Ghent that night.

But where was the official source? Eurostar communications only posted info on the website at 20.00 UK time; the incident was reported to have occurred at 17.50pm.

And where is the emergency action plan? After all, this isn’t the first time there’s been a major incident on the high-speed line to Europe. Remember last Christmas?

Have Eurostar learnt nothing from all this? Seems not.

Lucky me

I was one of the lucky ones. I was traveling on tickets booked through Railbookers and, while Eurostar floundered, their representative swung into action, booking me a hotel for the night.

I dropped off my bag by 11.30pm and walked across the road to a late-night bar.

I saw families with huge bags and small kids spilling out of the Eurostar terminal, trudging down the Euston Road to find hotels. They looked ashen.

I thanked my lucky stars my two daughters were tucked up safely in bed at home and steadied my nerves with a pint of Guinness.

Learning points

So what do we take away from this sorry scenario?

Of course, force-majeure events happen to anyone who travels regularly and it was simply my turn (again, after the ash cloud).

But why is Eurostar not learning from its mistakes. Surely it could have avoided yet another PR disaster?

For me, the lesson is clear: book tickets through a specialist operator or agent, not Eurostar direct.

The former are the ones to keep their heads while all around are loosing theirs.

And that matters.

Looking at Durham in a new light

I hadn’t been to Durham in years. I’ve been twice now in the space of a couple of months.

But why Durham? Newcastle gets all the cultural headlines – the Turner Prize exhibition opens at Baltic from October 21. Alnwick Castle gets all the film fans; Lindisfarne the pilgrims.

But Durham? Well, it’s a bit like my home town of Chester: historic, picturesque but, ultimately, a bit staid. Isn’t it?

The Journey by Fenwick Lawson

Lighten up

Actually, no. Durham hosts the UK’s biggest light festival, Lumiere, from November 17 to 20.

The four-day public-art installation brings some 30-plus installations, created by artists from across the globe (including the UK’s Tracy Emin), to public spaces around the city.

One of the highlights this year is a repeat of Crown of Light, projecting the story of the Lindisfarne Gospels (returning to Durham in 2013) against the 11th-century stone canvas of Durham Cathedral.

Wise words

There’s more public art across the city. My favourite was tucked away on a walking trail from the historic centre to Durham University’s Botanic Garden.

Amongst the autumn-turning leaves of maple, oak and cherry, the tranquil grounds reveal the Kindersley Engraving, a stanza of verse by the Newcastle-born modernist poet Basil Bunting.

The Kindersley Engraving, featuring words by Basil Bunting

His advice?

Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write.

Black gold

The man from the Telegraph was around Durham recently, too, talking a bit too much about coal and not enough about change.

From my visit, exploring the past to reflect the future was the key to appreciating Durham in a new light.

It’s like Jacki Winstanley of open-air museum Beamish told me: “We need to know where we came from to understand where we’re going.”

Read my story in the Express in November.

Delving into history on Hilbre Island

I revisited an old friend this week. Hilbre Island, the Site of Special Scientific Interest in the Dee Estuary, has attracted visitors since the Stone Age.

Romans, monks, pilgrims, smugglers and, finally, walkers followed over the centuries.

But I hadn’t been for many years. So, with school holidays drawing to a close, we made a return trip this week, heading out across the sands from West Kirby.

I’d forgotten how much history the tiny island, the largest of a triumvirate of islands drowned under high tides, packs into its 47,000m sq.

It is believed the island takes its name from a medieval chapel, dedicated to St. Hildeburgh. There are ruins of an old lifeboat station and a watchtower.

More recently, Wirral Council announced the island would no longer have a permanent warden as staff struggled to live with no mains electricity and water.

We spent the day watching seals, spotting birds, collecting shells in rock pools and soaking up the sand-blasted sense of calm.

Most of all, the visit left me wanting to know more about the legends and life of Hilbre.

I feel there are a thousand stories as yet untold about this stoic little island with its raw nature and are rare wildlife. I’d like to know more.

On September 18, you can head to West Kirby’s Marine Lake for more information about visiting and appreciating Hilbre.

Or contact the Friends of Hilbre Island for more information.

But, meanwhile, email me or post below if you have stories, links or more information to share about Hilbre Island.

I’m sure there are some great story angles just waiting to be explored.

Liverpool new developments: photo blog

Liverpool was back in the news this week.

The new Museum of Liverpool, the £72m development on the city’s World Heritage waterfront, opened its doors.

Given that summer holidays had just started, I took my girls to have a look around.

I thought the section on Liverpool writers was a bit sparse but the music section did cover Erics, Probe …

… and not just the Beatles.

Maya loved dressing up as a Chinese princess in the more compelling ground-floor section, which explores Liverpool’s place in the world as a key trading city.

And Olivia liked the soft-plat area as part of a good little gallery for children, a decent learning resource based around the alphabet.

The museum was packed on Friday and the cafe heaving at lunchtime, so we escaped to one of my favourite Liverpool boozers, The Baltic Fleet.

It was nearly empty, has some great ales on tap from the Wapping microbrewery in the basement and plates of Scouse for lunch.

Not bad for a ten-minute walk from the coach-party frenzy of the Albert Dock.

We didn’t stick around for the evening son-et-lumiere show but, if you’re in Liverpool this autumn, there’s more On the Waterfront during September.

We did pop into the exhibition at the Royal Liver Buildings to mark the centenary of Liverpool’s most famous landmark building.

My grandfather worked here in the Fifties for the shipping company, Palm Line Ltd.

The business is long since defunct but I’d love to hear from anyone who has memorabilia, documents or memories of the trading route from Liverpool to West Africa.

There will be tours of Royal Liver Building in September as part of the Heritage Open Days weekend.

I’ll be going back to explore in more detail and try to find the offices where Harry Millington, my granddad once worked.

More from Visit Liverpool.

More talk than action with the bad scientist

Gillian McKeith in a white coat, Harold Shipman the mass murdrerer and Bruce Forsyth circa Play Your Cards Right. These are the characters who inhabit the world of Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre.

I saw him speak last night at Glydwr University as part of the Wrexham Science Festival. The talk was being recorded for the Science Cafe programme on Radio Wales.

I like his column and often refer to it in my classes, especially to teach students about the importance of verifying their sources.

So I was hoping for some new insight on how we the media report on science. But, disappointingly, there was a lot of medicine and little on the changing nature of journalism.

Better reporting

The session ran over thanks to some poor interview management by host Adam Walton of Radio Wales.

We touched on reporting science only briefly in the truncated Q & A at the end. And the only advice he proffered was thus: “What popular science really requires is more editors and less writers.”

I think he means more subs. But it was his advice for reporting on science that really grated with me. “Make it about data not stories about people,” he said.

Data journalism is a fine area for students to develop but, ultimately, if you want to bring key scientific issues to the wider public, then giving them a human face is vital.

Playing up the human-interest angle is clearly a better way to engage readers than a phone-directory-sized report crammed full with baffling statistics.

Doing the rounds 

Ultimately I guess this was just another book-pushing session for Dr Goldacre.

I’d probably be trotting out the old faithful anecdotes by this point in the promo tour, too, if I knew they’d raise a moderate-sized titter from the crowd.

But, on this showing, I’m not moved to buy the book.

As Ben himself said, “There’s an element in all this of wanting to be a massive clever dick.”