Next to the McKee clock stands this boondoggle that I’ve walked past many times over the past two decades. I’ve always wondered what it is, but never been able to locate any information about it.

It turns out that it’s a memorial drinking fountain… though the fountain itself has been missing for a very long time. It in fact predates the McKee clock by some decades.

On 29 September 1893, The Northern Whig recorded:

A memorial, of very handsome design, has been erected by the members of the Bangor Corinthians Sailing Club to the memory of the late Mrs. Arthur Hill Coates in the new Esplanade, Bangor. The memorial, which takes the shape of a water fountain of four jets, covered by a handsome dome, and standing upon a solid foundation of concrete, was erected by the firm of Messrs. McFarland & Company, of Glasgow, and bears the following inscription:—“Erected by the members of the Bangor Corinthians Sailing Club in memory of their sincere and true friend Mrs. Arthur Hill Coates, 1893.” The position occupied is the angle adjoining the Sandy Row Promenade, and it is scarcely necessary to mention that the new esplanade is considerably beautified and enhanced by the splendid structure.

The article in The Newtownards Chronicle on 7 October of the same year has fewer words, but I think is more accurate in its naming of the manufacturer as

Messrs. Macfarlane & Company

They at least agree that it is handsome.

The Royal Ulster Yacht Club has in its possession a letter to Mr Arthur Hill Coates which includes the line:

We also desire that at the same time you will convey to Mrs. Coates our warmest thanks for the great interest she has taken in the welfare and prosperity of the Club, and ask her acceptance of the accompanying diamond ring.

This happily suggests that Mrs Coates was aware of the esteem in which she was held before she died… and also rather suggests that there was a lot of money sloshing around sailing clubs in the late 1800s.

This is Bangor’s McKee Clock, unveiled in 1915. It’s known as the McKee clock as the local tax collector, James McKee, contributed £200 towards its cost.

It was not uncontroversial, particularly its location. The site which was eventually chosen formerly hosted the town’s bandstand. The Herald and County Down Independent of 17 April 1914 records some disagreement at a Council meeting about whether the bandstand should really be moved:

“The proper site for the McKee clock is on the present bandstand site … There is no need for a bandstand at all in the esplanade.”

“By no means; oh dear no. Bangor must always have a pierrot troupe and the best obtainable too, at that.”

“But a bandstand is for a BAND.”

This raises a question: what the heck is a pierrot troupe, and is it really so bad for it to be in a bandstand?

Originally, Pierrot was a stock character of a sad clown, frequently appearing in Italian pantomime or comedy from the late 17th century.

In England, the name became adopted for troupes of vaguely clownish entertainers who would put on variety shows of song and comedy. They were a popular feature of seaside towns, often performing on piers, and some troupes travelled across to Ireland to perform. The form mostly died out in England in the 1950s, though National Museums NI has photographs of a show in County Down from 1962, so perhaps they lasted a little longer there. Performing in bandstands doesn’t seem to have been uncommon.

Anyway, the bandstand was moved to make way for the clock: it now stands in Bangor Castle’s Walled Garden. Ironically, the local newspapers feature many advertisements for band concerts at the McKee Clock thereafter, suggesting that—perhaps—the bandstand was better located before it moved.

But the clock was well received too.

It might be All Saints’ Day today, but I’m afraid I’m picking on just one of their number: St Columbanus, who walked this Earth back in the 500s AD.

He seems to have been a bit of a character: it is said that squirrels used to run down from trees and into the folds of his cowl to be close to him. I think this is supposed to be charming, but it frankly sounds like a massive hassle: he clearly had a lot to contend with.

His life is commemorated through a trail of seven bells in Bangor: the squirrels might have left him alone in death, but the Northern Irish are still keen to knock seven bells out of him. Poor guy.

And, as a rubbish blogger, I’ve only managed to take pictures of six of them. The first one of the trail is a giant bell, and I didn’t notice it, because I was too preoccupied with this: the oldest wall in Bangor:

The commemorative plaque omits to tell us when it was built, beyond a vague ‘13th century’, but it does let us know that the Council did some work on the wall in 2008.

Anyway, this means I can’t show you the first stop on our ‘interpretive art trail’ (not my words). So you’ll just have to imagine a giant bell with a wavy surface, commemorating Columbanus’s childhood journey across Lough Erne to the Island of Cleenish for his early education.

After leaving Cleenish, Columbanus went to Bangor Abbey… a time which is weirdly not commemorated on this Bangor trail. Instead, the second stop on our journey records him leaving Bangor to travel to Brittany.

While in Brittany, Columbanus worked to ‘root out the lusts of the flesh’. I imagine that being covered with squirrels might have helped with that.

He also founded a school in a former Roman fortress in the mountains. It became so oversubscribed that it eventually needed new premises, which he founded at Luxeuil:

While there, he met Gallus—another monk who had been taught at Bangor Abbey—who began to follow him. He originally came from somewhere on the French/German border, which will become important later.

The bells then seem to skip the bit of Columbanus’s life where he hid in a cave for a few years in search of solitude. They also have nothing to say about his spat with some bishops over the date of Easter: he wrote to Pope Gregory I and Pope Boniface IV on the point. Gregory ghosted him, and he folded before Boniface could reply.

I think this is a fascinating bit of his story, with much to say about the interaction between the divine and the human in the making of Christian festivals, and I’d definitely have dedicated a bell to it, but I’ve never been asked to make even one interpretative artistic bell in my entire life (to date).

Anyway, we skip ahead to Columbanus being thrown off a ship following a storm. The captain judged that the storm was god’s punishment for transporting Columbanus. Columbanus ended up at Bregenz in Austria, where he built an oratory:

And this is where Gallus’s heritage becomes important: as he could speak the local language, he played a big role in helping Columbanus convert the locals to Christianity.

And—local connection alert—Bregenz was twinned with Bangor in 1987 ‘in celebration of this important historical connection’ (not my words).

Since 2001, Bangor has also become a ‘sister city’ of Virginia Beach in the United States, though I regret to report a lack of connection to Columbanus. This relationship exists ‘because of the similar port area, military affiliation, and oceanfront tourist attraction’.

Back to Columbanus, whose time at Bregenz wasn’t going so well: a war had resulted in the area being subsumed into Burgundy, and a few of Columbanus’s students had been murdered. So, like any man of God, Columbanus prayed hard for a peaceful resolution and stayed to help defend his adopted community ran off to Italy.

Gallus, however, stayed behind, in hiding in a little cell. Eventually, long after his death, an abbey was built in his honour. Little-by-little, the Swiss city of St Gallen grew up around it, and, in 1983, the abbey area became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Oh, and there’s also this:

Meanwhile, Columbanus was living it up in Milan, where he was welcomed by the King and Queen of Lombardy. He once again set about converting the locals:

The Bangor Antiphonary, a historically important 36-leaf book of hymns and prayers put together in Bangor Abbey about a century after Columbanus’s death is somewhat inexplicably in Milan, though no-one seems particularly vexed by that. I suppose to many in Northern Ireland, it’s better than it being in one of the London museums, where it would probably have ended up had it not been taken abroad. Maybe they’d have loaned it back to the locals occasionally, like the Lindisfane Gospel.

The King of Lombardy gave Columbanus a tract of land at Bobbio, near Milan, to build a monastery—where, ultimately, Columbanus died and was buried:

Twenty years after Columbanus’s death, Jonas of Bobbio wrote a biography of him—the first known biography of an Irish person. And in 2002, because of his history of travelling through Europe, the Vatican declared St Columbanus to be the patron saint of motorcyclists… which honestly feels like a stretch.

But as for the bells—well, I think that we have to count them as a success. I’d never heard of the bloke before I saw them, and now know I’ve written (and you’ve read) a 1,000-word treatise about him.

And that’s the power of interpretative art trails… maybe.

In the newly-minted city of Bangor, County Down, there is a heritage trail carved into the paving, highlighting nearby objects and sites of interest. Here’s a representative sample:

It’s slightly hard to make out in that photo, but the left-most panel has some text written around a whimsical circle:

One of Two Edward VIII Post Boxes

The capitalisation and occasionally boldened words are, I regret, entirely the Council’s choices.

Edward VIII reigned for only 326 days, before abdicating so that he could marry a divorcée, Wallis Simpson. In 1937, it would have been unthinkable for the Head of the Church of England to be married to a divorced woman, something which wasn’t a barrier for the current occupant of the post. Religious doctrine may present a sheen of timelessness, but it’s shifted an awful lot over the last century.

For our purposes, this means that there aren’t that many Edward VIII postboxes—though even so, I was surprised by the ‘of two’—surely there are more than two of the things?!

A moment’s research reveals that I’m right: 161 of them were installed, of which perhaps half remain. So perhaps the engraving refers to Edward VIII post boxes in Northern Ireland.

A bit more searching, and I’m satisfied: there appears to be a much-celebrated example in Belfast—so celebrated, in fact, that’s it’s been removed from service and placed on display with a special plaque.

And isn’t that nice? Both of the Northern Irish Edward VIII postboxes have special plaques pointing out their unusual nature. Bravo. I’m satisfied.

Or so I thought.

The plaque on the Belfast example makes a startling claim: it says it is the only example in Northern Ireland. How can this possibly be?

Back to Bangor. As it turns out, the heritage trail is referring to this, on the front of Bangor Post Office:

This is a remarkable Edward VIII royal cypher on the front of a Post Office… but it isn’t a postbox. The clue is in the lack of a slot.

It used to be common for Post Offices to have cyphers on them, in much the same way as post boxes. As Post Offices are less common than post boxes, there are far fewer Edward VIII Post Offices than postboxes.

Therefore, the heritage trail could have made the much more impressive claim that this was Northern Ireland’s only Edward VIII Post Office. Instead, it made a less impressive claim, and in so doing, revealed the Council’s inability to recognise a postbox.

Today’s lesson is that you shouldn’t trust everything you see on the floor.

1: Cotton creases because it contains cellulose fibres which are held in position with nothing more than hydrogen bonds. Non-iron shirts are coated in formaldehyde to effectively fix the hydrogen bonds. And hence, A-Level chemistry is relevant to office wear.

2: The Times of India publishes an astonishing fifty-six localised daily editions, and is the most widely circulated English-language newspaper in the world. It’s a slightly deflating sign of my unconscious cultural bias that when I saw the cover promotion for this article, I automatically assumed that the most widely circulated English-language newspaper would be a US title, despite that being completely illogical.

3: When fire service colleagues are at a multi-agency meeting, there’s no option to sit back for a minute to see if the fire alarm interrupting the meeting is real: all are out in the freezing in the car park within seconds.

4: Colleagues from Teesside University told me that the campus now hosts more than 18,000 residential students: that’s more than 10% of Middlesbrough’s population.

5: I had forgotten how much I enjoy Erland Cooper’s Solan Goose album until it popped up in my Spotify review of the year. It’s extraordinary.

6: It takes less time to walk from Middlesbrough Town Hall to James Cook Hospital than I imagined.

7: UNESCO has a list of Intangible Cultural Heritage—a philosophical minefield if ever I heard one.

8: Buying Christmas cards a year in advance is only a great idea if you can remember where you put them.

9: CDC’s definition of emerging infectious diseases is “those whose incidence in humans has increased in the past 2 decades or threaten to increase in the near future”. I’m sure I must have learned this in specialty training at some point, but honestly… I don’t remember.

10: I would feel a little less stressed if I’d started my Christmas shopping before now: I usually have it done and wrapped way in advance, but not this year.

11: If people voted for Brexit because they felt that “the establishment” ignored people like them, then the failure to “deliver” Brexit in a timely manner following the vote reinforces the preconception that their views are ignored. That might seem like an obvious point, but it hadn’t really occurred to me in such concrete terms.

12: The General Election result shows that being sacked for lying twice is no barrier to gaining the public’s trust.

13: One of our registrars explained to me that recommendations on management of clusters of pertussis differ to a surprising degree between countries.

14: 90% of interactions between members of the public and healthcare workers are with nurses. 2020 is the ‘Year of the Nurse’: if you’d asked me, I would have said that was 2019, but I guess that must be because I’ve heard so many conversations about planning for it rather than celebrations actually happening.

15: Mycobacterium tuberculosis kills more people each year than any other single pathogen. I think I would probably have guessed that, but still arresting to see it there in black and white.

16: Italy has closed all of its forensic psychiatric units.

17: At work, our team has dealt with nearly 1,000 more queries this year (so far!) than last year: a 40% increase. I knew it had been busy, but that’s mad.

18: Jameela Jamil, who I previously knew only as a star of The Good Place, is quite the controversial ‘social media activist’.

19: If you’d asked me to name the biggest film of 2019 by box office revenue, I couldn’t have told you it was Avengers Endgame, even if you’d given me the first word of the title. I didn’t know that Avengers films were made by Disney. I’ve no idea even now how many Avengers films there have been. I haven’t seen any of the other movies in the top ten. In other words, I’m culturally illiterate.

20: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material. “The results are surprisingly consistent in undermining the specific claim that trigger warnings allow people to marshal some kind of mental defence mechanism. There is also a solid evidence base that avoidance is a harmful coping strategy for people recovering from trauma or dealing with anxiety.”

21: The Telegraph‘s reviewer really didn’t like the movie version of Cats. Zero stars.

22: I really don’t understand what separates good contemporary poetry from bad. In other words, I’m culturally illiterate.

23: When asked what he planned to give his girlfriend for Christmas, Boris Johnson replied “Get Brexit done”, which is—give or take a waffling peoration—the same answer he gave to a question about banning firework sales to the general public, a question about 500 public libraries closing, and a question about abuse of female MPs. It seems it might be a sort of reverse ‘supercalifragilisticexplialidoucious’: something one can always say when one doesn’t know what to say, but which makes one sound anything but precocious.

24: I rather naively believed the much-reported story that Netflix developed House of Cards on the basis of insights gleaned from the data on what aspects of other shows attracted an audience. It turns out, in fact, that the show was developed before Netflix became involved, and was just part of a traditional bidding war between broadcasters.

25: The path of 2019 has, at times, felt quite bumpy.

26: In the post-war years, there were ‘British Restaurants’ set up by the government “to serve cheap hot food for everyone so that people had enough to eat”.

27: The Premier Inn in Bangor is a surprisingly nice place for a Friday night drink.

28: The Starfish at Cairn Bay Lodge is a lovely place for lunch.

29: London has two branches of Ballie Ballerson, a cocktail bar set in a ball pit with more than a million balls. Learning of this reminded me that someone once asked me, in a professional context, how to clean a ball pit with many thousands of balls. It turns out that there are machines which claim to do that. In trying to find that answer, though, I found out that some international clinical settings have ball pits which is mind-boggling from an infection control perspective.

30: Only about 20% of bodies in England are buried in the UK as a whole; most people are cremated. The opposite is true in Northern Ireland. In most of the UK, ‘a funeral is typically held around one or two weeks after the death’. In Northern Ireland, ‘bereaved families hit out at not being offered a [Cremation] until four days after their loved one dies’. These statistics would be news to me if I hadn’t had the sad duty of attending two funerals in Northern Ireland this year: I’d far rather these had been lessons I wouldn’t have to learn for many to years to come.

31: Smokers have an increased risk of developing influenza compared to non-smokers: as much as 55% more likely to catch flu.

When we were first going out, Wendy once spent most of day in here painting a plate for me. She apparently had quite a crowd watching by the end of the day! She returned a year later to paint a plate of herself, and both now sit together on the bookshelf in our study (the plates, that is… we sit on chairs!)

This is a duck house in Bangor’s 37 acre Ward Park, where I came to see Snow Patrol in 2010. In the park, that is, not in the duck house. It’d be a bit of a squeeze to fit a crowd of 40,000 in a duck house, after all.

As spotted at the Bangor Castle Diamond Jubilee Party this afternoon.