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Often regarded as the finest chippie in the land, what do people on here think?

Personally, I enjoy it and have never had a bad meal in the place. But I would struggle to call it 'the best'.

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I seem to recall there was a PC CD-ROM made in 1998 that had the following:

- trailer for BB2000

- trailer for BB1980 video reissue

- a small driving game with an overhead view where you drove the Bluesmobile.

Has this turned up again or is it lost?

If you ask me, their most underrated live album.

I see NI "yoof" programme SUS has been uploaded to NI Screen archives.

For some reason, I loved this show as a kid.

More than three decades after its original release, Extremities returns in a one-of-a-kind live collector's edition created exclusively by Martin Atkins at the Museum of Post Punk and Industrial Music.

Available now via Amazon.

Acclaimed Belfast-based writer Christopher Owens returns with his most searing and psychologically incisive work to date, Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown — a novel of fractured memories, parallel lives, and the silent aftermath of trauma.

Set against the backdrop of two diverted flights into Dublin Airport, the book follows two strangers, Jake and Roibeard, who never speak and never realise how closely their internal storms mirror one another. As each man confronts the shadows of his past — the wounds that shaped him, the choices that scarred him, and the future that awaits once they finally reach Belfast — Owens crafts a dual narrative that is both intimate and monumental.

Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown explores how trauma lingers in the body, how cities carve themselves into their inhabitants, and how two lives can run parallel without ever intersecting, bound by the same unspoken ache.

Early Praise for Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown

Critics have already hailed the novel as one of Owens’s most resonant and unforgettable works:

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A Continuing Legacy of Critical Acclaim

Owens’s previous books have earned praise from leading literary and cultural figures including Patrick McCabe (The Butcher Boy), Gary Mundy (Ramleh), and Gareth Mulvenna (Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries), cementing his reputation as one of Northern Ireland’s most compelling and fearless contemporary authors.

About the Author

Christopher Owens is a Belfast-based writer known for his visceral prose, psychological depth, and willingness to interrogate the darker corners of memory, masculinity, and urban life. With Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown, he continues to push the boundaries of narrative form and emotional honesty.

Read an excerpt from it.

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/bobby-sands-the-protestant-victims-campaigner-and-their-cross-community-football-team-torn-apart-by-the-troubles/a/158268681.html

Outbreak of the confict in 1969 saw one community turn on another in Rathcoole, and turned former team-mates into enemies

David O'Dornan

It was a football team where religion was left at the door and young men from both sides of the political divide in Northern Ireland became best friends as well as team-mates.

But the fallout from the Troubles as hatred festered and violence erupted in 1969 meant even a cross-community sports club — Star of the Sea in Rathcoole—was caught in the crossfire. And torn apart.

It was a team packed with talent and players who faced sliding doors moments, from being invited for trials at Manchester United to choosing to take up arms with the UVF and the IRA.

Among them was IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and Raymond McCord, who was from the Protestant side of the estate and who is now best-known as a prominent victims campaigner.

He is one of the main contributors to a new Irish-language documentary from director James Wynne, Star Of The Sea — The Football, The Troubles And The Aftermath, which will have its premiere at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh.

Raymond explained: “In Rathcoole it was a mixed estate. The majority were Protestants, but in the street I lived in was a lot of Catholic families. No one thought anything of it. And it wasn’t that people say it’s the last thing in your head. It wasn’t in your head.

“You’d no brothers. Football and girls, they were my main priorities. In Rathcoole at the time was the Catholic school Stella Maris, and they had a youth club football team, Star of the Sea. Star of the Sea club was the best junior football club in Northern Ireland.

“It was just a great place, great lads. A real cross-community team. The Troubles ruined it. It started off as a Catholic team and then it turned into a real cross-community team. There was no religion or politics in the club. It wasn’t tolerated.

“My father, he was in the Orange Order. I was going down to training at the Star and my father and two of his friends, I asked them for a lift. We got to the Star of the Sea club, outside it, and I said, ‘Stop here.’ I got out and he said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, “I’m going in there, to the Star.’

“And the guy who was a paramilitary, he says, ‘That’s a Fenian club. What are you going in there for?’ I said, ‘I play for them.’ And the look on their faces was great.

“People were trying to enforce sectarianism into your head, but my father never put me under pressure.”

Other former players who share their story include Dessie Black and Geordie Hussey, who adds: ‘Being part of the Star of the Sea helped me be the person I am now.’

Raymond also remembers Bobby Sands as a team-mate, and in particular a 5-1 cup final win over rivals St Paul’s when the future IRA terrorist attacked a player on the pitch.

He said: “Bobby Sands was left back. He made a tackle. Sandsy’s boot came off — one of his football boots. The ball was away, cleared or whatever it was — Sandsy clubbed the fella with the boot.

“People would be calling that violence. ‘What else would you expect from Bobby Sands?’ But if it had have been one of our other players’ boots that had come off they would have lifted it as well. That was the way it was. It was over in 30 seconds.”

“Bobby wasn’t a skillful player,” added Raymond. “He was a hard player. Took no prisoners, like. Well, that’s part of football when you’re 16 years of age.

“You all want to be a tough guy.”

Just like fellow Belfast boy George Best, Raymond went for trials at Old Trafford but opted to return home because he was both homesick and lovesick.

He revealed: “When I went to Manchester United, I was a Manchester United supporter. One of my heroes was Paddy Crerand. Some player. Hard player.

“And the first day we were training, he asked me a strange question, ‘Are you a Paddy or a Billy?’ I hadn’t a clue what he’s talking about. ‘Geordie’s a Billy.’ And he was talking about Geordie Best. He was asking me, ‘Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?’ I hadn’t a clue. And I says, ‘Billy’.

“I didn’t understand it. We were playing a game. This guy who played for England, he was full of himself. Me and him clashed during the match and he got clipped.

“And Paddy intervened, and he says, ‘You, Billy.’ That’s what he called me. He didn’t call me Raymond. ‘Don’t let me see you doing that again. You can do it — but don’t let me see you doing it.’ This was Paddy’s words to me.

“You’re a Belfast lad, you’re going away to a place. I’d never been on holiday. There were other lads just like me who came back home, that were homesick and had a girl... I’ll never regret it. It was the same girlfriend who I actually married.”

“When I look back, if I had the choice, your three sons or a career with Manchester United? It was a no-brainer, it was the three sons every day of the week,” laughed Raymond.

“You weren’t thinking about Geordie Best. You weren’t thinking about the greatest team and the best team in the world. You were back in Belfast, back in Rathcoole, your girlfriend was there, playing football there.

“My heart was at Star of the Sea to be honest with you, where we had the best people, greatest people in the world. So there was no regrets that way.”

But as murder and mayhem became worse across Northern Ireland, it spelled the end of the community and team. It would change their lives for ever.

Raymond said: “There were families moving into Rathcoole, Protestant families who had been put out themselves. Unfortunately some of them brought the Troubles with them and you can understand that, because they were put out because of their religion.

“But you thought they would have known better. It was like a cancer spreading through, like an epidemic hit Rathcoole of get the Catholics out. Destroyed the estate. The Troubles ruined it. Spoiled the team.

“You’re 16, 17, they all want to be tough guys. They associated themselves with one of the two big paramilitary groups. Paramilitary bosses were sending them out. They were going out to throw bombs into a bar or walk into a bar and shoot people just because they were a Protestant or a Catholic.”

Raymond was the only Protestant to keep playing, years after the others drifted away despite intimidation and assaults from local loyalist paramilitaries.

He added: “We’re all made different. To me, it was another part of life growing up. Learning how to stand up for yourself and make your own choice. I’m glad I stayed, but it felt strange when I ended up being the only Protestant there.

“It’s amazing — the Troubles lasted 25 years. The transformation is 31 years. The transformation has lasted longer than the Troubles. I use the term loosely, ‘loyalist’, because no one’s worked out who they’re loyal to, except themselves.

“If you ask the people on the estate when you’re talking to them privately, they say that they want them away, the paramilitaries. And if you talk to people my age or a bit older than me and ask would they prefer Rathcoole pre-1969 or now? They’ll say pre-1969.

“We went from two communities to one community when we walked in through the doors of Star of the Sea. Sport brought us together. Walking in through that door I didn’t ask who the Catholic prayers were.

“Myself and some of the other players are free to tell you how to deal with people from both communities — I’ll leave it at that.”

Still buzzing from the recent show in Belfast, I've been inspired to dig out my Cure LP's.

This one is special to me as it was the first one I bought the day it came out (at the tender age of 18). At the time, I thought it was patchy and hard work in places but the great moments out weighed the negative. Listening to it today, I'm struck by how noisy and grinding it is in places and how there are times when Smith sounds like he's at the end of his tether.

Pity about the cover art but I suppose you can't have it all.

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https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/bobby-sands-trust-says-hunger-striker-never-moved-to-royal-victoria-hospital-SWIXC5GS7JAYVOHKJRXSBP2SRU/

THE Bobby Sands Trust has disputed a suggestion in a new book that the republican hunger was taken from the Maze prison to Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital.

In ‘The Troubled Adventures of a Student Nurse’, Liz Laird recalls a night porter telling her that Sands had been admitted to the hospital where she worked in 1981 with only days to live.

Danny Morrison, secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust, said while he wished the author well with her memoir, he wanted to correct the record regarding the death of the hunger striker.

“Bobby Sands not only did not die in an outside hospital but there is no record of him ever being taken out to any hospital while he was on the blanket,” he said.

Mr Morrison also rejected a suggestion that families of hospitalised hunger strikers faced “a barrage of questions” from republican supporters.

“A prisoner only ever ended up in an outside hospital, such as the RVH, upon lapsing into unconsciousness in the prison hospital, followed by an understandably distressed next-of-kin relative authorising medical intervention. There then followed transfer to an outside hospital,” he said.

Responding, Ms Laird said “accepts entirely” what the trust says and offers the Sands family sincere apologies.

“I would stress that my memoir ‘The Troubled Adventures of a Student Nurse’ is an honest account of what I believed at the time,” she said.