You can get there and back in a day for that university interview……
WITH around 2,000 students from Northern Ireland travelling to University in Dundee, a lot of them – and their parents – will be delighted to hear about the new Loganair direct service from George Best Belfast City Airport which begins in May.
In fact at the moment, many students from here are making the day trip over to Scotland’s fourth largest city and the UK’s first City of Design in 2014 as they attend the university for interviews, hoping they will be accepted at the beginning of the next academic year.
There is certainly a lot more to Dundee, called the city of ‘Jute, Jam and Journalism,’ than meets the eye, For instance, do you know that it has more hours of sunlight than any other Scottish city, it is on the edge of Britain’s largest national park, The Cairngorms, and has a wide range of outdoor activities including a cycling route along the river Tay, as well as mountain biking, zip lining, hill walking, and an ice hockey team – they clash with the Belfast Giants from time to time?
The city is an iconic one for publishing and journalism… it is home to one of the legendary centres of UK publishing, the DC Thomson empire. Thomsons publish among other newspapers, The Weekly News (we know it here in Northern Ireland as Thomson’s Weekly) indeed for many years I contributed a page of Northern Ireland soccer for the Thomsons Weekly.
However DC Thomsons are most famous as publishers of legendary childrens comics such as The Beano and The Dandy, The Beezer, The Topper, Black Bob, Bunty, etc with such characters as The Broons, Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, Rodger the Dodger and Beryl the Peril!
The company also produces newspapers like the Sunday Post and other titles like My Weekly and Peoples Friend, and still employs in the region of 2,000 people. Despite the changing times and many challenges in publishing, it is still a leader in the comic, newspaper and magazine industry. Incredibly, Thomsons still produces more than 200 million comics, magazines, and newspapers every year from its offices in Dundee (its headquarters), Glasgow, Manchester and London.
The company always had a reputation for being vigorously anti-trade union and my own days of contributing soccer to the Thomsons Weekly ended when I got an instruction from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to cease contributing because of a continuing dispute over its employment policy. However, even after all these years later I still have a soft spot for the Weekly News, not to mention all those magical comic book characters which have endured over decades and put so many smiles on millions of childrens’ faces.
Anyway its good to know that Northern Ireland students and their families will have a direct alternative to the current easyJet service from Belfast International to Edinburgh to get to Dundee university.
Not that the Aldergrove service to Edinburgh and on to Dundee by train or bus is a bad one, quite the contrary. I did the trip yesterday and it was a surprisingly smooth and quite economical journey. We took off at 8.20 am and three hours later were at the campus in Dundee, just 15 mins walk from the railway station.
Arriving in Edinburgh airport, the best way to Dundee is take the tram for three stops to Edinburgh Gateway, and then change over to the mainline rail for the hour and 10 minutes or so trip to Dundee. It can be a wee bit longer depending if you get a slower train, and there is a coach alternative, but you always risk delays by road and anyway I much prefer letting the train take the strain.
Anyway, you can make the trip there and back quite comfortably in a day, and still have time for a pleasant lunch or a stroll round the town centre where possibly you will bump into a much photographed statue of Desperate Dan talking his Dog for a walk……
Brian Ogle
The 'Travel' Life of Brian 