North Down Community Blogs

  How to make a coffee peeling :)     Grounded coffee (2 tablespoons).   Cinnamon (1 tablespoon).   You can add a bit of honey (1 teaspoon) and baby oil (just a few drops) as well          Pour freshly boiled water into a cup with cinnamon and coffee (just to cover the ingredients).On top of the cup place a saucer and let them stay until they are cold. Drain off any excess water If you like, you can add (if you like) some honey or baby oil. Mix it together. It`s ready after, 5 minutes rinse it. I love to use it for all my body – just once a week.        This peeling is really cheap, wonderful and easy to make. Some spa and beauty salons are offering massages with coffee scrubs.  Not everyone can afford that or simply have no time. So you...

Speccy has read (with interest) that along with our English neighbours Northern Ireland's young people are supposedly 'trailing the world' in literacy and numeracy - that's words and numbers to you ignorant sodafarl-eating peasants! ;) Ok, so I secretly suspect that we've been lumped into that story just to take the bad look off the English, but even at that it raises a wee small question in my overly suspicious scone. And it goes like this... Norn Iron still has the 11+ (not officially, but it does....) As a result we routinely achieve the highest regional GCSE & A-Level scores in the UK every year compared to the English, Scots and Welsh. However, if we're honest, we also know that those outside the grammar school system tend to have low english & mathematics skills and of course it is this division between the 2 groups that tends to be used as...

It is good to see The County Down Spectator printed some of the comments of their Facebook in their paper. It is a real communication tool. There are still Councillors who, even though they have a Facebook page, still disparage Facebook in Council and dismiss Facebook comments and there are still the dinosaurs who think that everyone on Facebook is not worth listening to and that there are complainers. What they forget is that the right to free speech was not limited to people whom politicians think are acceptable.  So good on The Spectator for adding legitimacy to the people who comment on Facebook....

Hi all, just a quick wee bit of technical nonsense for you... The eagle-eyed will have noticed that we actually, subtly, went live this week but some of you might also have experienced a tiny wee bit of downtime on the website. The reason? Well, we built the sites and then tested them and then invited friends and family to test them some more and, when everything looked to be working, we let her rip. Then of course we had a couple of thousand of you want to see a photo of a dead cat on our sister newtownardschronicle.com website and the webserver promptly fell over! Brilliant... Anyhoo, the upshot is that the good boys and girls at our webhosting partners have upweighted their systems and all is seemingly good once more. Apologies to anyone that was affected or inconvenienced and if any of you see any other problems please drop...

Wow, that was a busy week all right! We had 6 newspapers to put out and that meant a lot of midnight oil added to the ink, blood, sweat & tears! But what a week! Some big stories out there - horrendous assaults against young women, the potential (probable?) closure of Exploris and the sad passing of Pat Milliken, amongst many other things... Probably the story that raised most hackles amongst our Facebook readers though was the news that primary school funding is to either cut or boosted according to the social/financial standing of its pupils. Ok, that's a simplification, but in effect it means that if the school doesn't have a lot of kids receiving free school meals then that school will have its budgets cut from the Government. In North Down, like everywhere else, we will have winners and losers of course but the pain looks likely to be...

We seem to live in a country full of roundabouts. You'd think, by now, we'd all know the roundabout etiquette. Alas. No. They seem to stall the brain of the common motorist. Come on, own up... how many times have you come to one of those little mini ones and been caught in a wild west style stand-off? Three seems to be the magic number. Three cars coming from three different directions. Three drivers sitting, waiting. Three drivers not indicating their intentions. Three drivers... and then there were two. I'm the one, you see. I'm the one that can't stand that nonsense. If the other two are prepared to sit and wait then I'm off. There's no Reservoir Dogs style moment for me. You know the scene surely... all pointing guns at each other. Quite a fix that. It'll end badly. Anyway... can't be bothered with that - I'll pull the trigger and...

Hi everyone, this is the first blog post from me, Speccy! As you know, Speccy is the short nickname for the paper and is kinda how you people have been referring to us here for a long time but the point of this blog is to bring the guy to life, give him a bit of a stage and a voice to talk back with. So, just as the County Down Spectator has its traditional role and way of telling the local news - with professional journalists and editors and clever people like that - this blog is a different way of talking about what's going on around these parts, putting a different and less formal personality on the thing... Speccy is no one and Speccy is all of us! This blog is going to be where some personal views are going to be written - not as a part of...