Friday Ramble.

As is often the case on Friday my bookshop is too busy to get on with anything much but not busy enough to occupy me completely, so a bit of an ongoing ramble today, which I will add to depending on how busy the day is.

The Manston closure issue is very much at the forefront of local FaceBook activity, see https://www.facebook.com/groups/savemanstonairport/ which is the crux to the largest ever local internet political campaign.

I guess our local politicians are facing the power of a large internet campaign for the first time, with many of them behaving in a way that suggests something bordering on the bonkers.

At the moment the campaign seems to focusing on getting TDC councillors to say the will vote for Manson to be compulsory purchased by the council, the idea being to get them to do this before the council officers have worked out if a cpo is viable. I have to admit that I don’t have a lot of faith in politicians who say they will spend our money, without first discovering if they have got enough of our money to buy what they want buy.

There is also a vigorous campaign within the save the airport campaign against building any houses on the site, this seem to lead by individuals who already have very nice houses, thank you very much and completely ignores the fact that building on the parts of the airport site that were no longer being used has formed part of the strategy for financing the running of the airport over the last ten years. This is the last lot of plans for housing there http://www.manstonairport.com/userfiles/files/planning/Airport-Commission/Manston-Airport-Response---Long-Term-Proposals-190713.pdf on the airports website for about a year.

Don’t mistake me here I am not against the airport, but not any old airport, I am only for an airport that looks to be in some sense viable and where the benefits to the local community outweigh the disadvantages. So while a regional airport the we can fly from is something I support, an air freight hub with no fuel pipeline and pretty much all of the freight being taken by road from Manston about 100 miles where it passes a mayor airport hub before going to its destination looks a bit on the strange side to me.

The council’s chief executive is now under investigation, see http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Investigation-launched-Thanet-council-chief/story-21186766-detail/story.html and has apparently sent a sort of Murphy’s Sick Note https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWeXpNyqOrU to the council instead of turning up for work.

I have been working on painting and drawing with some emphasis on stuff you can’t rub out, I will try and explain this with a picture I started yesterday evening.

Here it is, the idea is to put the watercolour paint straight on to low quality paper without any pencil guidelines, looking at the large areas of white paper and considering where one goes next gives you some idea of the problem. Once the paint is on the paper there really isn’t any going back, with expensive paper you can usually get major errors off with a sponge and with pencil guidelines you can usually rub most of them off when the paint has dried. 

Here is what happens with people, the one on the left sopped at the point where the pencil could have mostly been rubbed out and the one on the right just done with the brush straight onto the paper. I don’t know about blog readers, but to me there is something about the stuff that comes straight out of the brush which I think I prefer.

ECR’s blog has gone into suspended animation, he says for maintenance, although fortunately he hasn’t given any of us a glance of his toolkit. My guess is that it is the bonkers comment that is at root of the problem, personally I am finding with this blog that I seldom have time to deal with anonymous comment being turned on and certainly wouldn’t have time to moderate it every day. I do what I can as turning it off stifles pretty much any comment here whatsoever. I guess for me the main snag with applying comment moderation instead of deleting unacceptable comment, is that once I have allowed a comment there a sense in which I have condoned it.

Anyway I have turned anonymous comments back on but please note comments anonymous comment directed at real people and organisations that I think may be dubious will be deleted. So if you have a gripe with the firm you used to work for, some known person who you name here, unless there is something concrete to substantiate what you say, then the comment goes in the bin.     

With the D-Day 70^th anniversary I just had a look at the WW2 general books in my bookshop and wondered vaguely if I should put some in the window.

The whole business of commercialism and bookshops is a bit of a strange one.

I mean is promoting a bookshop on a par with promoting any of the other arts, theatre, gallery, library?

Perhaps it is a bit of self advertising.

I do wonder if it would be possible to put together a reasonable and in depth understanding of a major historical event like WW2 without physical books.   

Could you do it all from digital files? I don’t think I could but I guess some people could.

I guess if firms like Amazon have their way then eventually all in depth information about a subject will be in the form of a fairly expensive download.

I am pretty sure that it is the existence of the secondhand book that is keeping the prices down.   

I have just copied this from Facebook and think it a very interesting stance on Manston Airport so have pasted it here:

"Dear **** ***
I was always anti relying on the airport for jobs, not because of noise but because it couldn’t be the regeneration for this area for so many reasons. I was told when I was in Labour, I'm now I independent, that to tell the truth re Manston etc is not popular or a vote winner. Well I've always been about truth and facts. Although I have sympathy for the loss of the airport I am also realistic. I have for many years looked into how and if Manston could work and found out that It could never be a commercial airport a) CAA say they would not give out airspace to fly, I have the director of CAA airspace number if you require it. 2. If they ever changed their mind there isn't enough catchment area this side of Maidstone to make it viable. 3. If a miracle happened and it did fly over 8million passengers a year a PSZ public safety zone comes into effect, this wipes out St Nicholas at Wade and most of Ramsgate. Please check any of these facts on the internet.

It could possibly have been cargo but Luton is better placed as it has routes up and down the country etc plus cargo doesn't create many jobs and usually comes in at night, please check health risks to night noise on the world health organisation site. Even at infitril's highest plans (upto 2030) for Manston it would have only created 300 jobs. There are no covenants on Manston and it is not a military strategic airport. I understand there is no money to use for a CPO.

I don't want houses there as the infrastructure cannot support them, no jobs, no drs, no dentists and a paired down QEQM. I would like something similar to Butlins, Haven or Centre Parks with a modern funfair and hopefully with a nice rink etc. plus retail like Bluewater (£40,000 disappears down the motorway to Lakeside, IKEA and Bluewate), plus some high end houses. This would create jobs and bring people to stay and spend money here thus creating more jobs.

As for the ballot box I stick to my principles of facts and truth even if the truth is painful.

Kind regards
Cllr Kim Gibson"


I have hidden all of the comments on this post as I have been asked to remove some unspecified comments and frankly don’t have time to unscramble what may or may not be offensive to whom out of 125.