Tuesday 29 July 2014

School holidays start with don’t swim in the sea and children’s books in the bookshop

 I will start with the children’s books, it is a very good idea if children have a books to read during the school holidays. The pictures are of the books in the children’s section of my bookshop, if you click on the photos so they get bigger and click on them again, once they have got bigger, they should get big enough to let you read most of the titles. If they don’t I will try to take some better photos and replace them.

I am having a jinxed day, I could say my decent camera has gone wrong, the truth is that I have lost the charger, so I took the pictures with my mobile phone which isn’t so good indoors.
 There are several reasons why it is best for children to have a real book to read, rather than a kindle, or some other device, the main one being that technology has just too many distractions.

Another one is to do with what some people call “lose toys in the attic” which is a euphemism (another way of saying) “mental” “mad” and so on, which can be hurtful if the person you’re talking about has really got a mental illness.  
 However people who are reasonably sane, in fact everyone, has stuff in their minds that works strangely for one reason or another. I think that if someone uses a screen a lot to read things that hardly go in to their memory and they will never need a few seconds after reading them, then their minds get used to junking stuff they read on screens.

A very good example on this blog is when the adults start to insult each other, they skim up and down the comments looking only for. What? Someone they don’t like so they can be rude to them. Someone who has been rude to them. can you think of any more? But the point here is it soon becomes obvious that they are not interested in the topic of the post, so their mind is junking that information.
 If you read a book on a screen and your mind has gone even a little bit like that when you read from screens, you may find you’ve “lost the plot” sorry couldn’t resist that one, wait until I get to the sea, it will get worse.

This can be a problem with serious study, my children have been saying, “print it out dad” for years.
 This part of my bookshop has children’s books for children, the books are priced accordingly, there are lots of books priced under £1 and if you look carefully some are priced at 10p. This is partly books that are nearly worn out, but also my low cunning which I hope will make children look at the books carefully.

 I should also point out the we offer exchange vouchers for books we want, and either money or more value in book exchange vouchers for books we want a lot. So if you have books you have already read you may not need money at all.
 There is always not paying for books at all and we have a library with a children’s book section which all children can join for free. What’s the snag? Library fines. Are you a well organised person? Do you loose things? Do strange marks appear on books when you read them? Do the pages often fall out when you read books? If the answer to any these questions is yes, then either change your ways or pay.
 Of course if you have bought a book and the book has some sort of accident, then this can be less of a problem and it can make for more relaxed reading.
 The big question is. Why would you want to read a book at all? If you didn’t ask it even a little bit, somewhere in your head's attic then you can skip the next bit.

Otherwise there are two questions. Do you like money? And do you like life.

People who read books do better with their education. People with a better education earn more money. People who earn more money usually have a greater life expectancy (live longer).

So think of the poor total stranger who is you in a few years time. 
 I have started expanding the children’s section, this is a long job and a bit like a puzzle, for instance I have to move all of dictionaries in order to make space some books about crime, so I can move the humour books, so there is more space for children’s books next to the rest of the children's books.
 On to the don’t swim in the sea business, the council has issued a warning not to swim in the sea on the beaches between Walpole Bay and Dumpton Gap, this includes: Walpole Bay, Palm Bay, Botany Bay, Kingsgate Bay, Joss Bay, Stone Bay, Viking Bay, Louisa Bay and Dumpton Gap.
 The Australians often have signs by their swimming pools saying. “Don’t pee in our swimming pool and we won’t swim in your toilet.” What seems to have happened here is we peed in our toilets and it has arrived in our sea.
 In some ways this is good news, because up until recently when things went wrong they didn’t tell anyone, now they put up warning signs and I think if something like this happens it is better to tell people.
 I will write a bit more about this later, I know you really know this is because I want to see how much it takes to fill the spaces, but I am pretending I have something interesting to say. 

Back in 2011 what happened here in Thanet when things went badly wrong, was the council and the water company let everyone swim in their toilet. I had a word with the council about this, here it is http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/thanet-blue-flags-some-thoughts-from.html so you see what reading can do.

It means that if you read a lot you may have some unexpected information up your sleeve, even the water company's engineer's notes.  

The downside here is that the council may not like you very much, so you may wind up trying to run a business opposite the biggest shop in the street and find that on the one hand it belongs to the council. While on the other hand it’s empty and they never ever intend to let it as a shop again.
Now I am going to be politically incorrect here, in fact I am going to be sexist, I am going to suggest first that women do most of the shopping and I am going on to suggest that most women won’t park in the multi story car park.  

Now three of my children and my wife are of the female persuasion and most of the blog readers will be familiar with the pictures that I paint, and put on this blog, while waiting for shopping to occur. I know this sexism may lead to adverse comment so I am covering my back here the best I can.   
However I think I may have the reason why nearly all of the shops in King Street between mine and the town centre are still trading as shops and I think this reason is that it is right next the open air car park which is where most of the women park when they come to Ramsgate.

Now in most of the other towns in this country the councils are doing everything they can to keep shops open, so it may be purely coincidental that they are trying very hard to keep this one closed.


Of course it may be that the reason that nearly all of the shops between mine and the town centre are open is because of the people going past them on the way to buy their books, ok I concede it may be a bit of each.   
Oh no I’ve just realised that I have done something else that will very probably annoy the council, perhaps they will buy another shop in the street and make sure that it is never going to be a shop again.


There isn’t much else they can do, we already have had pretty much every possible on street parking space removed, the wobbly pavements the blocked drains and have been excluded from the town centre policing.

The bottom line here is.

We'll let you swim in our toilet if you don't pee on our council. 

11 comments:

  1. It's a great pity that sewerage is still pumped into the sea. I know that if this hadn't been done then there would have been localised flooding and perhaps sewerage in the streets. I know which I prefer of the two options. I don't have to swim, but I do have to use the streets. Nevertheless something needs to be done. Perhaps a longer outfall pipe, again. More investment? Perhaps someone could buy it for a nominal sum and sort it out forever.

    I know that as a kid I used Walpole a lot, back in the day. I often wondered why there was a funny sort of scum on the water, and I gave it a wide berth. But I haven't swum in the Walpole Bay since 1965 so don't know what it's like now.

    I shall return later to see if I have been castigated for something I haven't done. :-)

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    1. SEMBOB very like the airport it is the old balance between pollution and economics, in simple terms, as this post is directed at children as well as adults. People in wealthier communities live longer and pollution, which is almost always the result of making wealth, often makes the people in communities die younger.

      One important trick is to make sure you don’t get the pollution without the associated wealth, like all the freight planes that the airports in wealthier communities don’t want, but very little of the wealth associated with the more labour intensive passenger flights and the advantages of many travel destinations economically benefiting local business.

      But yes in this case I think we should be considering more expensive water to improve the sewage infrastructure, which the water bills pay for.

      That said there will always be pollution incidents and the most important thing here is for it to become publicly known that at the beaches in Thanet are ones, where as soon as there is an emergency discharge, the warning signs go up because of the risk of pollution and before the sea sweeps the pollution onto the beaches.

      I am absolutely certain that at a lot of other places this doesn’t happen and it is easy to check in the UK as the actual beach pollution figures, derived from weekly testing of the water quality, are published about a fortnight after the testing.

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    2. To increase water charges would be a travesty as South East water Co must be forced to pay out of their profits or to invest in a overflow tank. When it rains hard they need to fill the tank then when water has dropped then they can pump it back into their system.

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    3. They do have tanks Om but they need more. But Excessive rainfall is difficult to deal with. When I was in Singapore ten inches of rain once fell in 24 hours. The main dual carriageway connecting Singapore city to the Malayan border had a monsoon drain six feet deep and twice as wide, yet the road still flooded. I agree Michael that signs in place are better than sweeping the situation under the carpet.

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  2. found a quote which although not directly related to circumstances here does explain some of the psychology in use to rally the troops. I will be changing some of the words but will leave the original quote intact.

    "The people (supporters) can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is the easy part. All you have to do is to tell them they (pro-manston) are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists (realists) for lack of patriotism and exposing the country (manston) to danger. It works the same way for any country."
    I wonder if any one knows just who said this?

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    Replies
    1. “If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Theodore Roosevelt. And yes it was Hermann Goring.

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    2. And if you use the right psychology you can make people jump through hoops for you in the guise of saving the world. I think Julia George had the last laugh over the stoogies this morning on Radio Kent.

      As I said before the Emperor is wearing his new clothes

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  3. So were do Southern Water discharge their water in places like Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks? If it works in these inland towns then coastal towns are entitled to the same solutions - unless of course coastal towns pay a lot less for there water services.

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    Replies
    1. The key to this anon, is that the UK’s and a lot of other countries infrastructure is very old. In the UK most of the drainage is a Victorian system that has been updated.

      So if we go back a hundred years, most inland towns had sewage farms and processed their sewage before discharging it into rivers, while all of the costal towns used long outfall pipes and poured it straight into the sea.

      This meant that most inland towns had and still have two drainage systems, one for rainwater and one for foul sewage. The rainwater one discharging straight into the rivers and the foul one being processed.

      Most of the costal towns had and mostly still have, a dual system, which means it all goes down one pipe, this used to all go straight into the sea, but now it all goes to the sewage farm. This is combined with the outfall pipes, which are used when we get heavy rain and the sewage farm can’t cope, so it goes into the sea.

      We could have a duel system installed for every house in Thanet , not only would this be very expensive, but the piping on/in almost every building in Thanet would have to be changed.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.