Tuesday 9 February 2016

Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day and an update on the vanishing Ramsgate Sands a ramble.

If ever one day of the year can be called carnival day then it’s today, no fixed date you understand, a movable feast forty days before Easter, which roughly is, the Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox. Not exactly and perfectly right, but good enough for me and The Venerable Bede wrote that definition of the date of Easter down in 725.


About 800 years later in 1559 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, the main historic image of this traditionally important symbol.

Here in Ramsgate what with the temperature at this time of year and stuff, very few of us celebrate this religious festival by removing most of our clothes and dancing in the street wearing feathers.

In fact after last night’s storm we don’t have that much to celebrate as another major running point in the departure of Ramsgate Main Sands has been reached



if you look at the photo you will see the high tide mark has reached the sea defence next to the East Pier harbour wall.


I posted about this issue yesterday, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/ramsgate-main-sands-where-is-sand-going.html#comment-form which resulted in various ideas in the form of comments, mostly on the various Facebook groups that yesterday’s post was linked to.


In fact I have been posting about the problem for several years now and it would seem that finally we have lost our sand above the high tide mark in Ramsgate, although a bit opposite the lifeguard station may remain for a year or two.

In the bookshop here in Ramsgate we are working hard processing the books we have bought recently, if you want to know what has just gone out on the shelves then keep an eye on http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/

As far as I know we are the only bookshop in the world photographing all the books we put out on the shelves every working day and putting the photos on the internet.

Technically it isn’t very difficult to do this now because of cloud computing which puts the photos on the internet automatically after you take them. Strangely although this all links up with blogger and youtube, Facebook it seems has yet to get to grips with the cloud, it’s a funny old world.


Ramsgate town centre wise the 99p shop has closed



the £1 shop is moving to the site



and then the 99p shop is closing, I think. Is that right? Sound like it. 

2 comments:

  1. The Poundland shop was Vye and Sons 'new' supermarket in the late 60s. I had a summer job there at 14 "filling the butter cabinets" at 1s10d per hour. The bacon cutting room was above the front of the shop and alongside this was a door that led into the old house it had been built into. The stockroom was at the rear and I suspect some of that was turned into shop space when the clothes shop there had an upstairs. Wonder what remains hidden?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Poundland bought out 99p stores so I guess having 2 stores owned by the same company opposite each other makes little financial sense.

    ReplyDelete

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.