Sunday Ramble

I have just read some of the Sunday papers, this isn’t supposed to be a national blog so I don’t really post about issues that don’t relate mostly to Thanet, there is more than enough about national and international matters on the internet and most of the conventional local media is based in west or mid Kent meaning that it is better covered than Thanet.

Next to the local news blogs in an attempt to find out what is going on locally, in the order that they are on my sidebar now http://marknottingham.blogspot.com/ is mostly about national politics at the moment, a bit about the Kent Labour Party which seems to be alive and well and mostly at the other end of Kent.

http://birchington.blogspot.com/ the latest post here http://birchington.blogspot.com/2010/10/pupil-called-gangster.html seems to be remarkably similar to an article in The Mail that I have just read http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319216/A-pupil-called-Gangster-How-Tories-favourite-teacher-exposed-madness-school-devastating-blog.html

This seems to be about a young woman moving up through and across the political world, it is an interesting reflection that a Marxist – British communist background seems help with getting into Oxbridge nearly as much a good public school.

http://bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/ posted an article about Kent International Airport recently, this was about Thanet so a point to Tony.

But what is going on here that isn’t in the mainstream media? Or should I say won’t be in it for a while?

I expect I have missed something or there is something yet to appear today, but it does seem to be that the remaining bloggers that post news are looking out of Thanet.

Perhaps the other Thanet blogs that post news or about news are looking to go more national, certainly there seems to be a bit of a hole where ECR and Bertie used to be, there is of course the possibility that nothing much is going on in Thanet this week.

There is a bit happening on the China Gateway front, the company behind it hoped to sell their Dover properties, I think for £5m, I think the plan was to help with their finances, which seem to be a bit heavy on the borrowing side.

This sale seems to have fallen through although I think they hope to retain the £500k deposit. They have now issued some more shares to the value £25k, this doesn’t seem like a very large amount to be issuing a share equity for.

The last time any shares changed hands on the stock exchange seems to have been in June. I wouldn’t have thought they would need this if they had just acquired £500k.

I have to admit that these sort of financial transactions are all a bit beyond me but I keep an eye on them because the development will have an effect on Thanet if it ever happens.

Truth is that I can’t really decode anything meaningful from the financial information and there doesn’t seem to be a new planning application that one would expect if they intend to actually do anything soon.

Ironically while Ramsgate is set to loose most of its boat building facilities the Turner contemporary is going to engage in a boat building project, just bring any bits of wood you can spare along to the Droit House on 27th and 28th November and the artists there will be building a seafaring boat.

They also seem to have an 18 month local history project, I suspect that this will attract more funding than Margate museum ever did, but will it attract more visitors.

This will apparently culminate at the end of the year in a sea shanty sing along, if you don’t believe me here is the what’s on page of their website http://www.turnercontemporary.org/whatson/?p=213

For me this once again raises the question, what is art? The problem for me is that the Turner Contemporary seem to be saying that anything can be art, which to me seems to be very close to saying that nothing is art.

What talks a lot and costs, no I had better be pedantic her, what could cost £1,000 per day in Thanet? The answer is Thanet District Council’s councillors, see http://tdc-mg-dmz.thanet.gov.uk/Published/StdDataDocs/4/5/1/0/SD00000154/$SchemeofAllowancesfor201011.doc.htm

If you think I am being a little flippant today, my excuse is that we have had children’s birthday party here today.

Sorry a bit of a miscalculation there it should read nearly £2,000 a day as I missed the basic allowance figure, which adds over £200,000 a year to the figure.

I did go for a short walk this morning and headed of to the wescliff to see if I could spot any sings of the dedicated oil spill response capability in the Port of Ramsgate. This could be important, particularly to Margate now, here are the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop1010/id6.htm there is certainly a lot of activity down there, so there but nothing that I could spot on that front.

Roughly speaking for every pound councillors receive in allowances in the coming year 4 tons of oil will be pumped between ships four miles off the coast of Margate, lets say it averages out, the oil that is at £400 a ton, I am working on about 40p a litre here, much cheaper to fill up your car at sea you see, then Thanet oil is worth about 800 times Thanet councillors.

I am probably on the way to trouble reducing these things to money, I certainly invoked the displeasure of one of the council’s senior officers when I did the post nicknaming by what they earn in a week, 2K, 1.5K etc.

I suppose this comes from science and engineering, where it in necessary to be able to visualise things, even very large numbers, to understand the workings of something or other.

At the moment I am trying to understand the risk associated with oil bunkering so near to Margate and the amounts involved are very large indeed
I will endeavour to ramble on during any spare moments during the day.