Midweek ramble.

Well the leader consultation deadline is up, so if you didn’t take part you can hardly complain about what Thanet District Council do during the four years from May 2011.

I got sucked into something of a spat about it on Thanet Life, see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2010/12/thanks-andy.html and ended up wondering if Simon would rather I didn’t comment on his blog. Anyway I have made some sort of fairly innocent historical comment about Karl Marx there as a sort of olive branch.

Very few Thanet blogs are getting involved in local issues now and there is very little at all coming from the local councillor’s blogs, so in terms of comment by known people things are getting a little incestuous. And I suppose having some sort of blog discussion with someone when you don’t know who they are, is just less interesting than when you do.

A newish blog has appeared http://www.westgateandwestbrook.co.uk/admin/our-blog but I haven’t sossed out the feeds yet properly, I can get posts to appear on the latest posts on other blogs thingy on my sidebar, but I can’t get the link to point at the blog.

I noticed that they have started posting the council’s press releases as has Don on Promote Thanet, I tried this here but eventually it made this blog so boring that I could hardly face looking at it myself, so I started the Thanet Press Releases blog.

Anyway looking at the local blogs there doesn’t seem to be much that hasn’t first appeared somewhere else, all in all not very exciting.

The bookshop is rumbling along in the pre Christmas way with people buying a lot of local history books as presents, I hope I don’t get behind with the printing this year, it is very difficult to tell how many of which title you are going to sell and with over 130 local titles in print you can only store a limited number of each.

There is also a steady year on year increase in the number of people who buy secondhand books for Christmas, I put this mostly down to more people specifying exactly what they want.

One chap bought three 5p books and one 10p book out the sale and told me they were for his girlfriend for Christmas, something that made me chuckle, perhaps she will bring them back for exchange after Christmas.

Quite a few of the books I stock although priced as secondhand are actually new, publishers reps samples, returns, bankrupt stock and so on and this often causes quite a bit of amusement after Christmas when people come to exchange what they think is a £20 book and it transpires that we sold it for £4, quite often it becomes suddenly less unwanted.

I may well ramble on.