Friday Ramble and some pictures

Despite the invent of the Kindle and competition from the internet my bookshop is extremely busy today, I suppose the bottom line at the moment is that for a lot of books my bookshop is still the cheapest option.

With paperback fiction where the Kindle comes into it’s own, the price of an average download is still about twice the price of a secondhand paperback and when you take into account the exchange value for books brought back to the shop when read, the secondhand paperback cost of reading is closer to a quarter of the price of reading the same book on a Kindle.

The first batch of pictures on the camera card – I have been very remiss about getting much in the way of pictures online recently – are of the Royal College of Art Exhibition in the Monkey House Gallery in Ramsgate.

This was one of those contemporary art exhibitions where it was a bit difficult to tell what the exhibits were, and what where just things that happened to be there. The danger of venerating the wrong objet d'art only to find it was objet d'lunch or objet d'piano, there were for instance two pianos there, one that normally lives in The Monkey House and would only have been an objet d'art had it had a label on it saying “this is not a piano” the other piano however was part of the exhibition. The artist had gutted it on arrival and paddled it across the boating lake before displaying it. The truth is often stranger than fiction. 

Anyway here are the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/811/id7.htm

Picaso had a bit of thing about pianos, so doing things with pianos I suppose is strictly more modern art than contemporary art, I will endeavour to add a video of what I mean.

I suppose that expressing things via musical instruments has always had a bit of a bizarre side, I noticed during this mornings ablutions that the youf of today was strumming Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” as an epitet to last night’s curry.

Something that  has interested me is the rebuilding of 1 Granville Marina, this is the project that TDC turned down the planning application for and the planning inspector passed. I have to say that the end result is looking very pleasing and as the project is nearing completion I wandered inside and took some pictures. Here is the link to them http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/811/id9.htm

The other eastern undercliff projects are not moving on so well, the one down near where Nero’s was has been turned down by the TDC despite having the support of Ramsgate Society and the town council. One wonders how the new localism bill will effect this sort of thing. The question really being does localism mean opening up decision making to local people or district councils.

And of course Pleasurama grinds on four men on the site where we expected 200, shallow foundations where we expected pile boring, no public information. The net result of all this is that what should be one of our main tourist areas, behind Ramsgate main sands remains a dreadful mess rather than a boost to the local economy.

The next lot of pictures relate to yesterdays lunch at The Rising Sun, Stourmouth, bar snack and a drink at about £10 good food and a pool table, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/811/id10.htm

As I said the shop was busy today, this meant I didn’t get a Gazette but for those of you interested, here is the link to the latest one councillor calls the other one a tosser story http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Councillor-quit-Labour-group-row/story-13298085-detail/story.html our TDC councillors seem to have a bit of a limited imagination when it comes to insults. 


Moving on from the disturbing images of onanistic councillors to another IOTG article with typo of the week “At that time I had five children in the house and we could all have been died in our sleep." Here is the link http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Serial-arsonist-gets-kick-burning-bins-Thanet/story-13298048-detail/story.html