Wind up of the year.

 As far as I remember this time last year we had just had a change of administration in our local government from Conservative to Labour, so a reasonable question is have we benefited.

 My view is obviously biased towards Ramsgate, where I live and trade and I guess what a district council does that it doesn’t have to do anyway – empty the bins, sweep the streets and so on - is fairly limited, the difference in Ramsgate, well at least the only one I could see, relates to council owned property.

 Somehow under the eight years of Conservative administration virtually all of our district council owned public properties became or remained empty and or derelict. Whether this was due to spite towards a town with mostly Labour councillors, terrible blundering or something else that has never been explained – I don’t know – no one has ever said. 

 Since Labour took over at the end of last year three have reopened, The Clock House and the café at the end of the pier and the old tourist information office.

 The biggest and most prominent Pleasurama and The Pavillion still remain derelict abandoned eyesores, as do Westcliff Hall and Albion House.

 I guess the most significant local factor last year is that it was the first full year of The Turner Contemporary art gallery and this even included a visit to the gallery by the reigning monarch

 With all of the cuts both to our county council and the arts council I do wonder what the long term future will be for the gallery, the way it is designed makes it very expensive to run and frankly I think it is too small an attraction to command an entrance fee comparable to its running costs.

 Children’s quote of the year, may be: “We had sex education at school, but it wasn’t much good, we didn’t get to do anything, apart from watch TV.”

 If I have a new year’s resolution it must be to put the names of places and the date in my sketchbooks. Thumbing through them and trying to grasp a little of the last year I have taken photos of some of the sketches, many of them never get finished as there isn’t time.

It’s been a strange year for secondhand bookselling with Albion Bookshop in Broadstairs becoming a pub with books, I don’t really know what to make of it and certainly know it isn’t something I could cope with. 

The whole business of books and bookselling is heading for a cliff edge as far as I can see, over the years the business of choosing something to read developed into something called the browse.

This is particularly important for newly published books that were never destined for rave reviews, but was nonetheless useful and interesting to some people.

I guess that the crux of the problem is that while Amazon are very successful at closing down all forms of opposition, they haven’t mastered the virtual equivalent of a browse in a physical bookshop.  

I may ramble on here.