A Pinch and a Punch It’s the first of the Month, a ramble, perhaps.

For the other local bloggers my referral statistics to this blog are published at http://www.thanetonline.com/613/ this is the nearest I have to being an indicator of the relative popularity of the other local blogs.

It’s been a funny old week where Thanet district Council are concerned, the Transeuropa ferries debt being the overriding factor.  

With a normal situation of a busy council owned port, allowing one of the port customers to run up a huge debt should obviously result in serious actions.

The problem in this case is we are not talking about a busy port but a port running way under capacity with no other operators forthcoming. Whether there is a level of port fees at which Port Ramsgate would be a viable ferry route to continental Europe is probably the area where the key questions lay.  

My take here is that the port’s position is very much the same as that of our town centre shops, under capacity may mean that revaluation is the way to go, more likely though is looking at the role and usage of both the town centres and the port in a completely new way and probably one where leisure plays a major role.   

Should the council have pulled the financial carpet from under the ferry company? I have to say that I don’t really know the answer to that one.

Should the council review the whole usage of Ramsgate Harbour with the key consideration being running it at a profit? I guess the answer to this one is a yes.

The other big Ramsgate and Thanet Council issue to come up again is Pleasurama and it looks as though the slowly grinding council wheels are moving towards repossessing the site and trying to get some sort of usage out of it.

My take with this one is that at some point a proper assessment of what the site can be used for needs to be undertaken, key issues here being flood and storm issues and cliff maintenance issues. An aside to this it the viability of using the Marina Road inclined viaduct as the main access to a major development.

I will ramble on here, work permitting.  

Yesterday evening I stopped by at “The Royal Harbour Brasserie”  wot wos the Eagle Café on the end of Ramsgate’s east pier, this is Ramsgate’s foodie destination with a view, although to be honest Ramsgate is a bit far away to sketch with my aging eyesight.

I wasn’t going to publish my sketch from there, but looking at it in conjunction with the photo I took at the same time interested me to here goes.    

I would say that this crop from the picture taken with my mobile phone shows a similar degree of detail to that which I could see with the naked eye. At one point during the sketch I decided my Granville tower was too dumpy, rubbed it out and drew a taller thinner one, retrospectively the photo seems to say the initial dumpier one was the right one.