Some sort of ramble

A very busy week in my bookshop, which could be down to the election result, stability and all that, honestly I don’t know. I do have a bizarre example of how this sort of thing works, we recently started putting pictures of the majority of the books going onto the shelves in my bookshop on the internet, see http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/New%20acquisitions now you would think that three thousand people looking at these pictures during the last month (about 100 a day) would be responsible for my bookshop being busier, until you look a bit closer. Then you find that the vast majority of these people weren’t even in the UK only about 350 from the UK, about 11 a day maybe 3 or 4 in the local area.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t carry on doing this, as far as I know we are the only bookshop in the world doing this. With Google you can do exact phrase searches by putting what you want to search in inverted commas like this "new acquisitions in the bookshop" and if nothing else it will eventually provide me with some idea of which books I have sold, unless of course I am buying the wrong ones.

UKIP and Manston Airport have dominated the local news and internet during the last week, with Thanet District Council becoming the first council to have UKIP with a working majority. Of course we won’t really get much of an idea of what this means for a while. I have spoken to a few of the new UKIP councillors, some of them don’t seem to be completely certain that they want the UK to come out of Europe, all of the ones I have spoken to say they want to save Manston Airport, they don’t all seem certain that the want the RiverOak plan for an airfreight hub that they can’t fly off on holiday from.

It would seem likely that the momentum is going out of the Save Manston campaign as we have just had the anniversary of the airport’s closure, which The Isle Thanet Gazette attended and have put up photos of, see http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/pictures/Manston-Marking-year-closure/pictures-26514372-detail/pictures.html well the weather was fine and it looks like not many people turned up.

I have revisited the airport cpo issue, mainly because of the new presumed council leader saying that the cpo was going to be dusted down and given another try, see http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Ukip-leader-elect-vows-Manston-CPO-work-begin/story-26489070-detail/story.html

What is really lacking here is an indemnity partner as RiverOak didn’t cut the mustard, I have had another go at using the internet to suss out whether they are a large enough company to come up with the big bucks.

Anyway using their website and the internet it looks like they operate out of a rented office in Stamford Connecticut, so using the old exact phrase inverted commas trick for their address "One Atlantic Street, Suite 703" which gives 117 Google matches, the address for my bookshop "72 king street ramsgate" gives about 12,000 matches.

As far as I can see the whole object of an indemnity partner is that the council don’t risk a huge liability, which I suppose would happen if the cpo got started and the indemnity partner folded up.

Of course I may have made a mistake here and apart from renting an office in Stamford they may have a huge multi million dollar set-up at another address.

If you want to you can rent an office there http://looplink.seaboardproperties.com/ll/18506556/1-Atlantic-St/

I did skive off for a bit this afternoon and try to sketch the Ramsgate Harbour

Not one of my best, but while practice may not make perfect it certainly improves things.

I also had a word with a seagull nesting in Waitrose’s car park, how daft can you get?

And came across a 1950s bus at the harbour.