Tuesday 1 December 2015

Why I am not wearing a red ribbon for World Aids Day today and a ramble.

I guess that as more than 34,000,000 people have died from aids having a day to commemorate it makes some sort of sense, and to be honest I had had assumed that this was a bit like poppy day.

So why no ribbon, obviously a lot of the people who have contracted aids are homosexual, so am I homophobic? Having done the old introspection bit, I don’t seem to be, always difficult with the ‘ists and ‘ics in one’s head inasmuch as it isn’t covered by the mutually exclusive rule. What am I on about here? Well you can be gay and homophobic, black and racist, female and sexist and so on.

Is it because I am unaffected or hardly affected by aids? No the majority of the school friends I made when I was a teenager have died from aids. Perhaps I had better explain this one, I was disabled as child and went to Lord Mayor Treloar College, so most of my secondary school friends were haemophiliacs and have therefore died of aids.

So why no red ribbon on World Aids Day? Truth of the matter is I can’t find anywhere selling them and haven’t seen anyone wearing one who I could have asked where they got it from.

Having been out to get the shopping, I then looked at the BBC news on the net over my lunch and no mention of World Aids Day there, perhaps I have got the day wrong.


Onto the painting, I did a bit more on the Ramsgate Harbour Arches picture from Miles Café Culture, being watercolour where you can’t paint light on dark, this was mostly the white bits where the railings go.

The purists say they leave the white bits blank as they paint, my guess is that most of them slap on releasing fluid and peel it off when the painting is finished, carting the unfinished painting around in my pocket means that this isn’t an option open to me as the movement makes it peel off.

I cheat on this one and slap on white watercolour which gives me a marker to paint around, I think JWM Turner put on pencil lines, painted round them and the rubbed them out when the paint was dry, but this produces a rather strange looking picture when I do it.


If you look at this Turner watercolour of Canterbury you will see what I mean.

It’s now two years since Ann Gloag bought Manston Airport and the next public consultation on the Stone Hill Park development is at Pegwell Bay Hotel tomorrow, see http://www.stonehillpark.co.uk/come-and-have-your-say-on-plans-for-stone-hill-park

The council and the various other groups who seem to be hoping to turn it into an airfreight hub are yet to hold any public consultation on this course of action.

Here is the latest from the council https://www.thanet.gov.uk/the-thanet-magazine/news-articles/2015/november/council-to-undertake-further-soft-market-testing/ “a viable airport could come into sustainable long-term operation as quickly as reasonably possible” Perhaps they somehow didn’t notice the last fifty years of attempts starting with Air Ferries and finishing with Ann Gloag.

Work in my bookshop goes on a pace as you can see from the bookshop blog which shows the books we put out on the shelves http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/


1 comment:

  1. TDC are picking on Ramsgate again. The amount of cash they hope to save in a year is peanuts and then if their logic is correct. Free Saturday parking in the Leopold car park is being scrapped. I don't know how they can possibly know but they claim free Saturday parking across Thanet costs £18k a year and Ramsgate's share is £12k, have they spent all day counting cars? I know they are making Canons road free but who will walk the extra distance? Looks like about 200 Saturday shoppers will give Ramsgate a miss in the future. I know Michael you have reservations about some shoppers not liking the multi story but it must have cost the council more than the savings to find out and if the shoppers go elsewhere then its a stupid mistake.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.