Happy Easter, an Easter Card of The Red Lion in Ramsgate, photos inside Pierremont Hall in Broadstairs, Bank Holiday Weather Ramble.

Happy Easter to one and all 

The very rushed sketch of The Red Lion in Ramsgate, painted from Café Nero at the bottom of Ramsgate High Street is the best I could manage by way of an Easter card. 

My children were engaged in Ramsgate Easter Egg Hunt at the end of a very full day – mostly full of Easter Eggs – so I didn’t get much time before the café closed.

Some interesting old paintings and prints on the walls inside Pierremont Hall in Broadstairs, sorry the pictures of the pictures are not very good quality, the mobile phone camera isn’t the best tool for this sort of copying. The will expand if you click on them.

Easter Day with unpredictable weather and the Sunday trading law, which means that shops over 280 sq m/3,000 sq ft are not permitted to open, is a bit of a strange one in what is mostly a secular country.

Obviously the idea is that it’s supposed to be a day of leisure, the bars, restaurants and cafés were mostly open but the smaller shops were mostly closed. There wasn’t a great deal of all weather entertainment available, we no longer have large indoor venues apart from shops. I suppose a lot of people's entertainment now is in fact shopping, of course given more suitable weather the beaches would have been packed. There was a bit of a sense of Christmas without Christmas dinner or the tree.

It’s a bit difficult to see what else we could reasonably take from the Neo-Pagan holiday of Ostara and incorporate into Easter. Some sort of sabbat with maidens and the horned god to encourage fertility could easily get a bit out of hand.

The situation with Ramsgate sands and the missing sand is pretty serious, this is how it was around high tide in 2010

and now you can see that there isn’t room to turn a bike at high tide, let alone hold a beach cross event on the beach.

With the local government here having invested so much in Margate, from where Ramsgate is partly governed, one can’t help wondering about the accident or design element of this. TDC at Margate is certainly where the Thanet coastal engineers are based and sand on beaches is usually held in place by groynes. I certainly makes for a fairly unique conspiracy theory – The Council That Misplaced The Beach.

Once again my apologies that there hasn’t been much in the way of photos and paintings on this blog recently, this comes down to my bookshop being much busier than it has been for years.

I put this down to changing leisure activities, I keep having new thoughts on this and my latest is to do with the screen.  A hundred years ago one of the main leisure activates would have been the silver screen, by about ninety years ago cinemas started showing films with sound, by about fifty years ago most families in the uk had a television and the screen of one sort or another became the main source of leisure activity. Now a very large proportion of us spend most of our working lives looking at a screen of some sort. I am not so very certain that this means there will so much leisure spent looking at a screen, so perhaps this is the reason my bookshop is so much busier.

Here is the link to the pictures of the books that went on the shelves in my bookshop on Saturday http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/an-influx-of-bygone-kents-at-bookshop.html granted a lot of local history, which isn’t going to be that easy to shop for online, but a lot of other books and maps too.