Lunchtime in Ramsgate the Booksellers Escape, a ramble, what? About cataracts, new shops in Ramsgate, the ever under developing seafront, sketching, books and stuff.

 Lunchtime today and whether the weather would – it did, good enough to sketch outside and I did. What? An impression – oh you can see, the top of what may be an impression of the view from my lunch. A Clothed Lunch?

 Speaking of jewels – which I wasn’t, there is a new jewellers opened in Harbour Street, unless they are called We Pay Cash, no name as yet. Has the internet affected jewellers like it has effected the other non-food shops in towns? If I wore jewellery, which I don’t, would I want to try it on and look in the mirror before buying it? In our fast decaying mouthfuls of town centre shops, capped with charity shops and filled with cafés, the jewellers seem to be among the last to go.  But aint it grand to have a shop there selling actual stuff you can buy and takeaway? 

The slipways looking very much demolished with rumours that Hornby may pull out and we will get. What? A bar betcha. Meanwhile on inner harbour emergency slipway opposite The Arch, which is Miles – Miles in Harbour Parade isn’t Miles I think, word is that Miles aka The Arch want to put. What on the emergency slipway? Decking that can be removed in an emergency but have seating for The Arch customers, in non-emergency situations.

What happens it you go onto the arch with a bottle of absinthe – something that normally results in some sort of picture or emergency, is yet to be explained.    

 The beach – I mean to say, it keeps vanishing every twelve hours or so because of the gravitational pull of the sun or moon or both, don’t you know? It didn’t used to and now it does, if the tourists ever return in large numbers there will be a flocking from the beach, perhaps.

 How many Ls in pavilion? Is it a matter of taste, class, nationality, I’m going for one today. Wetherspoon is no longer Whetherspoon and more of a Whenspoon while they wait for TDC to put their planning application through some complex Parkinson’s Law – more delays, betcha.

But Hi Ho the licence has now gone through, which I think means they will start on the building work as soon as the plans…

Onto Tops aka Candy’s for all day breakfast with cup of tea, price £3 and the inevitable sketch.

Now back at work, and blogging for me is a divisionary tactic, I should be working, but have just been the victim of a scam.

Phone rings. “This is British Gas about your electric bill error.” How did they know? “Could you just find your bill and confirm your account number?”

Anyway I have now managed to remove the offending party from my online account, with a little help form my friends and British Gas.  

I’m working far too hard at my dayjob bookselling or to be more exact bookbuying, booksaleing and bookpricing. Steering a UK bookshop through the twenty first century is uncharted book shopsailing.

That’s my excuse – that I was distracted when I answered the phone.

The next one will be ransomware I guess. Well after giving this some thought terror bites of portable drive, the last one fell over and broke, well now – this time, all the important files have gone onto, well to be more exact automatically get saved on googe cloud. If affected or effected Google pay the fine. Or something like that.

On the cataract front, at my last eye test and considering my dotage, I asked the optician about cataracts, his reply surprised me. Which was something along the lines of yeas you will get them eventually but you can probably stave getting them off for years by wearing sunglasses when you go out in the sun.

The problem here being that when I go out in the sun I sketch and as I need reading glasses to see the paper and no glasses or sunglasses to look at the view, I could see myself trying to eat beans with my left hand, sketch with my right hand and have to change glasses with… Beans or a fork in the eye, so I put this to the optician. I never knew that you can get sunglasses which are bifocal, so when you look down you can see the paper and when you look out you can see out.

How much was not so good, so I says I will go away and think. I thunk.  Ebay:- Foster Grant Sun Readers Commander Gun +2.50 2 In 1 Reading & Sunglasses Bifocal £8.99 inc p&p.

So in my new guise as Commander Gun…

Which reminds me on the bookshop front, this is a picture of my military book sale, what does this mean? All the military books in this picture are priced less than £1 each. But shopkeeper snigger – Thursday tomorrow so we’re closed, not sure if you click on the picture frantically if it will get big enough to read the titles, but these are in the shop prices