New Years Eve, Thinks?

Well that’s about it for 2017 folks, considering at the moment that we are a very long time dead, I am pausing to consider what I have got to show here for a whole year of life.

I think comparing recent years a question that more realistically answers this is how did your public mark on 2015 compare to your 2016 one, I don’t keep a diary written on paper – I never have and never will. When I was a child I had a disability that made my hands shake, years of people trying to force me to write on paper during my childhood means just the thought of keeping a written diary makes me feel pretty awful.

I do have the blogs for 2015 http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2015/ and 2016 http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2016/ and I can work through these by using the older and newer posts links at the bottom of the pages.

The main thing I can relate to is the pictures that I painted, to expand on this

Looking at this picture I painted in December 2016 is the closest I can get to reliving the memory of the time.

Looking at the photos I took is not so good for retrieving life from the past and reading what I wrote on the blog variable at best.

Most of the time the posts on this blog related to the history of Thanet and in a way I am a bit uncomfortable moving out on to the limb of the past that remains inside us and what we get from memory.

I have a terrible memory for people, names and faces, I first noticed this when I was about 20, in the sense that you have some important interaction with someone and afterwards – when they have gone, you realise that you wouldn’t recognise them if you saw them again. It is something to do with brain circuitry or something, as I can take a machine to pieces and put it back together again – no trouble.

But memory is very important and so are people and in a way that machines aren’t, and considering the end of the year, memory is what it is mostly about.

In a general sense it’s not a very good time for memory with a steady increase in memory loss diseases that just weren’t prevalent in the past. I think, am not certain, that this is due to increases in particulate air pollution.

In the last year I have become increasingly concerned about the air pollution issue here in Thanet, partly because Thanet has about the most road and population upwind of it in the uk, and partly because of efforts towards trying to generate transport hubs here, Port Ramsgate upwind of Ramsgate and Manston upwind of Broadstairs.

I guess the most significant thing to happen in Ramsgate was the new Wetherspoons opening in The Royal Victoria Pavilion, strange in one of the few towns that McDonalds has closed as in a way it’s got aspects of the same package. Paying upfront with a good idea of what it’s going to cost and what you are going to get, is what I mean here. Or to put it another way, I was painting for a while early mornings in Wetherspoons – coffee toast and marmalade, always the same and the same price.

With Margate I suppose it was the revamped Dreamland and Broadstairs I think the very fact that it hardly changes from year to year is one of its attractions.    

Most popular posts during the year have been:-

The Pleasurama one http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/pleasurama-update-from-tdc.html

The Wetherspoons one http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/wetherspoons-ramsgate-ah-view-review.html

And the 1987 railway accident one http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/ramsgate-trains-mostly-and-boat.html

My bookshop has done fairly well during the last year. Book wise, on the one hand we have continued to have falling prices for most individual book titles, but on the other the book is one of the few ways for one person on their own to get some form of entertainment that is isolated from intrusive advertising. Shop wise I think there is very little left in the non food and clothes retail world, that could be said to function in a useful way, so we get busier by default. 

Canterbury Cathedral today, I turned up at 9.30 and went to said matins, which was held in the choir, this proved to be a congregation of about ten and a priest armed with a powerful pa system designed to address hundreds of people, in this huge space the result is indescribable.

Painting in Canterbury Cathedral today, for this I essentially sit in the bottom of what would be a six story building if it had any floors and try to work out some sort of perspective that represents this.

Painting afterwards in Chocolate Café. I tried a bit of pencil, which I haven't done for a while.

A few Wellington Crescent Ramsgate photos next 

Some Margate pictures too

Apologies for a bit of an odd post, we have relations who have come here for the fireworks that have been cancelled.

I may well add to this post as the fireworks have been cancelled