A little local history and the new laptop tussle

In ancient times the village of Fordwich was a town governed by a mayor and Jurats, they administered justice and condemned evildoers to be put to death by drowning.

https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Death-by-Drowning-Fordwich-Custumal 

Scolding wives were strapped to the ducking chair and lowered to the bottom of the river, after which they were put into a specially designed loft over the prison to dry out.

O sorry I digress here and see to have slipped of the edge of the Isle of Thanet. Wantsum yes Thanet no.

Pleasurama site in Ramsgate 

Above is an artists impression of it, as I remember the developer was to have been Westcliff Park Estates who have produced the very attractive development opposite the boating pool on the westcliff in Ramsgate.

Part of the offer was to have been a swimming pool on the ground floor, this would have been given to the town on completion.

The council turned down the developer on the grounds that they were financially unsound and opted instead for an offshore company whose accounts were a secret.

So having bought another laptop and had an invigorating time with it, as everything is slightly different 

 And now trying to read the camera card, here we go - this afternoon from the bottom of Harbour Street

 

zoomed in but a fail on the horizon straightening.

Better.

Photos from phone camera to laptop, all fine, on and off the cloud.

The replacement laptop Lenovo ideapad 320 from Curry's seems to be ok so far. This fell into the mid range laptop, under £300, that would be OK for my personal use, available locally today. as ever with tec I will endeavour to let blog readers know how it goes.

At the moment it is doing major updates, I can't get the touchpad to scroll, but will probably be able to to after Windows updates.

Anyway as you would expect a bit of a messy blog post as I try to get the new tec to work for me.

I will probably add to this post a bit as I try stuff and see how it looks online

Phil Lanzon at York Street Gallery in Ramsgate

The current exhibition is by - Phil Lanzon 28 March - 4 April 2018

Margate and Ramsgate old photos and Good Friday rained off

These two photos show Margate clock tower when the pole on to was strait, straight, vertical, wosisname 

 1910 is wot the postmark says - so after 1910

 and not being able to read the postmark on this one but looking at the cars, I would think around WW1

 Ramsgate Sands Station when the sidings extended past the tunnel entrance and Augusta Stairs

The steam coming from the fishing smack wouldn't have been from a steam engine to drive the boat along, but would have come from a coal fired steam winch which allowed the smack to be sailed using a very small crew.

So much of the good old days was dependent on people hardly being paid for hard work and living in abject poverty. Smack crew often being paid in the fish that no one wanted to buy.

Bank Holiday, Good Friday, rained off today, verious commitments meant we found ourselves in Broadstairs after lunch, I had no idea what to do, it was pouring with rain.

So I started writing this in Sainsbury's due to the peculiar mixture of Easter and rain.

I tried to sketch the lights on the ceiling, the camera, after the event makes it look easy, as you can see I didn't even manage to decode the pattern.

I suggested WC shopping centre, but when we got there the traffic jam and the rain made the car park under Sainsbury's strangely attractive.

I would guess back in the day, we would have gone, where? Wet Easter bank holiday, well the guests in the guesthouses I think were often thrown out during the day. Pleasurama, the main hall as we called it would have been full. The Long Bar, front of Pleasurama, I think the licensing hours would have been Sunday? I don’t suppose the strippers would have been working on Good Friday. The Pav, I think The Showbar, much more a family venue, I think, or was it?

Wetherspoons this evening, pretty much full at 6.30 in March makes me wonder about the rest of the building. Have the council applied planning restrictions? Would it work if it was Half as big again? And of course why is it so so busy? My own take is that it is that it is just because it is very much better than most other places including the other Wetherspoons I have been to. The combination of, clean friendly environment, cost (Family 6 of us, food and drink tonight £42)

We are back at work tomorrow in the bookshop and then a couple more days off/closed, sunday and bank holiday this may be the link to the books that went out last

http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/lighthouses-in-bookshop.html

Frankly making html links with a mobile phone is very hit and miss

Maunday Thursday, old pictures of Thanet and a bit of a ramble.

The pictures should expand if you click on them a bit.

So Easter greetings, we are having an interesting time at the moment, my laptop conked out, then the till in the bookshop and now the car conking out that is.

I had this once when nearly all the white goods in the kitchen conked within a month.

We are mostly sorted now, but I am still posting my blogs with the phone, and it's so small.

Easter is always a good long break for us, but this year the weather is not looking so good.

Tea break in The Range at Westwood Cross, which was much needed and better than expected.

I am begining to feel that there is a strong cause and effect relationship between the Manston DCO and the interests of local developers.

We have a bit of a history of this here in Thanet and the business of the TDC officers working towards a local plan to protect the amount of housing development sprawl. This of course was followed by councillors voting down the local plan, which does seem to be a move towards opening up Thanet as a free for all for local developers.

I am becoming more and more concerned that the DCO hanging over us isn't directed towards developing the site for local employment, but is directed at what is actually happening.

On a more mundane note, the council rubbish and recycling collections carry on as usual through Easter to it goes out as usual on Good Friday and EasterMonday

Sorry about any errors, a folding bluetooth keyboard and a mobile phone is't the ideal way to post. I am however always trying to keep on the ball with mobile tec as it is the backup when the other stuff isn't available.

My book, Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami is particularly good reading, so I am a bit distracted.

Looking at laptops in Sainsbury I was struck that the only one that has a dvd drive was out of stock. I am wondering at what point the cd and dvd get counted as a redundant format. There are all sorts of issues if the shops go on selling them but the tec stops supporting them.

I think this is an area where I lucky to be in the book business, despite verious attempts to make the book into redundant media, it is very difficult to achieve.

Old Ramsgate photos, Bookshop Easter closing, Manston Airport an update

First we are closed, tomorrow Thursday because we close on Thursdays, Friday because Good Friday is a bank holiday, then open Saturday, closed Sunday then closed Monday for the bank holiday.

Recently my take on Manston, Airport, Mixed Use Development, Emergency Lorry Park, has moved much more into the realms of just trying to find out what if anything is going on and away from any particular for or against stance.

There have been some suggestions this morning that RiverOak Strategic Partners, RSP are aiming to submit their 5,500 page Development Consent Order application to The Planning Inspectorate PINS next week or next month. Apparently this has cost about £10m so far or about £2,000 per page.

The announcement hasn’t been made by RSP or PINS but by two local Conservative politicians Kent county councillor for Thanet Cllr Messenger on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/paul.messenger.94/posts/1865972960102348 and the leader of Thanet District Council Cllr Bayford to a local reporter https://www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/thanet-leader-council-bob-bayford-1390127

I suppose this is part of the strange modern world we live in that there is no announcement from the multimillion pound company RSP either on their news site http://rsp.co.uk/news/ their  Facebook account https://www.facebook.com/RSPManston/ Twitter account https://twitter.com/RSPManston

They don't seem to have updated anything for about a month, so low activity.

I’m not really sure if this should be viewed as good news or bad news from anyone’s point of view.

For those hoping the reopening of Manston Airport, the DCO remit is for building an airfreight hub with a capacity of at least 12,000 airfreight movements a year. This combined with the negative consultation submissions from the local councils, which RSP are supposed to have been working closely with for the last two years towards this submission stage but in fact don’t seem to have any viable dialogue with. Well it don’t look so good.

For those who are sceptical and see the possibility of our local politicians involved in some potential land grab and land banking move by foreign investors, something that has happened before in Thanet, well that doesn’t look too good either.