Painting in the Pav again, some old Thanet pictures and a ramble

The pictures should expand if you click on them

 The Pav so after 1903 when it was built

 This one says 1893 on the back and you can see the tower of The Granville before it was shortened in 1900

 Not sure of the date of this Broadstairs one but I would think early 1900s

 A couple of the Margate jetty which was built so paddle steamers could land passengers

 Ah yes the Pav again.

I decided to stay in Ramsgate today in case I got snarled up in traffic because of the snow.

Once again the only place I could think of to go and paint was Wetherspoons Royal Victoria Pavilion, The Pav. If anyone can think of a reasonable alternative with a good view where I could paint in Ramsgate, please let me know.

Don't get me wrong here I have visited the Pav on numerous occasions with all ages and types in tow and haven't had a bad experience apart from one time when the heating had gone wrong.

So this morning I started an A4 picture from one of the two balcony seats with a window facing Harbour Parafde.

It's a big bit of paper

and when I get the seat again I will do some more.

I went off into ramsgate and did a couple of bits of shopping that I couldn't do yesterday on account of the police closing the town centre for the day. Very hard to tell if this is arrogance or necessity but some of the shops will have lost money that they can ill afford to lose and a large chunk of the costs of the police force comes out of the taxation paid by them.

Apologies if it was of necessity, it's my alma mater showing.

There is a fair amount of "the town centre is collapsing, who is to blame?" on the local Facebook groups at the moment. I suppose the real answer here is. "sell your house, rent a shop building, live over the shop and do your best."

I think the real answer to where have the shops of out childhood gone? Is somewhere in the, lost because people will no longer work for a wage that you couldn't possibly live on. But further down the line here is that rents and mortgages have a lot to do with this, especially residential rents, which seem to mop up many people's wages - are we working away to buy our own county. 

Wetherspoons was so busy at lunch time that I had some difficulty finding a seat on the balcony, I think the seat that I eventually started this painting, (even bigger A3) from is undesirable enough that I may get to finish the painting fairly soon.

The people on the far side of the gallery are about as small as I can paint, 0000 brush and even then pushing things a bit.

Back to King Street

Here is the link to the books we put out in the bookshop on Saturday

We are getting offered a reasonable amount of books at the moment and so some thoughts on selling books to us. The easiest way to approach this is is to take photos of the spines of the books

like this.

Then you can either send them to me by email, share the files with me or just bring your device into the bookshop, it will save you lugging about boxes of books that we have already got multiple copies of and don't need at the moment.