Photos of Ramsgate from Sandwich today, some thoughts on Manston, a wet Bank Holiday Ramble

If anyone tells you that when the ageing process cuts in you will need less sleep and therefore get up earlier, all I can say is this hasn't worked for me. Snuggling back under the covers smartphone in hand, one look at the weather app was enough to send out the very clear message that today should be cancelled due to lack of interest.

I recently asked my teenage children. "Assuming I have entered my second childhood, how old do you rate me as being - mentally, at the moment" The answer. "About twelve." Wasn't very encouraging.

So, from this perspective, various grownups made me get up and to The Church of Saint Peter the unconsecrated/secularised or whatever it is in Sandwich. "It's Sandwich Festival today the tower is open and we want vertigo." Or was it to go, go came into the equation somewhere, so I went.

Up the tower, not the best conditions for zooming at Ramsgate and other stuff, a fairly bright afternoon with the sun behind me would have been favourite, here are the links to the unedited content of my camera card.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Well it wasn't the 13th, the tower collapsed on 13th Oct 1661, hand held zoom shots with the frisson of a collapse in mind, you can do your own editing.

I have been a bit obsessed recently with the business of painting looking down on things

 you don't get much looking down from buildings among the old local pictures

 I guess because the traffic wasn't significant enough to obscure the view

    lots of practice sketches in the Pav aka Spoons

On to Manston, the main snag with the airfreight hub for some people is the reduction in life expectancy that will be caused the air polution created by the large number of airfreighter movements needed to make the DCO an nationally significant infrastructure project.

Personally I have great admiration for those people living upwind of Manston and low part of the takeoff path, I guess mostly Margate and Broadstairs, who are happy to give up a few years of/off their lives for increased import/export. For the rest of the people who will want to move because of the pollution, mainly being killed by it, night flights noise air, water, I was expecting a compensation package a bit like the Heathrow Expansion compensation one. Here is the link to it    
the Manston expansion compensation seems to be a bit limited .

The DCO application is basically a jumble of massive pdf documents most of which I haven read, but the funding statement Here is the link to it   seems to be a bit inadequate.

Back to the wet Bank Holiday Sunday, well we got something out of it, however we have really run out of good and fairly local indoor leisure destinations, any ideas would be appreciated, especially any where there is a view that I can paint.