A few old Thanet pictures

York Gate Broadstairs before 1907 as you can see from the postmark.

 These two are part of a Ramsgate Model Village series that say "Greetings" on the back but have no postcard layout, I assume they could be bought there as souvenirs

 I would guess from the bathing tents that this one is between the wars

 This is Negate gap in the late 1890s

I think this is an early one of The Pav 190something


Canterbury today

Note the blind where the return spring has broken

with the various watercolours I paint it is a bit of a spot the difference

 so today I added the broken blind to this one.

I was painting from a table outside Chocolate Cafe.

The article about Barclays closing their branch at Asda Westwood was a bit of a retail eyeopener for me. It seems to say that the branch only has 159 regular customers, can that be right? My guess is that this may have something more to do with the way people behave in supermarkets differing from the way they behave in towns, than internet banking. Or perhaps I am the only one who ever has to queue in the bank here in Ramsgate.

I tried actively engaging in shopping in Canterbury today, as a shop worker I am becoming increasingly concerned about the decline of the non food shop in our towns. Something I still really can't understand is why it has to be such a bad experience for an ageing bloke.

Still in the retail sphere, Michael's Bookshop here in Ramsgate where I work

this is the link to the pictures of the books we put out yesterday

I am also beginning to take an interest in what both Tripadvisor and Google have to say about our shop and other shops. Of course there is a sense in which it is us, we the general public who write these reviews. There is also a fair bit of publicity recently related to misuse of the review system.

With bookshops that sell on sites like Amazon there are also the reviews there, one of the funniest negative reviews we got was because the customers didn't like the story in the book they bought from us.

Mostly though if we get a negative review it is because the customer paid for second class post but expected it to come first class, since we started sending everything recorded we haven't had much not turn up.

My whole stance with selling books on the internet is related to improving the books we have in the bookshop, this is mostly selling books that haven't sold in the bookshop and the local history books we publish.

In an overall sense though I think the business of closing shops in our towns is having a major impact on the way we live.