Old Ramsgate and Margate photos, minor ramble

 Old Margate photos first, click on to expand

 Then the Ramsgate ones, I hope some you haven't seen before

This one postmarked 1914 has developed a totally fictitious structure where the railway tunnel should be, perhaps due to the way a black and white photo was prepared for colour printing at this time.

Rainham today, mainly to visit both bookshops there as I hadn’t done so for some time and like to know what’s going on in the Kent bookshop world. The whole business of shops and shopping is in decline, and it was good to see both of the Rainham bookshops fairly busy. I bought some books for the bookshop here in Ramsgate, made a bit of a hash of trying to photograph a squirrel but didn’t get the time to paint anything.

Having had issues I now have an Oukitel phone which isn’t ideal but the best I can come up with, a sort of compromise between batteries, cameras and being able to operate when out and about. My phone has a very large battery, so it never runs out and has the facility both to charge other devices (sound cancelling headphone, wifi keyboard, etc) and to transfer data from an ordinary SD card, this is usually photos from the various cameras I use.

Of course it has snags and wouldn’t suit a lot of people, smartphones have become the main ITC device for most of us and the choice of the one you use is very much related to what you need to do.

I was very surprised, having got my coffee in Costa in Rainham to find the two electrical sockets next to my table labelled “please do not use” my children would not have been amused and although the coffee was good it’s one to give a miss if your phone’s battery is running low.

The centre of Rainham has a fairly recent and well designed shopping centre with good and reasonably priced parking, that said, apart from food outlets you can see it is slowly failing along with the other Kent town centres.

Rates, rents, out of town centres and multiples, the internet, have all combined to terminate the non food aspect of town centre retail, I don’t think anyone knows what the solution is.  

The Thanet coastal towns do have the advantage of the seaside leisure attractions which I assume means that a lot of the café culture would survive the end of retail as we know it.

There is a fair amount of local news coverage about the people who don’t fit in our modern complex, more densely populated world, the homeless and the travellers at the moment, seem to be standing out.

Another lot of difficult problems and this time often related to not fitting in and not wanting to fit in, some sort of trailer park on the edge of towns may be the solution, don’t know really. I don’t think a world where everyone has a conventional job and a conventional home, pay through taxation for emergency services, hospitals, schools and so on would ever be attainable.

I count myself very lucky pretending to work in a bookshop which I enjoy, here is the link to the pictures of the books we put out yesterday 

Ah yes the photography, not that much and it didn't work out so well, the squirrel kept moving here is the link  

Interesting sign this one, I expect to see a lot more I wonder just what the impact will be as the penny drops, people realise the air pollution contributes to dementia and a reduction in their life expectancy. 

When I saw the article about the new Starbucks in Italy here is the link it was the pile of wood and the wood burning oven's impact on air quality that was one of the main things I noticed, a year ago I wouldn't have