Old photos of Thanet, day off looking at guitars, books, Margate Coffee Shed

 Music today, I listen to it but you wouldn't want to hear me sing.

Hence th local related song covers amongst the local pictures

As I said I'm not a musician so don't really know anything about musical instrument shops, but most of the rest of my family are and while I am not really keen on shopping apart from bookshops I don't mind shopping for guitars.

We started today in Wingham, I have to admit I didn't expect there to be a guitar shop there and on arrival I was surprised to find a significant one.

Village Guitars this is the link to their website

 An extensive range of new and secondhand guitars, more something I would expect to find in a busy town.

On to the bookshop at Christ Church University Canterbury link to the university website the bookshop there has been reduced in size to just over half of what it was last year link to the university's bookshop website 

All things considered and in the present climate it could have been worse, it still has a substantial range of non academic books and is still open to the general public as well as the staff and students of the university. I browsed bought a couple of books had a cuppa and a sarni in the cafe

With bookshops and Canterbury the loss of the largest new bookshop in Southeast England, the Rose Lane Waterstones, and the reduction in size of this one shows the trend is still downwards.

We went on to Margate where we arrived to find most things were already closed, both bookshops, as we had parked pretty much right outside we decided to give the new Margate Coffee shed a go

 Decent pot of tea and cake coming in at about a fiver, I like the atmosphere of this one so aim to go over during the day and try a paining from there.

Here in the bookshop in Ramsgate we managed to get quite a lot of books out yesterday, including a substantial top up of the local history books

link to the pictures of the books

I am in the middle of making a few more bookshelves and while I normally would buy the wood from the woodyard I only needed a small amount of planed six inch planking. Of course this is all in metric now, but essentially the size has stayed the same, the planed planks wind up a bit narrower than six inches, but I have always thought it as the most common size of plank, generally floorboards are made from it.

B&Q no longer stock it and it was much more expensive than I expected in Hombase

 
So I visited both of these huge shops at Westwood Cross on the way home, they were very quiet, not sure if this is significant of anything.

As you can imagine I took the wrong camera with me today, so the pictures could have been better, however here is the link to the photos on the card any editing is down to you I'm afraid.

I guess now we are into November Christmas shopping starts to rear its head, fortunately we have quite a few recently published local history books, meaning it should be possible to buy them as presents for people and be fairly certain they won't already have them.

To be honest I haven't had the time to promote them much so we haven't sold many of the recent ones.