Old Thanet photos, click on them to enlarge and a ramble

 This is Cecil Square in the 1930s, I think the rest of the photos are all prety obvious.

Someone who will remain nameless used the bookshop shoebrushes to clean shoes, meaning they were no use for polishing the spines of leather books: unless you want black hands of course. Off I went to buy replacements and was intrigued to learn that most now have plastic bristles; what sort of person hopes to shine leather by rubbing it with plastic?

Saturday nights here in Ramsgate in the latter part of the 1700s was every bit as invigorating as it is now. We were at Wetherspoons this/last Saturday after work, of course the seafront bars in Ramsgate, Margate and would you believe Pegwell, aren't what they were in the 1960s and 1970s. No strippers for a start.

 ok John Hamilton Mortimer was from Eastbourne, but the title "A Bacchanalian Group of Nymphs and Saytrs dancing" suggests some experience of a night out in our coastal towns, I now understand that the meaning of the word dancing changes subtly over the years.

 Nightlife in Ramsgate is tamer than it was in the 60s and 70s

 I added a couple of people to my watercolour from the balcony of Wetherspoons here in Ramsgate

one, another attempt at paining someone looking down on them at an acute angle, this is much more difficult than you would expect. I think this has something to do with what is technically called, a priori and a posteriori, terms used by the famous philosopher Emmanuel Kant to try and describe how we perceive things.

To put this in simple terms, if you walk into a kitchen, all of your senses, sight, smell, sound... well a great jumble of stuff goes off to your brain as electrochemical wosisname and you then know you are in a kitchen, even if you have never been in that particular kitchen before. So most of the kitchen you experience is already in your head/brain/conciseness and if it wasn't you wouldn't know you were in a kitchen. 

's the same with people and particularly faces, so at some point you recognise people if you are looking down at them, perhaps. Anyway shortening the height of the front of a face, relative to width, isn't enough to give the impression you are looking down on them in a painting, and to an extent even in a photo if you crop out the contextual background. 

Work wise here at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate I have decided I have been working too hard, so I aim to put an easel up behind the till and have a go at a bit of oil painting for some of the time.

Link to the photos of the books that went out yesterday, mostly Thanet history books