We closed the bookshop at the end of Wednesday last week, so we have been closed now for eight days. This is major culture shock for me, I permanently stopped being a mechanic of sorts towards the end of the 1970s, having tried various things apart from being a mechanic. In 1978 I decided that opening bookshops from scratch and getting them going was the thing I wanted to do workise and I did manage to get several going before independent bookshops became very difficult. In the late 80s I realised that there was some sort of future in secondhand bookshops and in 1978 I opened Michael's Bookshop here in Ramsgate. For the last thirty something years I have tried to evolve it into something that replaced some of the gaps left by independent bookshops in small towns. I have also tried to get it to produce a reasonable proportion of our family income.
Stopping suddenly due to coronavirus means I have had the first week not buying and selling books in over thirty years. I have been catching up on the DIY around the flat over the bookshop where we live. There hasn't been time to do much else, so nothing much on the blog posting front. In fact very little internet at all. About an hour a day catching up with the news and trying to work out how the pandemic is going. I haven't volunteered for anything as I have underlying health issues, some of which stem back to my childhood, so staying at home seems the most sensible thing I can do at the moment.
In terms of the government prime minister and handling the crisis, my take on politics is to disagree with candidates in the run up to the election and then once they are elected, to do my best to support the current government, which is what I am doing at the moment.
Of course if they do anything absolutely terrible, then it's a different matter. But basically I'm a firm believer in democracy.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.