Is Margate Harbour Arm coming apart? Why is the council press office telling a different story to Thanet Council Leader Chris Wells?

This is a bit of a strange one that begs the question, what's really going on? By this I mean has Chris Wells made up one story and the council officers made up another while in reality it was. What? A council balls up? Suggestions on a plate please.

Chris says The Waverley Paddle Steamer has dodgy insurance.

"Chris Wells said...

Perhaps I can help. It would appear that in previous years this vessel has been accepted in to Margate harbour without the necessary insurance or statutory requirements being fulfilled.

We have now made it clear to the operator the documentation and level of notice we require for them to berth in the harbour, none of this information has been provided, we have also offered them the use of Ramsgate Port at a reduced rate, but due to the nature of the vessel and the fact that it has two fixed paddles they would need a tug to manoeuvre, a cost they are not willing to incur.

October 07, 2015 6:28 p.m." (see his comment on http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/thanet-district-council-divert-tourists.html )

The council officers say that Margate Harbour Arm has got into such a bad state since The Waverley Paddle Steamer visited Margate last year that it would be dangerous to do so this year. 

" Hi Michael,

Please find our statement on this below:

The Harbour Arm at Margate is not in regular commercial use and unfortunately Waverley Excursion Ltd. did not allow sufficient time to notify us so that we could arrange the necessary works and processes to ensure a safe operation.

Waverley Excursions Ltd. was offered the use of Ramsgate Harbour, which could safely accommodate such a vessel; however the operator elected to coach their customers to join the vessel elsewhere.

The council is fully aware of the benefit that such vessels can bring to our district when the operation is appropriately managed to allow a safe entry and exit from the harbour. We are working with Waverley Excursions Ltd. to ensure that a safe process can be agreed to facilitate future use of the Margate Harbour Arm.

Many thanks,

**** *****

PR and Publicity Officer

Thanet District Council

PO Box 9 ¦ Cecil Street ¦ Margate ¦ Kent ¦ CT9 1XZ

Direct line: 01843 5770**

E-mail: *******@thanet.gov.uk

Visit our website – www.thanet.gov.uk

Follow us on Twitter – @ThanetCouncil 

Find us on Facebook – Thanet District Council" 

To be honest this is very like my experiences yesterday tying to buy a campervan, eg. the one on ebay is described as in good condition and nothing in the listing mentions the body of the thing being anything else. Having arranged insurance and turned up at the appointed time with the money the body is so rusty you can put your fingers through it, and yes it did have an MOT.    

 I have just checked the two fixed paddles business, as I am sure this couldn’t have been right and assumed all paddle steamers can reverse either set of paddles independently. I was also pretty sure that when we used to sail on her from Ramsgate no tug was used. She can indeed turn on her own axis and the paddles can be reversed independently.

I get got by coffee then James Patterson’s Cross trial, Pinch and a punch and some blogging and a bookselling rant.

Sorry about the lack of blog posts for the last couple of days, the aftermath of too much coffee on Sunday that lead to a bad nights sleep and pretty much wiped out any chance of writing something even vaguely coherent, was followed by one of those star books yesterday.

This was Alex Cross’s Trial, I don’t know what it is about the story within the story, particularly when it happens in the middle of what is a very good story anyway, perhaps it is the radical change of subject, perhaps the unexpected. 

 Frankly the stories have to both be very good and so does the storyteller, I think the first time I was really aware that this particular trick had been played on me, to my own benefit was in John Irving’s Garp, so that takes things back to the late 70s.

Anyway I was lifted out of modern American serial killers, something that I have had to ration anyway as I wouldn’t get anything much done if I didn’t, to the Klu Klux Clan and the American deep south of the early nineteen hundreds. That is where yesterday went, so no blog post

 Being in the middle of trying to work out what I think is one of the most serious problems of our time now, the demise of the physical book and the bookshop, I do wonder whether any of our great story tellers would be able to put this problem into a story.         

Very powerful things, good stories and very hard to tell just what affect they have had on the social problems through history.

 The printed books first got going around five hundred years ago, but it wasn’t until around 50 or 60 years ago that the quality books really got into the hands of ordinary people in a big way. I am thinking here of the paperback with a bit more to it than ripping off the bodice or shooting the injuns.

A big mover in this was Allen Lane the bloke who started Penguin Books, but just when or how ordinary people got first hand helds into their pockets is a bit of a mixed thing. Here in the UK it was very class related, my family has had bookshops all my life and I guess I really became aware of the bookshop in around 1960 and it wasn’t until quite a long time after this that I realised that the whole thing was very class related. To be honest there weren’t many good contemporary storytellers whose books you could buy back in the 60s. Home, school libraries, public libraries came up with Christie, McLean, Shute, Wheatley and a few more and I guess the only one of these authors I go back and back to is Neville Shute. Of course it is very different with what are loosely referred to as the classics, I don’t mean the greek and roman stuff here, but mostly English and American literature, we all have this, but there is surprisingly little of it that will keep you turning, good story tellers that is. 

 My own take is that most of this, the story telling book business didn’t really get going until well into the eighteen hundreds, only shaped itself into something really great well into the nineteen hundreds. 

Of course now the choice is massive, the pictures in the post are of the general fiction where the authors surnames start with A and B in my bookshop, so not the crime fiction, children’s fiction, science fiction, horror fiction… well I guess you get the picture.

 Anyway my take is and has been for a long time is that all towns need something like my bookshop, where you get a big range of books that you can actually buy for cheaper than you can buy them on the internet or download them to your kindle.

I think this is particularly to do with getting our children reading and keeping them reading, a great part of this is children living in households where there are books, where the adults read and where families go out an buy books together. 

Sorry a bit of a rant there. 

 The old pinch and a punch blog statistics aren’t really worth bothering about recently, there is very little in terms of consistent regular blogging about Thanet issues at the moment. The big local issues are all there, but mostly it’s all been said.

Save Manston Airport seem to have lost any touch with reality now that the TDC cpo looks like a dead duck. The bottom line being that with two fairly similar proposals, one from River Oak involving Aviation related industry and one from the owners involving non aviation related industry so there really are no grounds for a cpo which would have needed something radically different to tip the public interest business. Perhaps they will wake up and look for a viable route, but at the moment they seem far too busy looking for people to blame. My take is that only something involving historic aviation, grant funding and KCC had any chance of succeeding and now I think this approach, which should have started with a petition to KCC for a public consultation is too late.

 Pleasurama, I have mixed felling about as Cardy Construction are one of the best local firms, so on the one hand I would prefer their involvement than most others, on the other hand I don’t think the approved plans that they apparently wish to build to are viable. This wasn’t I hasten add down to some plot, just a very inexperienced developer drawing up plans for a very demanding site without even being aware that it is a very demanding site. At the moment it is on par with The Turner Gallery, the thing where the prototype got washed away, and in that case experienced engineers and architects were involved.

Dreamland seems to be going to happen although where the council are going to find the money from to buy the site is a bit of an unknown.

 It looks like Ramsgate Pavillion is going to turn into the biggest pub in Europe, once this is certain to happen then I will of course change track and support it as we could have a lot worse. But in the meantime I would like to get a large publicly funded leisure venue like the ones in Margate for Ramsgate.               

The council are steam cleaning the pavements in the town centre Whether this will get as far as King Street and the bookshop seems unlikely although one can but hope.

Oh and Conservative Chris Wells has defected to UKIP which does rather take a lot of the stuffing out of both what he has said here in the past and the position of the so called new Conservatives at TDC.