Ramsgate food for thought

A busy day in the bookshop today, once again Ramsgate is becoming a destination for Londoners and this seems to be to do with the diversity and quality of the Restaurants and the new café culture. Virtually every week there is something in the national press, this is the most recent I could find from Country Life http://www.countrylife.co.uk/blogs/article/448999/Town-mouse-on-Ramsgate-London.html for the most part these Londoners seem to come down, as they have since about 1800, to recover from life in the capital and most of them seem to enjoy what they find here.

The secondhand book world is inclined to bring up peculiar historical anomalies, the book pictured above, was published in 1942 while we were fighting a war and it does indeed seem to explain in great detail how anyone can make explosives out of common ingredients.

It says inside “FOR THE FORCES. Leave this book at a Post Office when you have read it so that the men and women in the Services may enjoy it too.”

One is reminded that we are fighting a war at the moment and building a whole new set of historical anomalies.

Delving through news about Kent on the internet I noticed that much is being made of the differences in reporting a sex attack in Aylesford with some speculation that the BBC is taking an extreme slant towards multiculturalism, here is the BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/8600907.stm and here same thing as reported by the Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1262984/Teenage-Afghan-asylum-seekers-pool-sex-attack-girl-13.html various other media sources are reporting it with slight variations. The Daly Mail article was the most detailed I could find.

Both of these anomalies made me wonder if we are a somewhat gullible people and if we are how I feel about the idea.

Another bit of local news is that John Kampfner http://www.jkampfner.net/index.html is the new head of the Turner Contemporary, I have great hopes that he will improve the situation there.

Oh and Katherine Kerswell has been confirmed as the new chief of KCC on four thousand pounds a week see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/03/female-4k-for-kent-county-council.html nice work if you can get it.

I will may ramble on depending on how busy the shop is.

Female 4k for Kent County Council

As some of you will remember I have occasionally referred to council officers by nicknames relating to their weekly pay, I mainly do this on occasions where I am publishing a dialogue with them where what they say doesn’t entirely make sense.

As the internet has a very long memory and I have a fairly high internet presence, it isn’t my objective to have something stupid they have said to come up when one googles their name years after the event.

KCC’s new chief Executive will be Katherine Kerswell she is currently chief executive of Northamptonshire County Council.

As her salary at KCC will be £197,000 per year, I couldn’t resist the honorific of 4k.

When I was a child back in 1950s my father was the manager of a bookshop, in those days bookshops were mostly staffed by highly educated and articulate women, many of whom were spinsters trying to live on what wasn’t a living wage.

I was often sent to these women’s homes to be looked after and became acutely aware of their poverty, so this is also a bit of a reflection on how women’s pay and jobs has changed in some cases over the years.