Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day and an update on the vanishing Ramsgate Sands a ramble.

If ever one day of the year can be called carnival day then it’s today, no fixed date you understand, a movable feast forty days before Easter, which roughly is, the Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox. Not exactly and perfectly right, but good enough for me and The Venerable Bede wrote that definition of the date of Easter down in 725.

About 800 years later in 1559 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, the main historic image of this traditionally important symbol.

Here in Ramsgate what with the temperature at this time of year and stuff, very few of us celebrate this religious festival by removing most of our clothes and dancing in the street wearing feathers.

In fact after last night’s storm we don’t have that much to celebrate as another major running point in the departure of Ramsgate Main Sands has been reached

if you look at the photo you will see the high tide mark has reached the sea defence next to the East Pier harbour wall.

I posted about this issue yesterday, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/ramsgate-main-sands-where-is-sand-going.html#comment-form which resulted in various ideas in the form of comments, mostly on the various Facebook groups that yesterday’s post was linked to.

In fact I have been posting about the problem for several years now and it would seem that finally we have lost our sand above the high tide mark in Ramsgate, although a bit opposite the lifeguard station may remain for a year or two.

In the bookshop here in Ramsgate we are working hard processing the books we have bought recently, if you want to know what has just gone out on the shelves then keep an eye on http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/

As far as I know we are the only bookshop in the world photographing all the books we put out on the shelves every working day and putting the photos on the internet.

Technically it isn’t very difficult to do this now because of cloud computing which puts the photos on the internet automatically after you take them. Strangely although this all links up with blogger and youtube, Facebook it seems has yet to get to grips with the cloud, it’s a funny old world.

Ramsgate town centre wise the 99p shop has closed

the £1 shop is moving to the site

and then the 99p shop is closing, I think. Is that right? Sound like it. 

Blue Flag Disaster For Thanet’s Beaches.

Minnis Bay, St. Mildred’s Bay, West Bay in Westgate, Margate Main Sands, Stone Bay, Viking Bay and Ramsgate Main Sands, have all lost their blue flag status.

Botany Bay, Joss Bay and Westbrook Bay are the only Thanet beaches to receive Blue Flag awards.


What we have here is a government funded and large company funded award system that fails to cough up the basic criteria of stopping you swimming around in sewage, blue flag or no blue flag.

Right engineering hat as promised.

The problem here can best be summed up as, if you want a blue flag you need a brown flag too and some good communications so that the council know when to fly it.

The problem here is one of old drains mixed system drains that are too expensive to replace that cause problems when we get a heavy rainstorm.

These mixed system drains have sewage and rainwater runoff in them and most of the time everything in them goes off to the sewage plant and is properly processed so that the water that is discharged into the sea is safe and clean.

On occasions we have a large rainstorm or a pump failure, sometimes a combination of the two, meaning there is nowhere for all the waste water and sewage to go, in these instances an emergency discharge is made via one of the several outfall pipes into the sea.

These discharges are properly monitored and the water company has the information relating to the few occasions when the sea is contaminated.

My understanding is that if on these occasions the council put up signs notifying the public that the sea was contaminated then we would be able to retain our blue flag status on the effected beaches.  

What happens instead is that nothing happens, by this I mean that after Southern Water make an emergency discharge of sewage near to one of our bathing beaches, this doesn’t result in the council taking down the blue flag and putting up warning signs telling people the sea is contaminated.

I tried last year to get the council to set up a system to overcome this problem, the result appears to have been inaction causing most of our beaches to be stripped of their blue flag status.

See

http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/08/blue-flags-summer-sewage-sand-and.html 


http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/08/sunday-ramble-councils-website-drains.html   

I will add to this one 

South East Region Beach Lifeguard Championships at Ramsgate main Sands Today

Events started at 10am and will be on all day today Sunday 18th July, sorry I only found out about this just now and rushed back from my walk to get some of the details online.

Events include; beach sprints; beach relays; cobra ski race; rescue tube rescue; beach flags; cobra rescue race; paddle board race; reel and line.

Click on the links for this mornings pictures

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop710/id8.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop710/id9.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop710/id10.htm

they may take a while to appear as my laptop is a bit of an antique, sorry about the bits in the camera – don’t change lenses on the beach – I will try to delete any really bad ones when I get time.

A few more pictures from this afternoon, more to follow later

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop710/id11.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop710/id12.htm

Finally the last lot of pictures at

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop272010/id5.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop272010/id4.htm

may take a while to appear

as I pointed out to several people running this event I have the original high definition files of the pictures and if any of you want any of them I will do my best for you.

Email me with the web address of the page it’s on (url starts http) approximately how far down the page it is and a description of the picture, the original picture file sizes are about 2 MB so I can’t send many by email.

Mr W C Lavatory makes us spend a penny or more

I have just come back from taking the children to Ramsgate main sands where I had a long chat with the concessionaire who runs the children’s rides on the beach, another person very disenchanted with Thanet District Council.

He told me that the council are installing turnstiles to make people pay to use the main sands toilets, this work is being done at considerable expense and one wonders if the money will ever be recovered.

Well this year I have begged the councillors to invest a small amount of money to make the Pleasurama site available for leisure, I have to admit the only councillor who had the courtesy to reply was Sandy Ezekiel, who said he had tried and failed because of the dangers of the work going on down there.

So the only investment being made down there seems to be something to put tourists off using the main sands, or perhaps encourage them to use the main sands as a toilet.

Oddly enough I can’t find any record of this decision in the councils documentation library online, I can only imagine this is to get the main sands inline with the lorry drivers toilet that the western undercliff beach has become.