A ramble about sewage, taking credit cards with PayPal in my bookshop and Manston Airport.

Not much in the local news today and I noticed that Kent Online had a lead article about sewage http://www.kentonline.co.uk/dover/news/southern-water-reveals-sewer-blocker-30657/ while here in Thanet there are major works underway to deal with our sewers.

The problems in Thanet relating to our water supply and sewage are unusual and related to tunnelling our chalk, which is very easy.  

From a water supply point of view you either know how the system works or need some simplified explanation which I will try to provide.

If you think of Thanet as big lump of chalk sitting on a layer of clay surrounded by sea you won’t be far out. The chalk acts like a sponge, the clay underneath stops the rainwater running out the bottom and the sea at the sides stops the rainwater running out the sides.

There isn’t much sideways movement of water or obviously or the surrounding seawater would have made the Thanet groundwater brackish millennia ago, however our sewers which started being built in about 1840 and seem to have used roughly the same construction methods for the following hundred years are now giving problems.

In most places if you want to lay a major sewage pipe, you dig a trench and put the pipe in the bottom of it then fill it in, in Thanet they often dug a tunnel through the chalk and lined the bottom of it with something that wasn’t porous.

The snag here is obvious if you get a blockage the level rises to above the impermeable lining and soaks into the chalk contaminating the drinking water aquifer.

Bumph about this is starting to appear online, see file:///C:/Users/Michael/Desktop/11%20thanet%20sewers%20groundwater%20scheme%20public%20publication%20final.pdf and https://shareweb.kent.gov.uk/Documents/environment-and-planning/flooding/Thanet%20Stage%201%20SWMP%20-%20Report.pdf and google away at your leisure.

On to Paypal, well the first few days of using the payal card reader linked to the android tablet (see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/taking-credit-and-charge-cards-in-my.html )have gone reasonably well.

The only issues have been that the tablet automatically reboots at 7 am, which means it forgets the paypal password, so it is best insert the password when opening the shop and when the reader gets to around 20% charge it refuses to work, giving you a recharge message instead of an insert card message, once you have plugged it into a charger it immediately works ok, so it is best to have a charger handy.

Manston comes up at parliament on Monday, here are links to the two main submissions http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/transport-committee/smaller-airports/written/17277.html and http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/transport-committee/smaller-airports/written/17493.html it’s very difficult to see in either of these documents any compelling case for a cpo.

There has been a fair amount of activity at the airport over the last week with one of the broken down planes being broken up for scrap and various amounts of disused concrete has been removed, all in all more clearing of the site that doesn’t need consent or where consent has been granted.

Actual demolition on the site is a bit of grey area consent wise, in most cases I don’t think planning consent would be required as it isn’t a conservation area, however local authority planning department and environment agency involvement will be needed for some things mainly because of Manston being on the aquifer.  

If for instance the current owners want to remove the runway, I think they would be obliged to consult with those agencies to ensure that they did this in a way that wouldn’t damage the aquifer.

This is rather in the same sort of bracket that you need planning permission to build a garage in your garden but you don’t necessarily need planning permission to knock down a garage in your garden, but would be advised to inform the council if you are going to.

I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding going around that parliament could actually force TDC to engage in a cpo with an indemnity partner that TDC had rejected, this just isn’t the case.

If the department of transport makes any significant changes to which airports they consider to be important, this is highly unlikely to happen until well after the general election when the new government had become established.

I will leave you with a picture of the traditional Thanet Tea Ceremony, in this case being performed in Margate. The timing of the ceremony can be varied with a 240-volt kettle as this type of generator offers a 110-volt output, which allows for the slower boiling method. As an ex engineer this is often used in areas where members of the populace are technically described as "well fit" used less in areas of gba. 

Obviously it takes a highly skilled water engineer to fully comprehend what is happening in the picture.

As a bookseller I can usually offer further reading.

Today's most strange Kent tweet has to be this one from Kent emergency services.

VAT Darling

Up until this budget I had thought that the government were acting in a fairly sensible way to try and mitigate the effects of the recession and that there seemed to be some sort of cross party unified approach to getting us out of it.

Here in the bookshop the budget doesn’t really effect anything much as books don’t carry VAT, however the most expensive part of the budget in terms of what the government has borrowed on our behalf is the cut in VAT.

It did occur to me though that this will be a very difficult and expensive reduction for many retailers to implement, I reckon that the paperback fiction in the shop runs to about 15,000 titles most I believe are priced at £1.99 consider the logistics of reducing them to £1.94.

Looked at another way say I am going to buy a new computer that is £400, will it being £390 make any difference?

While in a broad sense I am in favour of doing something but the VAT cut suggests a complete misunderstanding of how retail pricing works. Much of the thing is about thresholds, i.e. trying to get it under a particular round amount.

I will give you an example of what I mean using a book off the shelf, as steam boats are very much on my mind I have chosen; Turbine Steamers of the British Isles by Nick Robins.

The book was published to sell at £11.99 obviously the publisher was getting below the £12 threshold here. I managed to buy the bin end of it 10 copies for £30 and am selling it at £4.99 to get below the £5 threshold, 12 ½ p in this equation doesn’t really get you anywhere.

I am afraid the only way that I can see that this could possibly work, is that if the government is going to borrow n thousand pounds on behalf of every family in the country for repayment in 2011, 12, 13…………., would be to send us all a cheque for whatever it is, and a letter begging us to go out and spend it.