Manston update, a watercolour sketch of Ramsgate and advice to young people from the bookshop.

I had breakfast 8 to 9 am and lunch 12 to 1 at Ship Shape café which is at Ramsgate Harbour arches, while I was there I started a watercolour sketch looking southwest i.e. with the sun mostly behind me.

Very reasonable café prices, the toast, marmalade and cup of tea was £2 and the all day breakfast £4.

Here is the watercolour sketch so far and below the photos I took to record this in chronological order.

On the Manston front the update relates to the new material that has appeared today on the TDC planning website at https://planning.thanet.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents&keyVal=O5Z2F2QE00300 before you go there it is as well to note that the website is unpredictable and often pages won’t open. Patience is the key here.

This information relates to the site owner, Discovery Park’s application for a mixed use development to provide housing and employment.

This new information is responses from members of the public and other interested parties to the planning application (you can submit a response to this application using the council’s website) responses so far either support the application are against the application or are neutral.  

The aspect of this that I don’t understand is that while some of the applications have the respondents name and the beginning of their address redacted. Others just say this information isn’t available.

This is an example.

With tdc planning applications anyone can support or object to them, they don’t have to be Thanet council taxpayers or Thanet residents, but what concerns me is more here is that if the council don’t have a name and address for respondents it may be possible for some people to object to support the application multiple times. This tdc planning website is a new one and the way online responses are now handled is different to the old one.

On the bookshop front I have spent the last two days processing books that I have bought for stock in my bookshop, I think my bookshop is fairly unique inasmuch as we publish details about what we are up to on the internet. One of us takes pictures of all of the books after we have priced them and before we put them on the shelves and we publish these pictures online at the end of every working day here http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/

As a bookshop we have a fairly broad price structure, in the last couple of weeks the cheapest book I have sold in the shop was 5p and the dearest £1,000.

Today the cheapest book I priced was 5p

This is a picture of all today's reject books that we will sell for either 5p or 10p or they will go off for paper recycling.

The dearest book I priced today was £95 (pictures below) about tools

The dearest novel this one, like Noddy early PG Wodehouse is identified by the books on flaps of the dustjacket, I think this one will be about £50.

The crazy ones the two very large children’s books, too big to go on our shelves, so on the table in the children’s section.   

Bookshops encouraging children’s reading, the bookseller’s moral responsibility or just common sense.

About two years ago I expanded the children’s book section in my bookshop from seven bookcases to ten which is about 10% of the overall bookshop of about 100 bookcases, last year children’s books accounted for 6% of book sales in the shop in money.

This may sound like some sort of accountant’s gibberish to most people but the town centre bookshops I have opened over the years (Welwyn bookshop in Welwyn Garden City, Hitchin Bookshop in Hitchin and now Michaels bookshop in Ramsgate) have always been weighted towards children’s books. 

By this I mean more space in the bookshop than an accountant would advise based on the value of children’s books.

Back in the 1980s when independent bookshops in the UK started to close, partly because of the ending of The Net Book Agreement and partly because of the expansion of retail book chains in the UK, I had a bit of a rethink about children’s books.

For the most part now you have three types of children’s book sections in bookshops. You have the ones in the big chain bookshops (mainly Waterstones) these are very good, but the snag is that the children who would most benefit from them can’t usually afford the books. You have the ones where it is fairly obvious that the price and marketing for a cheap present are at the forefront, these are not so good. You have the ones in the better secondhand bookshops which are collectable children’s books and one again children can’t afford the books.

What I set out to do was by a mixture of sourcing secondhand, from bankruptcies and remainder lists to have a fairly good children’s book section where the children and in the case of the less well off their parents could afford to buy the books in the children’s book section.

A factor in this meant that the children’s books would have to be cheaper, I aim for an average price of about £1, but certainly I think the books in the children’s book section are averagely less than half the price of the books in the rest of the bookshop.

Of course this means that in terms of the number of books sold from the bookcases in the children’s book section of my bookshop, it is now doing as well as the rest of the bookshop.

This is a first for any of the bookshops that I have been involved with and I think a considerable achievement, the best we ever managed in the past was Stevenage Bookshop before it closed in the early 1990s where the children’s section took up about 10% of the bookshop and generated about 3% of the sales.

Many thanks to my younger customers and their parents for the support during last year. The pictures are of the ten bookcases in the children’s section the photos were taken today and the sections are in a bit of a mess as it’s a school holiday this week.  

School holidays start with don’t swim in the sea and children’s books in the bookshop

 I will start with the children’s books, it is a very good idea if children have a books to read during the school holidays. The pictures are of the books in the children’s section of my bookshop, if you click on the photos so they get bigger and click on them again, once they have got bigger, they should get big enough to let you read most of the titles. If they don’t I will try to take some better photos and replace them.

I am having a jinxed day, I could say my decent camera has gone wrong, the truth is that I have lost the charger, so I took the pictures with my mobile phone which isn’t so good indoors.

 There are several reasons why it is best for children to have a real book to read, rather than a kindle, or some other device, the main one being that technology has just too many distractions.

Another one is to do with what some people call “lose toys in the attic” which is a euphemism (another way of saying) “mental” “mad” and so on, which can be hurtful if the person you’re talking about has really got a mental illness.  

 However people who are reasonably sane, in fact everyone, has stuff in their minds that works strangely for one reason or another. I think that if someone uses a screen a lot to read things that hardly go in to their memory and they will never need a few seconds after reading them, then their minds get used to junking stuff they read on screens.

A very good example on this blog is when the adults start to insult each other, they skim up and down the comments looking only for. What? Someone they don’t like so they can be rude to them. Someone who has been rude to them. can you think of any more? But the point here is it soon becomes obvious that they are not interested in the topic of the post, so their mind is junking that information.

 If you read a book on a screen and your mind has gone even a little bit like that when you read from screens, you may find you’ve “lost the plot” sorry couldn’t resist that one, wait until I get to the sea, it will get worse.

This can be a problem with serious study, my children have been saying, “print it out dad” for years.

 This part of my bookshop has children’s books for children, the books are priced accordingly, there are lots of books priced under £1 and if you look carefully some are priced at 10p. This is partly books that are nearly worn out, but also my low cunning which I hope will make children look at the books carefully.

 I should also point out the we offer exchange vouchers for books we want, and either money or more value in book exchange vouchers for books we want a lot. So if you have books you have already read you may not need money at all.

 There is always not paying for books at all and we have a library with a children’s book section which all children can join for free. What’s the snag? Library fines. Are you a well organised person? Do you loose things? Do strange marks appear on books when you read them? Do the pages often fall out when you read books? If the answer to any these questions is yes, then either change your ways or pay.

 Of course if you have bought a book and the book has some sort of accident, then this can be less of a problem and it can make for more relaxed reading.

 The big question is. Why would you want to read a book at all? If you didn’t ask it even a little bit, somewhere in your head's attic then you can skip the next bit.

Otherwise there are two questions. Do you like money? And do you like life.

People who read books do better with their education. People with a better education earn more money. People who earn more money usually have a greater life expectancy (live longer).

So think of the poor total stranger who is you in a few years time. 

 I have started expanding the children’s section, this is a long job and a bit like a puzzle, for instance I have to move all of dictionaries in order to make space some books about crime, so I can move the humour books, so there is more space for children’s books next to the rest of the children's books.

 On to the don’t swim in the sea business, the council has issued a warning not to swim in the sea on the beaches between Walpole Bay and Dumpton Gap, this includes: Walpole Bay, Palm Bay, Botany Bay, Kingsgate Bay, Joss Bay, Stone Bay, Viking Bay, Louisa Bay and Dumpton Gap.

 The Australians often have signs by their swimming pools saying. “Don’t pee in our swimming pool and we won’t swim in your toilet.” What seems to have happened here is we peed in our toilets and it has arrived in our sea.

 In some ways this is good news, because up until recently when things went wrong they didn’t tell anyone, now they put up warning signs and I think if something like this happens it is better to tell people.

 I will write a bit more about this later, I know you really know this is because I want to see how much it takes to fill the spaces, but I am pretending I have something interesting to say. 

Back in 2011 what happened here in Thanet when things went badly wrong, was the council and the water company let everyone swim in their toilet. I had a word with the council about this, here it is http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/thanet-blue-flags-some-thoughts-from.html so you see what reading can do.

It means that if you read a lot you may have some unexpected information up your sleeve, even the water company's engineer's notes.  

The downside here is that the council may not like you very much, so you may wind up trying to run a business opposite the biggest shop in the street and find that on the one hand it belongs to the council. While on the other hand it’s empty and they never ever intend to let it as a shop again.

Now I am going to be politically incorrect here, in fact I am going to be sexist, I am going to suggest first that women do most of the shopping and I am going on to suggest that most women won’t park in the multi story car park.  

Now three of my children and my wife are of the female persuasion and most of the blog readers will be familiar with the pictures that I paint, and put on this blog, while waiting for shopping to occur. I know this sexism may lead to adverse comment so I am covering my back here the best I can.   

However I think I may have the reason why nearly all of the shops in King Street between mine and the town centre are still trading as shops and I think this reason is that it is right next the open air car park which is where most of the women park when they come to Ramsgate.

Now in most of the other towns in this country the councils are doing everything they can to keep shops open, so it may be purely coincidental that they are trying very hard to keep this one closed.

Of course it may be that the reason that nearly all of the shops between mine and the town centre are open is because of the people going past them on the way to buy their books, ok I concede it may be a bit of each.   

Oh no I’ve just realised that I have done something else that will very probably annoy the council, perhaps they will buy another shop in the street and make sure that it is never going to be a shop again.

There isn’t much else they can do, we already have had pretty much every possible on street parking space removed, the wobbly pavements the blocked drains and have been excluded from the town centre policing.

The bottom line here is.

We'll let you swim in our toilet if you don't pee on our council.