Painting Pictures in Ramsgate today, Harbour Arches from Miles Café Culture and Vinyl Head Café, TDC Manston legal fees, GRIT as a ramble.

Here is the watercolour paining of Ramsgate Harbour Arches from Miles Café Culture, steady progress with this one, with most of Nelson Crescent sketched in, although some roofs to go there.

After about three hours of this I had got tired of painting buildings so I went off to Vinyl Head Café

So a bit more on the Vinyl Head Café watercolour sketch, one of the main advantages there is that it has roof lights and is painted white, so the light is good for painting, or at least as good as you are going to get on a December afternoon in the UK.

TDC’s Manston legal fees to date Falcon Report £26,000, external legal fees £3,180 under Leader Iris Johnston, to December 2014, external legal fees £8,151 under Leader Chris Wells, plus small additional amount to come, to date.

I guess this is all fine and dandy if the council has some genuine chance of a successful cpo resulting in a successful airport, but frankly without an indemnity partner coming up with even phase one, which is to make available to the council more money than the rejected offer of £7m, then this was money down the drain.

To expand on this if the council want to acquire the airport site, the first thing they would have to do as the acquiring authority is to make a reasonable offer for the airport to the current owners, before they could start the cpo process.

The Campaign for Government Reform in Thanet GRIT has started see http://www.grit.how/ the idea here being an elected leader of TDC, I suppose this is really the last thing we can try to get some sort of improvement in local government. 

Oh and yes M&S cafe at WC yesterday evening  

Slippery slope at Kent County Council

I have been trying to find out just what happened with the gritting over last weekend in Thanet, and am coming to the conclusion that there was some sort of mistake that meant that the main Thanet roads didn’t actually get gritted although KCC Highways assure me they should have been.

I am not particularly interested in recrimination on this one but am very keen to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.

From personal observation here in Ramsgate town centre the two main problems related to the main bus route not being gritted, this stopped the busses for most of Saturday, and Ramsgate shopping centre roads and pavements that weren’t gritted either.

Some of the fancy new cobbles that have replaced traditional paving slabs are very slippery when wet and with ice on them were pretty much impossible to walk on.

The only gritting that I noticed was on Monday morning to the pedestrianised area, this was just after the ice thawed and just before it rained, so it was all washed away.

Other people I know noticed a skidding bus blocking Westcliff Road with the emergency services being called.

The Margate Road leading to Westwood Cross and more importantly the QEQM Hospital, with the other emergency services based in the area, was not gritted on Saturday morning.

Did anyone else notice gritting problems?