Monopoly

Not really a lot to say today, the game going on here makes the ramifications of national debt even the imminent collapse of the Euro pale into insignificance.

A few pictures of Ramsgate and St Lawrence, and possible ramble about the airport and so on.

I notice Simon has had a ramble today, see http://birchington.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/sunday-ramble.html with some thoughts on the airport and once again I find I am trying to work out what I really think about it.

I guess to me it has been a sort of ongoing joke since the 1960s, because obviously an airport needs to be a transport hub and Thanet’s location makes it a very few spokes.

Unkind I know but in truth so much money has gone into trying to make it work and always the problem is that most people who would ever use it would have to travel past at least on large operational airport, invariably offering more destinations, more flying times and better prices.

I guess being in business and living in Ramsgate what would be best from my point of view is the stability of knowing where we stand with it, the uncertainties particularly about night flying are damaging to Ramsgate, being at the end of the runway.

I guess there are some types of airport activity that would be beneficial  the local economy, perhaps five or ten years after it had become established, but uncertainties about noise and other environmental issues, particularly drinking water protection are damaging to the local economy.

When uncertainties about pollution issues continue for fifty years while various companies discover the fish make very few journeys by air, the damage is considerable.  

I guess there are potentially two sorts of airport, one being a modern regional airport with the highest standards of environmental and safety controls enhancing the local economy and bringing tourists direct to us, the other a sort of dumping area taking mostly flights that aren’t wanted elsewhere, mostly freight at anti social hours, I guess this would have the minimum environmental controls that they could get away with and would be detrimental to the local economy.

I guess the latest information I had, that the airport operator has applied to The Environment Agency to reduce the environmental controls that were set out and the subject of a major consultation exercise is most discouraging.   

 I did a few sketches today, one of the harbour here, sorry about the lifeboat, pen is pretty final if it doesn’t go right the first time.

And another inside St Lawrence tavern, apologies to any victims.

Oh and here are the photographs http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop512c/id6.htm

It seems Simon has been busy today with a second post about changes to the Conservative shadow cabinet, see http://birchington.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/new-statesman.html

I guess I keep coming back to the old problems with the Conservative group, the first being are the really Conservative or just mostly people who have flown that flag of convenience for one reason or another.

I guess I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of its members cross the floor to one of the independent groups, partly because of this lack of Conservative ideology and partly because of the groups backing of a series of non runners but mainly their failure to listen to the local people they are supposed to represent.

The latest business over the airport being an example, it is really quite simple, the council hold an internet consultation which has more responses than any other and is overwhelmingly against night flights. The Conservative group claim to represent local people and yet seem to be saying that they are for night flights.

I guess I will be slated as being a red under the bed again for saying this, but the latest example of what I mean, is trying to get some sort of proper and considered response to the Royal Sand problem from them. 

I would guess that the local Conservative group stands a fair chance of spending the next seven years in opposition, particularly in view of the recent election results, so I guess they will try making some changes.

Whether they actually have anyone that would make the independents consider them a better bet than the existing Labour leadership I don’t really know, I guess supporting night flights just after the results of the recent consultation is as close as they could get to shooting themselves in the feet. 

A few pictures of Ramsgate and a ramble perhaps.

 I did get our for a little while this evening and took some photos they may appear at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop512c/id3.htm and http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop512c/id4.htm

 A pretty dreadful watercolour and a couple of sketches, a lot of the photos were taken after dark so some are probably pretty blurry, as I just copy and paste them by the page onto the internet you will see them when I do or before.

 A couple of issues at the moment that may be worth further investigation one being the changes to hospital services at the QEQM Hospital and the other relates to The Theatre Royal in Margate, I am pretty foggy on both issues so do feel free to comment about them.

Yesterdays cabinet meeting didn’t cover The Royal Sands, the councils website says they were doing a due diligence check on the developer, which in the circumstances may be difficult as SFP Ventures UK Ltd is in negative equity.

I think although am not certain that this check would be to ensure that the money, I think about £1.6m was sourced legitimately, this is to do with modern money laundering regulations which you may have noticed if you have tried to open a bank account recently.

Erotic Art Exhibition at The Turner Contemporary

As I expect most readers will know that the exhibition Turner and the Elements last day is this Sunday and then the upper galleries will be closed until 26^th May when the exhibition She Lay Down Beneath the Sea begins.

Here is the gallery’s webpage about it http://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/tracey-emin-she-lay-down-deep-beneath-the-sea

The exhibition's central theme will be a display of paintings, sketches and watercolours of erotic subjects by Tracey Emin as well as JMW Turner and Auguste Rodin.

I have to say I was a bit shocked by this, frankly there isn’t anything very erotic in anything I have seen by Tracey Emin or Auguste Rodin but Joseph Mallord William Turner is another matter altogether.

I have only seen a very few of his erotic pictures, but the ones I have seen are very erotic, I really don’t think this is the kind of art you would wish your wife or servants to view.

Anyway I have put a modified sketch above for decency’s sake and started a new blog with an adult content warning, for Joe Turners stuff which is pretty hot, see http://margateturner.blogspot.co.uk

With Emin’s sketches I find I am reminded of the literary quote “Fainted while diaphragming herself!” and anyone who visited the TC recently and had a close look at the kiss will realise that it didn’t conform with the specification in the commission. 

I may ramble on here.       

The Royal Sands Development on the Pleasurama Site in Ramsgate back before cabinet tomorrow

Looking at the cabinet agenda for tomorrow, see http://tdc-mg-dmz.thanet.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?MId=2238 it looks as though there is going to more secret discussion about The Royal Sands Development.

Quite why this major development which is about three or four times the size of The Turner Contemporary is only ever discussed by the council in secret is a bit of a mystery to me.

Of course there will be aspects of the agreements that may need to be secret, I don’t expect the council to publish the developers mobile phone number or bank account details, but with something the size of this development the information soon leaks out and of course we can all see what is going on, on the building site. I was going to say it is like trying to keep an elephant secret, but with the size of this thing I guess it is nearer to trying to keep 100 elephants secret.

With the ten years of delays and nothing to show for it apart from a few concrete posts and a couple of huge roundabouts, the question “where do we go from here?” is an important one for Ramsgate.  

There is a “just give the developer anything he asks for and hope he finally gets something built” school of thought, and a “stop the thing at any cost” school of thought over this development.  

I think looking at both ideas is the best plan at the moment.

So first going ahead with the developer and trying to get the thing built:

I think the reason the development has stopped and the developer has gone back to the council at the moment is entirely about funding.

When this came before cabinet three years ago the funding to get the thing built £10m was pretty roughly based on promises from the contractor Cardy, who promised to put up £1.5m and the hotel backers Wetmore Investments £5m and that the developer had already spent £3.5m.

I would guess the works done over the last three years, the surface drain and part of the building’s foundations probably cost around £1m give or take.

Anyway one way or another the funding isn’t there anymore, so the developer has come to the council asking for help with the funding, this is essentially asking the council to sell the freehold of the site to him, for around £1.6m now and another £1.6m in overage, which is a proportion of the sale price of each apartment when it is sold.

The overall financing plan seems to be that the developer than gets a loan on the security of the freehold land to build the first block of flats then sells them and uses the money from selling them to finance building the next block and so on.

I think the main stumbling block here is that since the plans were first approved The Environment Agency has designated the site a high risk flood zone. Under normal circumstances this would have made a flood risk assessment mandatory, but because of the timing factors we are instead going down the road of putting a new development on a high risk flood zone without a flood risk assessment, here is the EA letter about the situation http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/ea/id2.htm

Putting aside the obvious safety implications, this situation is probably going to make it more difficult to borrow money against the development and the site. I would guess the developer has some plan for doing this or he wouldn’t have gone down this road, however when people come to buy the flats, getting a mortgage on a new build built on high risk flood zone without any flood risk assessment may not be possible.

The number of apartments reserved fluctuates a bit and is available on the developments website http://www.royalsandsramsgate.co.uk/availability.asp obviously the deposits of £2,000 per apartment could also be taken into account, I think there are eleven apartments reserved at the moment. When contracts are exchanged there would also be further 10% deposit although I couldn’t make out from their website if this has actually happened with any of the apartments. 

So lets say we get a year or so down the line and the first block or two, of flats at the Broadstairs end of the site is finished, the people who don’t need to get a mortgage buy their flats and the rest are unable to, so the developer can’t continue the development.

You understand here, that it is the future banana skins that I am looking out for, as I guess none of us want to see the building site, still a building site in another ten years.  

When it comes to financing the development, so that it is reasonably likely that is ever gets built, I think the key question is:

Do you consider it would be possible to obtain borrowing based on the security of residential building land or new build residential dwellings, on land that is designated as high risk flood zone by The Environment Agency? This is both in respect of the developer obtaining finance using the freehold as security, in the immediate future and at the point when prospective buyers attempt to obtain mortgages to buy apartments and the monies obtained from the sale of apartments is required for further funding of the development.

I have put this question to the council officer in charge of the issue and various local councillors; so far no one has given me a definite answer and many of them seem to have the same reservations as I have.

The other side of this financial coin is the council’s potential liability for maintaining the cliff and sea defence for the life of the development. What I mean by this is over say the next hundred years before the development is demolished, what is it going to cost the Thanet council taxpayer to maintain the cliff façade and sea defence to a suitable standard relative to their proximity to residential development.

Residential developments between unsupported chalk cliffs and unassessed sea defences are not very common, so it is difficult to assess, I would think that the £1m the council has spent over the last ten years is about all we have to on.

There is also the a side issue to going down this road of selling the land to the developer, and that is that the sale would have to go through the asset disposal process. This is a fairly involved process that local authorities have to go through when the sell publicly owned assets. I think the idea here is that it prevents members of the council from selling of public assets for less than they are worth, perhaps to friends or associates. 

I suppose the council could decide to miss out this process altogether, but I guess that this would leave the sale open to legal complications.

Now we come to the alternative of not going along with what the developer would like.

I guess one factor here would be how the site was left, it obviously couldn’t be used for leisure or parking with the concrete posts sticking up.

I guess the cliff safety issues would resolve to the don’t sit under the cliff level that applies to most of the unsupported chalk cliffs in Thanet. The flood risk issue only really relates to anything there in the winter months.

I would say the main potential banana skin relates to the money the developer has already spent and whether he would take the council to court to try and get some sort of compensation.

I will give this some more thought and try and add anything else that occurs to me.

A Few Bank Holiday Pictures and a Bad Technology Experience a ramble.

I wasn’t very active on the photography or art front over Sunday and Monday, a few pictures on the camera card here http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/512/id5.htm these were going online yesterday but I had some technological problem publishing them from my laptop.

Going through the pictures, the new Tesco at St Lawrence is evident, I have also been told that there is an intention to move the cash machine away from the church, this should prevent the groups attending weddings, funerals and the like getting mixed up with the groups trying to get their dosh out of the machine.

Lunch on Sunday at the boating pool café, this is a handy and not to expensive option if you have children as there is a free playground there.

Very good to see a heritage vessel on the heritage pontoon in Ramsgate, this is something that enhances the café culture.

The recent rain hasn’t improve the state of The Royal Sands cliff façade, the cracks make room for the plants to root which makes the cracks larger, so more plants root.

Broadstairs sailing club had sailed along the coast for a visit to Ramsgate the bright sails making a splash of colour on Ramsgate Sands.

Ramsgate has a new lifeguard station, not sure why or if there other new ones spouting up round the coast.

Pier Castle is looking much improved without the scaffolding.

 The new Sainsbury supermarket is taking shape at Westwood Cross.

We had to go to Westwood Cross for children’s clothes, shoes and backpacks, although we had manages some of this in Ramsgate, it is no longer possible to do it all here, so bank holiday Monday saw me hiding in Waterstone’s café with a cup of tea and trying to draw the bookshop below me.

I was going to colour the sketch in later, noting the colours with the camera on my mobile phone, the application camera failed. I was going to reply to comments there, the application failed, that sort of a day.

I was though pleased to learn that the apps I had bought for my Android phone, for the most part, can be downloaded for free after it has been reset to how it was when it left the factory.

Getting back home and finding most of the emails that had appeared on my phone hadn’t arrived on my laptop and the images I had published from the laptop hadn’t appeared on the internet I just gave up. 

Trying to field the comments on the previous post, I do wonder if some of the local politicians have grasped the fact that most people who live in Thanet want the whole of Thanet to be prosperous, park in all the Thanet town centres and are singularly unimpressed by spiting one town or another.     

Ramsgate Maritime Museum is now open

If you are wondering what to do on this rather dismal bank holiday, the maritime museum is now open and well worth a visit, entrance is free.

Looking out for banana skins with this one, I think there may be some problems relating to the amount of time heritage vessels can remain on the heritage pontoon, I think the council have restricted this to two weeks, which may mean that some of the ones run by volunteers may find this time frame difficult.

On the same track I gather The New Britannic that was being restored there has been effectively evicted by the council and at Richborough at the moment, which is a very difficult place to continue the restoration.

There is also considerable restriction on the number of events that the museum can hold this year, although this is combined with the limitation of what they could hold given the time frame.

I think the trust’s decision to open immediately without lots of improvements to the museum is the right one, they also seem to very keen to involve local people, I think if you want to volunteer now is your chance.

Here are a few of the pictures I took yesterday http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop512/id3.htm

Both the mayor of Ramsgate and the soon to elected new mayor of Margate were there.

None of the Conservative councillors in sight and the messages I am getting from the Conservative group seem to be saying that they are still against the lease being signed, strange mutterings about pacts with the devil, the crazy talk of lost parking revenue of £40,000 per year, when the revenue for all the spaces in the car park for the six weekends it is to be used for event couldn’t reach a tenth of this figure.

It makes one wonder if the years of delay were actually due to misplacing the decimal point, what I can’t get from the Conservative group is any sensible reason, in terms of a potential banana skin, so it looks like we have got our museum back at virtually no cost to the council taxpayer.   

More pictures and thoughts to follow on this one, not sure when as I am a bit tied up with the bank holiday weekend.

Painting, drawing and photos of Margate today and a ramble about watercolour paint boxes, even some bird photos

I managed to get a window seat in the Turner Contemporary Café today both for the pot of tea when I got there and for lunch, so I managed to paint a picture of the view.

I am not very keen on painting from photographs and the options are limited on a day like today that is cold and wet.

For most of my life I have felt that an important factor in maintaining a healthy mind is to do something often that one finds fairly scary, and for me at the moment this is painting in public. 

 This type of bird photography is done with mirrors, in case you wondered.

 Well one mirror.

The black thing is my new paint box, spending about £40 an empty paint tin may seem a bit excessive and I will endeavour to explain later.

I also did a quick sketch of The Kiss while I was at The Turner Contemporary, very quick indeed, with a Pitt Pen, there was a charming lady also sketching and The Kiss a lot better than I did, so I didn’t feel quite so exposed doing this one.

I have got most of the red paints in the paintbox and am working on the browns, more about this later, if I ramble on some more

Oddly enough there is a lot of comment about music on the last post, this is an easy house to find a musician in, to draw, so I had a go at trying to draw a guitar player, so I seemed perhaps that the strings were being plucked, moving, maybe even making a sound.

Not sure if it worked, but it had something about it. the pictures may expand if clicked on.

Well I have done the deed, all the artist’s quality watercolours I have acquired in one box with a label telling me what they are.

The main colours I use are down the left side of the list, the others I use are whites grey and blacks over on the far right.

The main reds I use are the madders, particularly rose madder, the only browns I use burnt umber and yellow ochre, I don’t use yellows much, but find I can only get the colour of magnolia buildings mixing naples yellow and titanium white, most of my washes, sky sea sand, are various mixtures of, cobalt blue, yellow ochre and rose madder. Prussian blue, brown madder and vandkye brown are incredibly strong dyes, using them is like the watercolour equivalent of Russian roulette. I mostly mix my own greens, but can’t achieve olive green. Davey’s  and Payne’s grey are also something I can’t mix. The rest of the paint in the tin I wouldn’t recognise, apart from chrome orange.

I always buy paint in tubes and squirt them into pans because it is much cheaper then buying full pans, but a lot of my mystery paints came as full pans, basically because I wanted the box that was on special offer, because the combinations of paints and box was often cheaper than two tubes of paint. A 5ml tube of paint fills about three half pans.

If I had filled the box up with 48 half pans at between about £5 and £9 each it would have been very expensive, as it was it was just expensive. The paint goes a very long way though I would doubt the painting above has 10p worth of paint on it.

Here are today’s photos, I haven take any of my lunch as it may offend Chris Wells who commented adversely about this recently, apart from the large pot of English mustard that came on the plate individually with both my steak sandwich and my wife’s.

I first assumed it was mustard flavoured mayonnaise, but fortunately tested it first, instead of slapping it on, possibly it was supplied this way as a potential emetic fro unhappy diners.

The steak sandwich was excellent by the way and they have increased the size of the teapots so the ample supply of tea stays hot for about half an A4 watercolour.

Frankly for me it is the painting and drawings that mean something and the digital photos not very much at all, anyway click on the link for the photos http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop512/

Anyway despite the weather a pleasant day off more than paid for by the books I bought wandering around Margate.

One of the funny moments was when the yellow buses pulled up while i was painting completely obscuring the view.