I know what I like, shops, art, Chrome, computers, Monday again a ramble.

Due to the main computer in my bookshop having a complete makeover I am using an old computer that was probably designed for windows 98, now running XP and the thing was crawling.

Honestly it didn’t seem that bad last time I used it, to cut a boring hour of geekery short, you can’t use the up to date, supported version of Internet explorer on XP, so I had put Google’s Chrome browser on it and this was what was making it crawl, using loads of memory, I have changed to Firefox now and it is perfectly ok.

Another gallery, picture framer is opening in Ramsgate as you see from the picture, is, I wonder the demand for art increasing, perhaps the living room of the future will contain no books, records, cds, but just chairs computers and art.

As most of you have probably already noticed, Argos and Burton in Margate are due to close in January, so perhaps even more galleries are needed there too.

Perhaps it is time for me to produce an artists view of Ramsgate.

Forgotten what I was going to say now, found the lock but seem to have the wrong key.

Oh yes still on the art theme the Turner Contemporary have just tweeted about the video on the talk about Alex Katz’s relationship with the American dream.

I realised that I didn’t know anything much about classic American art and even what American art would represent the American dream.

Googling classic American art and similar things mostly comes up with the couple and pitchfork thing, American Gothic by Grant Wood, but this isn’t even a 19th-century painting.

I think it was done in about 1930 and won’t risk infringing anyone’s wosisname when it is easy to sketch, what with the long neck and everything. Sorry about the blokes hand I go a bit muddled up with which way what was supposed to go, could have been worse I suppose.

Anyone familiar whith Gabrielle d’Estrées et sa soeur au bain, also easy to sketch will understand the temptations I faced when the hand went wrong.

What with installing a new browser and so on I have finally discovered the problem with the council’s Conservative group, see http://thanetconservatives.com/ they still think they are in power.   

Photos of inside the new Updown gallery in Ramsgate and a Sunday ramble

All pictures copyright and produced with permission of the gallery, their website is http://www.updowngallery.co.uk/

I really recommend visiting this exhibition of Sir Peter Blake’s prints, if you don’t think he is an artist you are familiar with he designed the Sgt Pepper album cover, so you probably are.

First an apology for the photos, I had to fit the whole thing, buying lunch, eating it, walking from my bookshop to the gallery and taking the photos into my lunchtime yesterday.

So the pictures (click obsessively on them to expand them) below are just snaps using the camera in my mobile phone, I promise to return with a proper camera and attempt to do the subject justice.  

Now for the ramble, I guess this gallery is the first substantial and London related spinoff from having The Turner Contemporary in Thanet, to arrive in Ramsgate, my guess is there will be much more.

Even with the recession the penny is dropping that the train journey from London to Ramsgate is faster now than the one to Whitstable. Thanet has the best climate in the UK and Ramsgate, more listed buildings than most places, low property prices and so on.   

Business wise I am feeling the effect in my bookshop, so this is all positive.

Some of the artworks in the photos are not by Peter Blake, some of the clues are here http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/sunday-ramble-about-art-and-stuff.html

I have been complaining about the closure of non food shops everywhere recently, the key to this is that with most browsable shops the internet is taking over, art I don’t think can really work in this way, the internet tries but fails to nail it.

Staying with the ramble and the art theme last Friday evening I was sketching over a drink in the Belgian Café.

 
Drawing and painting in semidarkness isn’t an exact science, but I did promise the musicians I was talking to that I would put the sketch online, here it is.

Exposed to the light of day, it started as A5 size so expanding it reveals all faults.  I will ramble on 

Thanet District Council Conservative Group, another one down?

In these arresting times with another senior Conservative member up before the beak, this time it’s Councillor Mrs Shirley Tomlinson Shadow Cabinet Member for Housing and Planning.

She can’t do what her fellow ward councillor Ken Gregory did as this is much more serious than wanting another councillor to die a horrible death, so a caution isn’t an option.

This time unfortunately she wasn’t pretending to have had a few for a lark, but had had a few before going for a drive.

It is a bit hard to tell who are the local Conservatives worst enemy at the moment, Labour, TIG, the police or the DPP. However  it is looking increasingly like it's the local Conservative councillors.

In local politics having two ex cabinet members of one local authority awaiting trial looks to me like one for The Guinness Book of Records. 

Once again I will make my plea for the local Conservatives to sort themselves out, disassociate themselves from the old ways and provide us with an effective opposition.

This isn’t some sort of Tory bashing, but I think time for a serious wake up call.  

Perhaps having no real chance of getting back into power for the foreseeable future will concentrate the Conservative group on some sort of useful activity. I would suggest a move to being an open and transparent group, live webcasts of their meetings and a strong internet presence with a genuine interest in attempting to publicly communicate with local voters would be a good start. I don’t see they have that much to lose at the moment and moving into the present could be a risk worth taking.        

Thanet and the Kent police commissioner elections

Update the first preference results from Thanet are: Barnes (Ind) 42.1%, Mackinlay (Con) 22.8%, Yeo (Lab) 12.7%, Wauchope (UKIP) 10.5%, Uncles (English Democrats) 6.5%, Dai Liyanage (Ind) 3.4%.

The official turnout figure for Thanet is 15.1% with 14,671 people having voted.

the figures for the rest of  Kent are pretty awful too.

The full turn-out figures for each district voting is as follows:

Tunbridge Wells - 18 per cent

Ashford - 17.3

Canterbury - 15.7

Dartford – 14.3

Dover – 18.4

Gravesham – 13.9

Maidstone – 16.6

Medway – 15.7

Sevenoaks – 16

Shepway – 20.3

Swale – 14.8

Thanet – 15.1

Tonbridge & Malling – 16.3

The average turn-out across the county was 16.3 per cent

The total number of votes cast was 208,762

Total number of people eligible to vote in the county is 1,281,968 

As you see it isn't much of a mandate for anything really.

Plenty of info from other sources on the web, I putting the information here mainly so we can find it in the future.

The Great British Pizza Company Margate, a ramble and a few pictures

I first discovered the pizza when I lived in London in the 1960s, at that time pizzas in England were rare and for me at least The Amalfi Restaurant in Soho a useful discovery.

Here in Thanet I often eat pizza in The Osteria Posillipo Pizzeria in Broadstairs, so I was interested to try Margate’s Great British Pizza Company.

For me the important thing about lunchtime is a good balance of price, quality and speed, my days off are mostly spent book buying and with children to be collected from school it’s a short day.

Obviously after one of our councillors had said on the BBC that this restaurant should be boycotted on socio-political grounds I was very keen to try it.

For me Margate’s Great British Pizza Company pulled it off on all counts, pizza £7

The picture of my lunch I know will annoy another councillor, who has already complained about me putting photos of my lunch on this blog.

With one TIG and one Conservative isn’t it about time one of the Labour lot commented on food in fanet, one can only hope.   

I did manage a quick sketch, not while I was waiting for the pizza as it came very quickly, sorry I didn’t have time for a watercolour, perhaps next time.

Margate is still having its ups and downs, while the effect of the Turner Contemporary is now creeping up the lower High Street, with more of the empty shop buildings returning to use.

At the top of the High Street the greengrocer has closed, on the whole though I think Margate is improving.   

A few more pictures which should expand if clicked on, not so many as there would be if I was using my big camera, but I am trying to master the camera on my mobile phone at the moment.

The plan is that this will eventually be a seamless illustrated blog post using only my phone and a folding blue tooth keyboard, eventually.

I have pretty much achieved all of this apart from being able to position where the pictures appear.

The most useful aspect of using the mobile phone camera it that the pictures from it automatically load to my the internet when I go into a wifi hot spot, this means I don’t have to wait for them to upload. The down side of this is the picture file names don’t relate to what the pictures are of, so they wouldn’t be easy to find with a search engine.

There has been some sort of altercation between the the local police and the animal rights protesters, it appears the protesters had been in a car crash and the police turned up and issued them with a notice not to protest at the scene of the accident.  

here is the video, I don't however know the details.

I will ramble on here and add some more pictures