How good is your website?

This may be of interest to some of you it’s a free service that looks at your website or blog and tells you how to improve it click here to use.

Here are the results for www.michaelsbookshop.com I was surprised how comprehensive they were and that the advice was actually useful.

Ramblings on the recession

The £400billion bank bail out I think represents about £20,000 per tax payer and no, I don’t really think that there was an alternative. We have moved to an economy where government, many businesses and many private individuals, view financial stability as being able to pay the interest on what one has borrowed, instead of being able to pay for what we can afford.

What really worries me here is that if this means that mortgage lending continues so that house prices don’t fall back to where ordinary people can afford houses, the fundamental cause of the recession has not been addressed.

This is that those of us engaged in productive work are essentially buying our own country, rather than ploughing the fruits of our labour back in to the real productive economy. Ease of borrowing for the last 15 years means that the price of an ordinary house in Ramsgate built years and ago paid for many times over, has risen from a value of about £50,000 to about £250,000 meaning that someone in an ordinary job has no hope of buying it, unless they borrow far more than is safe for them.

It would seem to me that in bailing out the banks, the government has bought a lot of houses really worth £50,000 for £250,000. Now the old adage was never borrow what you can’t comfortably pay back at £10 per thousand per month. Now times have got tough before and we have seen 10% interest rates, which mean a loan of £200,000, would mean repayments of £2,000 per month. So if and when the repossessions start by the government owned banks, lets hope they will rent the properties back to the occupants at a reasonable rent.

Here in Thanet one effect of all this is that the value of buildings in which small businesses operate has increased to the point where rents that relate to their freehold value is out of all proportion to what those businesses actually produce in profit. We have seen many long established shops go from our towns recently, including two bookshops, no bale outs for them.

Local Blog Gone

Semper eadem the local catholic priest’s blog has gone, you now get a message saying, “Sorry, the blog at revsafisher.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.”

Father Fisher’s church is St Ethelberts Ramsgate, vanishing with no message seems a bit strange I hope it hasn’t been got at.

Wish You Were Here: Coleridge’s Holidays at Rams gate 1819-1833

I have managed to acquire some stock of Allan Clayson’s book which I am selling for £9.99 Amazon have it on special offer at £18.95 so it is a good opportunity to acquire an important local book economically. Unfortunately Allan died recently however his wife said that he left some material for some further publications, which I hope to be able to publish in the fullness of time.

Wish You Were Here: Coleridge’s Holidays at Rams gate 1819-1833 is a wide-ranging study of the Ramsgate that Coleridge knew in his sunset years, and the many holidays he passed there. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), author of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and one of England’s greatest poets and writers of prose, spent a summer month in 1819, six weeks or so every autumn from 1 821 to 1828 and a final Indian summer there in 1833. He wrote over fifty letters from Ramsgate, and while there made numerous entries in his notebooks.

He was always accompanied by one or other of his minders, the Highgate surgeon James Gillman and his wife, with whom he resided for the last eighteen years of his life in an attempt to control his opium addiction. They regularly took accommodation on Ramsgate’s East Cliff — generally in Wellington Crescent or the Plains of Waterloo, and many of these houses are still identifiable.
In Ramsgate he met not only old friends and writers but local worthies like Sir William Curtis and even national figures like the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool. Furthermore, he took an informed interest in local affairs like the consecration of St George’s Church (1827) and the dedication of the Montefiore Synagogue (1833).

He visited Ramsgate for the sea-cure, and he records his ‘sea-baths’ in minute detail; also he was a pioneer of travel by paddle-steamer, and one of its earliest champions. In addition there are good grounds for believing that he composed or polished two or three of his better-known later poems in Ramsgate, while he carried out in the town the restructuring of the great religious prose work of his declining years, Aids to Reflection.

His letters and note-book entries are a delightful mixture of serious concerns and amusing anecdotes, and add considerably to our knowledge not only of the resort in its late-Georgian heyday but of one of the country’s greatest writers and thinkers. His illustrious presence in the town has been neglected for generations by the local townspeople and Coleridge scholars alike, and it is hoped that this book will in some ways redress the balance.


Jacket Illustration: The Royal Sovereign entering Ramsgate Harbour (1826) [by courtesy of Kent Arts and Libraries]

Council meeting vote results for China Gateway

I have just received the vote results for the full council meeting click here to read them as we all paid for an electronic voting system the scan of a bit of paper seems a little strange, anyone know why?

Sorry about the error on my previous post.

Sunday morning reflections

Of the 56 councillors 41 voted to approve China gateway 10 voted to reject it Tories: Savage, Crotty, Wells, Hayton Labour: Poole, Fenner, Dark, Campbell,Clark Independent: King. Cllrs Hart and Harker were both unwell and left early. Cllrs Ezekiel and Latchford didn’t vote, that leaves one unknown unaccounted for.

Of all of the councillors with in depth knowledge of planning I would say Bill Hayton must be fairly near the top of the list, so it is of some concern that he voted to reject, I would certainly like to know his reasons.

Commercial group properties announced on Friday, that a resolution to grant planning consent, subject to conditions, has been approved at the extraordinary meeting of Full Thanet District Council on 9th October 2008. The consent for Phase 1 of the "China Gateway" scheme at Manston in respect of 1,481,815 sq ft of commercial development should allow construction to commence in 2009.

This didn’t cause a rush of buying see http://www.londonstockexchange.com/en-gb/pricesnews/prices/system/detailedprices.htm?sym=GB00B1P70L34GBGBXAIM%20B1P70L3CMGP their share price is at 42p in July their share price was 115p and back in december it was 210p. I don’t know if the lack of share sales on this announcement is the result of the stock market crash, Ken Wills saying on “BBCs Inside Out” that it’s all three phases not a stand alone development or the lack of answer to the question where does the surface water go and the other conditions many of which look very difficult to comply to.

Certainly as Roger Gale said that it would probably need a public enquiry for the land for phases 2 and 3 to have any chance of getting changed from agricultural to industrial use, so it doesn’t look to be a particularly good gamble at the moment.

So we have permission granted for a stand-alone development but the developer has said that it isn’t a stand-alone development, where that leaves us leaves me somewhat confused.

short deed dated 1641

This from Gerald I will try to get a photo of the original from him.

Interesting and relatively short deed dated 1641. Rather odd handwriting,with some characters having no relation to modern script at all - so it tooka little while to transcribe. Might be of interest to the Spencer familydescendants, although it is rather a jump in time from 1641 to the will Itranscribed earlier.My personal interpretation: Nicholas Spencer grants his house and variouslands to his son William Spencer and Mary Goodson in consideration of their(William and Mary's) forthcoming marriage. Nicholas retains the use of theproperty during his lifetime. After Nicholas's death, William and Mary havea life interest in the property and after they have both died it passesentailed to their legitimate male line. If there are no heirs under theentail then it passes to William's heirs.

Click here to read it

TDC IT Councillors internet presence gone

I just received the following from a reader:

“Not that I'm a suspicious person but.....

TDC's website won't let you access any councillor's details so no-one can e-mail/phone/write to unless via TDc's offices.

Coincidence? Any chance you could put this on thanetonline blog? Obviously you'd check in advance that any fault(?) had been corrected!!”

Ed, You just get the error message below however should you need to contact a councillor I published up their contact details last time this happened at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tdc/councillors_revised.htm please let me know if it needs any revisions.

The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://councillors.thanet.gov.uk/sites/sandyezekiel
The following error was encountered:
Unable to determine IP address from host name for councillors.thanet.gov.uk
The dnsserver returned:
Refused: The name server refuses to perform the specified operation.
This means that:
The cache was not able to resolve the hostname presented in the URL.
Check if the address is correct.
Your cache administrator is helpdesk@thanet.gov.uk.
Generated on Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:37:59 +0100