A few pictures of Ramsgate

One again a few pictures Don and the others who may not be able to get out.

This lot are Wednesday morning and mostly show the terrible state the pavement in King Street in Ramsgate has got into http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id11.htm I was talking to one of our road sweepers about it and he said that of the main town centre roads in Thanet this one is the worse.

Sorry it was too wet to get far on Wednesday.

I believe I have already done Thursdays.

This is yesterday mornings, the main thing of note was the complex machinery evidently doing something to our drains, at first I think the chaps operating it thought I was up to no good with my slr but once I explained what I was up to they were very cooperative hence the picture down the drain http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id16.htm

On to this morning’s pictures sorry the first few seem to have got to the bottom of the page, one thing they show is how badly silted up the harbour is, you can see the boat that was on the slipway next to her sister ship well and truly aground with props mostly out of the water. You can also see the route the fishing boat has to tale to get out of the harbour.

Here are the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id17.htm another think I have noticed is a slight movement in Augusta Stairs, by this I mean the platforms between the various sets of steps used to all be level and drain properly. Now some of them have puddles on them, I don’t know if this is significant of anything.

Dane Valley By-election results

First congratulations to Sandra Hart see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2009/12/sandra-hart-labour-rose.html

Something I noticed here was the enormous swing away from the Conservatives, they got 50% of the vote in the Dane Valley ward in the 2007 local elections and this has now been reduced to 24% in yesterday’s by-election.

Could it be that local people are waking up to the idea that although it may say Conservative on the box, what you get when you open it can be something else?

I wonder if our local Conservative Cabinet will look at the message from the voters here, it is certainly a very large swing to Labour at a time when I don’t feel that the electorate at large are so decisively in favour of Labour policy.

The figures for the 2007 local elections are Con 50% Lab 43% and Grey 7% see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id15.htm

For yesterdays by-election Lab 34% Lib 28% Con 24% and Ind 14%.

So while this was a disastrous result for the Conservatives it wasn’t so good for Labour either, in as much as they lost 9% of their vote.

A few thoughts on Ramsgate’s cliff safety, infrastructure and a morning walk.

Sorry about the length of the previous post I have now managed to publish most of it on a separate webpage, the mouse on my laptop went wrong last night so I didn’t do it then.

My concerns about the cliff problems and allowing heavy vehicles near the cliff edge where the condition of the cliff is suspect, seems to be falling mostly on deaf ears at the council, so I have tried another approach which is to contact the head offices of both the civil engineering consultants that the council use and the contractor that did the £1m repair to the cliff façade.

They are both large and reputable firms and I have some hope that one of them will take some sort of action, most particularly imposing temporary weight limits.

I have got most response from telephoning the engineers involved, at the moment they seem strangely reluctant to put anything in writing although there is a lot of concern expressed on the telephone.

This link takes you to today’s pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop2/id8.htm

I will probably ramble on as the day continues.

Extraordinary Meeting of the Ramsgate Town Council to be held on Monday 7 December at 7 pm

RAMSGATE TOWN COUNCIL
EXTRAORDINARY MEETING OF COUNCIL
7 December 2009
A meeting of the Ramsgate Town Council will be held at 7.00 pm (or on the rising of the Finance and General Purposes Committee) on Monday 7 December 2009 in the Council Chamber, Albion House, Albion Place, Ramsgate.
Membership:
Councillor Green (Chairman); Councillors Byne, Carr, Dark, Doyle, Fenner, Hoult, Kirby, Landi, Moore, Nicholson, O’Donnell, Poole, Rogers, Todd and Ward.

Click on the link to read all of it http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop2/id7.htm

Ramsgate Town Council gets a town clerk from Lydd

Ramsgate council has appointed a town clerk Richard Styles, he is Lydd’s town clerk at the moment and to start with he will only be working on Fridays, as he has to work out his notice at Lydd.

This is very important as the town council has to have a town clerk to function, it is also reassuring that the council has appointed someone experienced, who I gather is keen to take the council to quality status.

I couldn’t find a picture Richard Styles so have illustrated this post with a picture of a previous Ramsgate town clerk, Blasdale Clarke, he is the one bewigged seated at the desk.

It is with some interest that I speculate, will our new town clerk wear a wig to fit in with our, so far ceremonial council?

The Dictatorship of Thanet and the Ramsgate Tunnels

The more I live in Thanet, and just try to find out about ordinary things that are happening, the more I am reminded bizarre third world dictatorships.

This morning’s walk is an example of what I mean. One of Ramsgate’s greatest potential assets is its underground tunnel system, I publish a small book about it and it is my bestselling book, I take this to be a reflection of local peoples interest in the tunnels.

This morning the seafront tunnel entrance was open and there were a couple of white van types down there with torches.

Obviously I asked them what they were up to and they said they were clearing the rubbish out of the tunnel entrance. Did they know why? No. Can I find out? Possibly. Is it worth the effort? Probably not. I tried phoning the council but apparently the only person who would know what was going on was not available.

Extracting information from Thanet District Council is a laborious business, for the most part they don’t just tell you what is going on. As an example of what I mean, I wanted to get the development agreement for the Royal Sands Development in Ramsgate, a reasonable request as it has been a deserted building site for years now, I wanted to know the dates by which various parts of the development are supposed to happen. We are on the forth lot of contractors now and I want to keep an eye on the situation to make sure they are really serious, so the development agreement would be a useful document. I first asked TDC for it on 8th September. Now about 20 emails later I have requested the information commissioner’s office to look into why I haven’t been sent it. God alone knows what all of this costs and how much civil servants time is wasted, in any sort of sensible world it would just have any commercially sensitive information removed and be published with the plans on the council’s planning website. It is after all a key document about a major development in Thanet. By way of explanation normally there would be a planning agreement for this sort of development setting out what has to be done when, but as the development is on council owned land it is exempted from having one.

So when the council start playing about with one of our major assets in this case the tunnel system, I want to know what they are up to. Over the last few years they have run one of their worst possible worlds scenarios, on the one hand they have shut off all the ventilation to it, something that will probably ruin it for future generations, while on the other hand they have continuously failed to keep it properly secured.

Anyway if anyone knows what is going on perhaps they could comment.

Here is the link to this morning’s photos http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id10.htm

I wonder what it would be like to have local government that really engaged with local people and genuinely tried to keep them informed about what was going on, normally we only find out about our heritage assets down on the eastern undercliff, like we did with theatre and restaurant down there, that is when the demolition starts.

Pinch and a Punch it’s the First of the Month

Once again I stop for a few moments to review this blog, a sort of is it all worth it type of thing, well here are the statistics for November. 8,026 Visits; 2,884 Absolute Unique Visitors; 13,772 Page Views; 1.72 Average Page Views; 00:02:45 Time on Site; 69.19% Bounce Rate; 29.64% New Visits.

I think the figures are all pretty self evident apart from bounce rate, this is the percentage of people that only look at one page.

For the other bloggers here is the link to my referral statistics http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id9.htm these statistics show the numbers of people that come here by clicking on a link on another website and are the nearest I can get to a chart of local blog popularity.

Unfortunately I can’t unlock my blogger statistics so anyone can look at them, I should like to be able to do this as unless you publish a website, you can’t in the normal way of things get to look at a website’s statistics.

This may not sound important, but when government financed internet projects like Kent TV use their statistics to justify the amount of our money they are spending, it is useful to have something to compare with.

Hits is a statistic that is often used but seldom explained, for instance my http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/ site got 41,689 unique visitors this year but 1,219,895 hits, I won’t bore you with my analysis of what this means, but for anyone interested here are the statistics for that site http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/stats/awstats.pl?month=11&year=2009&output=main&config=www.michaelsbookshop.com

Less than 20 Shopping Days to Christmas

I should point out that as my bookshop closes Thursdays and Sundays this is the case and this post is just a reminder to those of you who intend to buy people books about the local area for Christmas, not to leave it too late.

I am doing my best to keep stock of everything all of the time, but with my own and other people’s publications this is over 150 local titles, so logistically it is pretty much impossible to have all of them, all of the time.

I don’t think that the people who buy antiquarian and collectable books as Christmas presents will need reminding, but for those of you strapped for cash, I should point out that I have recently bought quite a lot of review copies of books and that these are just new books at secondhand prices.