Ferry Sad News

I’m not normally one to plaster death notices all over my blog willy-nilly, but now that it’s been officially confirmed you might care to know that Mr Denzil Dias, the founder and owner of TransEuropa Ferries, has, er, rolled on to meet his maker, having rolled off this mortal coil earlier in the month.

Ownership of the line has passed to his two sons, who were thought not to have any interest in things nautical, although I see they’re now saying it will be ‘business as usual’. Let’s hope they don’t change their minds again, and that Port Ramsgate’s only customer stays afloat!

Click here to read TransEuropa story in Ferry News

Fairtrade Fair Trade For Water Week?

Yet more evidence, if it were needed, of the low priority placed on the Millionaires’ Playground by our Margate based Jurassic junta. My spies tell me both the council chairman and our glorious leader, Sandy Beach, have booked themselves in for a Fairtrade bunfight at the Winter Gardens on the same night they’re meant to be attending a gala dinner as the culmination of Ramsgate’s Water Skiing Week next month.

I presume the chance to rub shoulders with my old TV chum George Alagiah, who’ll be at the Mike and Bernie Winter Gardens in his role as a Fairtrade patron, has got the better of them. Let’s hope there’s not another of those ‘f*cking tosser’ episodes that seem to go hand-in-hand with Sandy’s presence at the venue. Of course, it might also have something to do with avoiding awkward questions about what happens in Ramsgate next year, since this water skiing mullarkey is a one-off, and the previous, marvellous annual Powerboat Weekend has got the arse and moved on to pastures new.

Meanwhile I see the council’s events listing website has unilaterally elevated the BBC’s smiley, 6 o’clock newsreader to the knighthood. A vain attempt to make the whole Fairtrade thing seem more important, I presume!

Click here for Fairtrade bunfight listing
Click here for Ramsgate Water Skiing Week listing

Realty Check

Reader Bull Terrier Gal writes to inform me that tiny Terence Painter, the Ile’s dapper, diminutive developer and estate agent, has closed his office opposite the Royal Harbour. After tooling down there, I can indeed confirm this to be the case:

Despite being a relatively recent Ramsgatonian (eat your heart out Wossie), even I can remember the days when these premises were a dingy drinking dive, before our Terry came along and turned it into a place for millionaires to invest in the Thanet property boom. But with a number of local developments now seemingly at a standstill, can we now assume the boom has turned to bust?

Even more worrying is that TP is i/c flogging the Pleasurama development (aka Royal Sands, aka Titanic), should it ever be built. At a meeting of the Eastcliff Residents Association only last September, he said there was ‘lots of interest’ and that one hotel chain was on the point of signing up for the site. Upping sticks and buggering off doesn’t really do much to confirm that, does it?

Ramsgate Rocks

Unfortunately I couldn’t make this morning’s official opening of the new project by Thanet’s greatest living-here artist (Tracey only visits), Ruth Cutler. Her Sea Garden project, which she’s crafted from local stones and plants, was due to be unveiled by none other than our local MP Dr Steve Ladyboy at 11am. Here’s one I snapped off through the railings a few months ago when it was a work in progress. Ruth’s asked everyone to rally round and look after, or even add to, the sea garden so do feel free to lend a helping hand.

Meanwhile Ramsgate’s newest charity, Beach Within Reach, has also been launched today with a fun event on the sands. The charity aims to provide all-terrain wheelchairs that can be used by adults and children, with no hire charge only a returnable deposit. BWR’s Treasurer, Kim Twyman, told me: ‘These All-Terrain wheelchairs will be on Ramsgate main beach for the new season of 2008 and on other beaches in the Thanet area as funds permit. We hope this project will increase the tourism industry in our area. We are trying to reach charities, organizations and schools out of the area that run holidays/breaks/days out for the disabled.’

Good on yer, Kim! The launch is also being featured on the BBC’s teeny-tiny news today, so if any of you lot want to catch a glimpse you’d better dash home by 6.30!

Click here for more details of Ruth Cutler’s sea garden
Click here for more on Beach Within Reach

The White Cliffs Of Ramsgate

With the red veil slowly being lifted from our once crumbling, now repaired Eastcliff here in the Cannes of Kent to reveal our answer to Dover’s proverbials, Chief O’Donnell of Ramsgate First writes:

I went down to see the partial unveiling of the cliff face on Ramsgate front yesterday. It looks very white, bright and clean and on a sunny day should give us all snow blindness. Still mustn’t carp. It’s not for the likes of us (ratepayers) anyway – it will mostly be covered up by the new carbuncle that SFP (Whoever) Ltd might, perhaps, build there thanks to the obliging and cynical old ruling junta on TDC.

The railings on the cliff-top look very bright and shiny too. Unfortunately they end abruptly and unevenly exactly at the point above where the new flats that might be built by SFP (Wherever) Ltd will end. Coincidence? Having restored over 750 feet of path, railings and cliff face they should have finished the job and continued to the Augusta steps – another 150 feet at most. And it looks like an unfinished job and that, of course, is par for the gang from the North Side Chapter of Thanet – the Conswervative Cowboys. It will become a monument to their monumental cynicism.

In the meantime what will happen if the housing market continues to fall in value? SFP (Whatever) Ltd could be left with unsold apartments for years. Will they defer the build until house prices rise sufficiently to make this ugly carbuncle viable again? If so can we look forward to another five years of an empty site? Probably. It could only happen in Thanet.

Gerry, as ever, not holding any punches there. I’d have to add that I do trust my council tax won’t be going up when they have to repaint it in a few years’ time for the benefit of the Titanic’s residents. I wonder how long before it’s covered in graffiti?

Football Crazy

A rumour has reached the old Eastcliff lugholes that our local footie team, Ramsgate FC, has dropped its youth and kiddies sides after parents failed to come up with the wad it was demanding to fund them. Word is that the Rams wanted five grand and that when the grown-ups said ‘bugger off’, they did just that.

One anonymous contributor told me: ‘There is a bit of Thanet history with kids and football. Margate FC tried the same thing, so the kids decamped to Ramsgate FC. Now they’ve done it too.’ Apparently both Margate and Ramsgate FCs are on their uppers, so there’s now talk of an amalgamation to form Fannit United. Oh for the simpler days of yore, when matches were played on the Goodwin Sands and footballers were happy with a kipper as payment!

Yes, those really are kippers they’re holding

Ramsgate ‘Too Weird For Words’

I see my old broadcasting chum Dylan Winter has, er, captured the essence of the Millionaires’ Playground as part of his circumnavigation of Britain, which he’s doing piecemeal at the weekends and in any other spare time he gets in a 40 year old sailing boat he purchased for a mere two thousand quid.

It’s interesting to have an outsider’s perspective on the place, but it’s a bit rich, if you ask me, being labelled ‘weird’ by someone who lives a stone’s throw from Milton Keynes! Anyway, here’s his Ramsgate instalment:

Teeny-Tiny Tears Over Teeny-Tiny Council

Regular contributor Steve reports that Friday’s inaugural, go-it-alone meeting of the Tim Garbutt inspired alternative Ramsgate council was attended by ‘three men and a dog’. Now Chief O’Donnell, head Ramsgate Firster, writes:

Tim Garbutt has used the back of my email to propose setting up his own ‘Ramsgate Town Council’. He wanted a public meeting and a committee formed to ‘sack the Charter Trustees, TDC, etc etc’. I found Tim’s proposals ludicrous and Ramsgate First rejects them utterly.

Before advising those of you who had received my previous email of this fact I stopped off at Albion House on Friday 22nd May at 7.00pm to attend Tim’s proposed meeting so that I could inform him personally of the contents of this email.

Though the meeting was advertised in the Gazette it appears that nobody at Albion House was informed and consequently Tim and a couple of other people were unable to gain admittance. I therefore informed him on the doorstep that his proposals were unacceptable and that all he was doing was possibly jeopardising the parish council. There are some churls in TDC who are itching to scratch Ramsgate parish council and that Tim’s intervention might give them ammunition.

I have to say I like Tim Garbutt. There is no doubting his sincerity but his waywardness, especially in his hatred of TDC, often leads him to express thoughts that frighten off others. I think Tim thinks that I am now some kind of Uncle Tom – betraying his own. He is wrong of course. Often is.

It is quite obvious that Tim’s views are shared by a few, a very few: less than a handful of people judging by the attendance on Friday and that in no way is he representative of the overwhelming majority of the people of Ramsgate.

I hope, therefore, not to hear some councillors suggest there is any linkage between Mr Garbutt and Ramsgate First or the good people of Ramsgate in their pursuit of their own parish/town council. There is none.

To which Tim Garbutt has responded:

Gerry’s opinions are all true: however next meeting of Ramsgate Town Council 7pm Friday. In Ramsgate Town Hall or on the steps again.

18 months and no Town Council is too long. TDC is a failed council. Could Richard Samuel provide the keys?

You have to admire the fighting spirit Thanet Council generates. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no great admirer of the Uranians, as regular readers will have realised all too long ago. But I’m afraid that anti-council initiatives seem to spring up in these parts with the same kind of monotonous regularity as luxury apartment blocks, only to subsequently crumble quicker than our lovely listed buildings. So for better or worse, I think I’ll be sticking to the current Tweedledum/Tweedledee political arrangement for the time being.

The Revolution Starts At 7pm

Local businessman and publicist Tim Garbutt has emailed to say he’s going ahead with his plan to create ‘a de facto Ramsgate town council’, following TDC’s tardy response to the overwhelming desire for more local representation here in the Cannes of Kent. He writes:

The meetings are from 7pm this Friday and next Friday at Albion House (Ramsgate’s Town Hall) – on the steps if it remains locked – to create the Town Council.

Why don’t you stand: you care about the town – put forward a list of nominees too? I think 6-10 people is about the right number?

Well, I’m afraid modesty would prevent me from getting involved Tim. Plus, as regular readers have probably noted, I’m cursed with a certain, er, hamfisted approach when it comes to politics. Still, if there’s a free lunch at Mrs Garbutt’s world-renowned Surin restaurant on offer, I may be persuaded to change my mind!

Growing Problem

Holy smoke! I see Her Majesty’s Rozzers have raided yet more homes here in the Millionaires’ Playground in their never-ending quest to halt the eccentric horticulture that seems to thrive in our lovely local micro-climate. The cops pounced on 300 cannabis plants being grown in three houses in Church Road yesterday.

That’s the second big Ramsgate raid this year, on top of the closure of what was described as the UK’s largest cannabis factory in an industrial unit on the outskirts of town in 2006. I dread to think what the judges at the Chelsea Flower Show would make of it all. One honking fat Camberwell carrot, one presumes.

Click here for full story on BBC website