Margate Pride

Margate Pride seems to be going as per over on the seedy north side of the island, with the hookie perfumier's banter competing nicely with the Boy Georgealikes on the sound stage. I deliberately call it 'Margate Pride' as it's a much more honest description than 'Thanet Pride'. The 'Thanet' being a recent invention to justify everyone else's council tax funding it.

Call me a curmudgeon [You're a curmudgeon - Ed] but quite why I need to pay for Margate to hold a shindig every week when the basics are being neglected is beyond me. Derek Harding, who heads up Margate's Renewal Partnership, apparently commands a £60m budget. Although it's now slipped to £40m according to a story in yesterday's Gazunder about schoolkids who've come up with the slogan 'More than meets the eye' for the town. So what's all that mazooma being frittered on Derek?

Maybe the kids are right. Maybe it does require the Transformers to step in and demolish the lot in an epic battle with the evil Developons. But a more honest tagline for the town would currently be this from T S Eliot's The Wasteland:

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.

Inspired as he was sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter, which has received national publicity this week due to the campaign to list it, he wrote that in 1921. If he sat there today, gazing across the wasteland of the Arlington complex, the disused NCP and the derelict Dreamland site, I think he'd come to the same conclusion!

Bangin'

Yes - it's all go Margate! This weekend sees a cornucopia of poorly-publicised activities across the north of the island!

Arsongate's 7-day Big Sky Jazz Festival kicks off tonight at the Mike and Bernie Winter Gardens. Then tomorrow it's Margate Pride, which I see has been renamed 'Thanet Pride in Margate' this year in a vain attempt to suggest that it's inclusive of us poor sods here on the underfunded and woefully neglected south side. Meanwhile you can boogie all weekend to the sounds of UB40 and Scouting for Girls at the Sound Island Music Festival at Quex Park.

Still, to be honest it's not all Margate-centric. On Sunday it's Ramsgate Carnival, and the same day sees the start of the first ever, week long Ramsgate Historic Festival billed as 'all action from Eastcliff to Westcliff'. Expect to get your pulse racing with morris dancing, a human chess game and a teddy bears' picnic, culminating in a full scale re-enactment next weekend of the Napoleonic (or should that be 'Wellingtonian'?) Wars. Maybe one way or another Ramsgate will be bangin' after all!

Manston In A Spin

I see this week's Isle of Thanet Gazunder carries a full page puff for RAF London Kent Ramsgate Manston International Airport in the form of an interview with the airport manager, 28 year old Matt Clarke. Mr Clarke's clearly rattled by my petition to No. 10 Downing Street to improve the regulation of the airport, as his first para reads:

My role covers a wide variety of aspects including responsibility for the airport and staff safety. This involves compliance with all aviation rules, council regulations and noise abatement laws.

Yeah, right. Elsewhere the paper reports that in June this year there were 100 heavy training circuits over the course of five days. Anyway, I'm sure that supporters (Tony) of the non-stop, oozalum style training flights will chime in here with the usual pro-noise and pro-air pollution arguments.

And speaking of puffs, I've just nipped back from Pride over in Margate, before, er, nipping back again. A word of warning though. The closure of Marine Drive appears to have had quite a knock-on effect on the Ile's roads, which are more bunged up than Melvyn Bragg with a bad head cold, especially around Westworld Chaos. I think I'm going to have to jump in my millionaire chum's Sunseeker for the trip back!