Histon Parish Council colleagues are concerned about the threatened loss of a public telephone in the centre of the village. I guess that many youngsters today have never used a public telephone box – having the advantage of a landline phone at home, and probably their own mobile. How many remember pushing buttons A and B is another question altogether!

Not everyone does, and the public telephone box is a vital service to those who don’t – but money seems to rule all – and so it may be lost. We’ll put up a fight, but we may lose.

A bigger loss will be Impington Post Office – information has been leaked ahead of time (it should have been published on Tuesday) that it’s threatened with closure. We, and residents, have until late August to marshal our case that it shouldn’t be closed, but there has to be a question as to how real the consultation is.

Impington (and Histon) are blessed with a fair number of shops. but the loss of Impington Post Office will remove one of just two at that end of the village, and a vital service to residents of all ages and businesses in the vicinity. Of course there is a thriving post office (and postal delivery office) in Histon – but parking is difficult and there’s no scope for more counters to cope with business transferring from Impington.

But its the service component, the impact on communities, where the loss of the local post office/village store has a real impact on the community, on community cohesion that seems to have no value in today’s world. Of course, Post Offices are now less viable, in part because the Government has transferred their business elsewhere. But when the community is becoming more valued, carbon footprints are beginning to matter – is this actually the right thing to do?

No it isn’t – and we’ll try to change that – and plan for what may be inevitable as well.

Can you, will you, help?

The end of June/early July is always Histon Feast – a week long celebration in the community.

The feast goes back many years – there’s an extract on the community website from an excellent hisoty produced by the Village Sociery. It describes events in 1902 – and clearly it was an established event even then.

Traditional Feast events include the parade through the village, when floats decorated by groups and businesses are a wonderful site to see, matches and games of all types – fishing, cricket, tennis etc. One of the final events is the Feast Market – where village groups and organisations put up stalls and sell themselves and produce.

Since the late 1990’s the Parish Councils have been going – and this year was no different.

Parish Councils Feast Tent 2008

As usual, we were in the corner of Histon Village Green, under the trees, and somewhat away from the action – but nevertheless had 200 plus visitors, looking at displays, asking questions, making their views known to Parish Councillors.

The Scouts were doing a roaring trade in bacon sandwiches, and even ran out – and Councillors, many who’d been at the Green at 7:30 to erect tent and displays were plied with coffee and even ice creams at one stage.

The weather didn’t help, with some periods of rain, which surely deterred visitors.

Found this site wordle.net today – can produce a word cloud from any submitted text. Gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

The cloud for the words used to date in the blog is: