District councillor for Sutton, Mepal, Witcham, and Wentworth (East Cambridgeshire District Council) and county councillor for Coveney, Little Downham, Mepal, Pymoor, Sutton, Wardy Hill, Way Head, Witcham, and Witchford (Cambridgeshire County Council)
The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.
20/01261/FUL Mepal 16 School Lane Mepal CB6 2AJ Two storey rear extension.
20/01259/FUL Witchford 239 Main Street Witchford CB6 2HT Glazed link to rear of property between existing dwelling kitchen and existing outhouse.
Further information can be found on the district council’s planning pages. If you would like to respond formally to the council about any planning application, comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me. Comments may be made
online using the council’s public access web page (the link above);
Works on the A142 BP roundabout at Ely are currently ahead of schedule – and the Council will be bringing forward the carriageway surfacing which will now start on Monday 19 October for five nights.
For those five nights, all arms of the roundabout will be closed with access granted only to the frontages of the A10/A142 and the services area. Depending on where the works are taking place vehicles may be asked to travel the appropriate diversion route to access properties within the works area.
Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (image by Daniel Orme, after W. Denton – National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D8546, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55086682)
October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
According to his memoir, Olaudah Equiano was born in around 1745 in the Eboe region of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is today southern Nigeria. Enslaved as a child he was shipped to the Caribbean and sold as a slave to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more but bought his freedom in 1766, and for a while worked at sea including as part of an expedition to the Arctic to try to find a north-east passage to India.
On moving to London, he became active in the campaign against the slave trade, and was encouraged and financially supported by benefactors to write his life story.
In April 1792, Equiano married Susannah Cullen, a local woman, in St Andrew’s Church in Soham. The register containing the record of the marriage is held in the Cambridgeshire Archives. The couple settled locally and had two daughters who were baptised at the church in Soham. Equiano died in Westminster in 1797.
The Severan Tondo, a portrait showing Septimius Severus with his second wife Julia Domna and their two sons Caracalla and Geta.
October is Black History Month, so every day for the next 31 days I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
Septimius Severus has been described as the first black Roman Emperor. He was indeed Emperor of Rome, ruling from 193 to 211. Whether he could be described as ‘black’ is a matter of some debate – he was born in Leptis Magna in what is now Libya (one of my bucket list travel destinations!).
Roman remains at the Forum in Leptis Magna – image by Sasha Coachman / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
Septimius Severus travelled to Britain in 208, strengthening Hadrian’s Wall and reoccupying the Antonine Wall. In 209 he invaded Caledonia (modern Scotland) with an army of 50,000 men but fell fatally ill of an infectious disease in late 210 and died the following year in York.
(The painting above known as the Severan Tondo shows Septimius Severus with his wife and their two sons Caracalla and Geta. The erased face is said to be Geta, who was murdered by his brother Caracalla less than a year after their father’s death. Caracalla then announced a damnatio memoriae against his dead brother, which meant what it sounds like – a scrubbing out of all references to someone, with faces removed from portraits, names obliterated from monuments and official records.)
More about Septimius Severus at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septimius_Severus
It’s less than six months to the census – the population survey which takes place in the UK every ten years (years ending in an 1).
It takes a lot of work by a lot of people, as I remember from when I was a census enumerator in Essex for the 1991 census, going door to door to deliver the census forms and going back several times to remind those who had not completed them.
The Office of National Statistics has been considering how to run this exercise during a pandemic, and preparing for the particular challenges of early 2021.
The findings of the census play an important part in shaping all sorts of decisions, so it’s really vital to ensure it is as accurate as possible.
I’ve just registered for Solar Together Cambridgeshire – a new scheme for residents in partnership with Cambridgeshire County Council, offering high-quality solar panels and battery storage at a competitive price.
If you’re a homeowner, there’s still time to register – the scheme closes at midnight on Monday 5 October. Taking part is free and there is no obligation to get an installation. We already have solar panels on our roof, but one of the options under this scheme is to get a storage battery installed and connected up to your existing panels.
Solar Together Cambridgeshire uses the power of group-buying to bring households together to get high-quality solar panels and battery storage at a competitive price. If you’re interested:
Register before 6 October free of charge and without obligation. You will need to fill in details about your house and energy consumption.
An auction will be held on 6 October. Pre-vetted suppliers submit bids. The supplier who makes the best bid will win the auction.
From 26 October you will receive apersonal recommendation, based on your registration details.
You decide if you want to continue. If you accept, the installer will take care of the installation.
After the installation is completed, you will start saving money on your electricity bill by generating your own renewable energy.
If you need more information there’s a frequently asked questions section on the Solar Together website, or you can get in touch with Solar Together via the contact form. , or call 0800 048 8259 from 8:00AM to 5:00PM Monday to Friday.
The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.
20/00694/FUL Little Downham The Oaks 2J Tower Road Little Downham Single storey garage.
20/01225/FUL Little Downham 10 Orchard Estate Little Downham CB6 2TU Single storey rear extension.
20/01228/AGN Little Downham Laurel Farm Main Drove Little Downham Agricultural building for box potato store.
20/01235/FUL Mepal The Elms High Street Mepal New bay window to front of property and single storey rear and side extensions.
Further information can be found on the district council’s planning pages. If you would like to respond formally to the council about any planning application, comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me. Comments may be made
online using the council’s public access web page (the link above);
The Rule Britannia Blogathon is an event celebrating British cinema, hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts. This post is part of the 7th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon—an annual celebration of British film-making hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site.
(Note: this review contains numerous spoilers throughout)
The film starts without visuals—the voice of a counter-tenor singing in a style that places us firmly in the seventeenth century, and accompanied by a keyboard instrument of the period. But there’s nothing entertaining or relaxing here—the singing voice is strident, harsh, and every note feels like a knife.
As soon as the characters appear on screen, with their absurdly exaggerated powdered wigs and extravagant costume, that seventeenth-century feel is confirmed. It’s a clearly upper-class dinner party gathering in a country house, indulging in a series of scatological anecdotes about themselves and their neighbours—in one case the punch-line being ‘a watery death’.
We’re swiftly introduced to the Herbert family. Mrs Herbert is unhappily married to her unappealing husband who, we hear, is shortly to leave their house and gardens of Anstey, their lavish home in Wiltshire, for a fortnight away in Southampton. (The filming location is actually Groombridge Place in Kent.) Mrs Herbert is therefore to be left at home with her married daughter Mrs Talmann, along with her distant and arrogant Dutch husband Mr Talmann and his young nephew Augustus.
The year is 1694, six years after the accession to the British throne of William and Mary, and the Protestantism of the Low Countries, of which Mr Talmann is emblematic, is in the ascendant. We later learn that the reason his young nephew is living with him is that his father was killed in battle, and he was an ‘orphan’ because his mother is a Catholic and therefore an unsuitable parent. Political and religious micro-tensions run through the film, with reference to ‘Scottish sympathies’ and William III’s battles in Ireland four years earlier.
During Mr Herbert’s absence, mother and daughter decide to commission one of the guests, the draughtsman Mr Neville, to produce twelve drawings of the house and gardens as a gift for Mr Herbert on his return. The contract for this work is drawn up by the family’s lawyer Mr Noyes, in the presence of Mr Neville and Mrs Herbert, and the surprising terms include not just the fee of £8 per drawing, but the condition that Mrs Herbert will ‘agree to met Mr Neville in private to comply with his requests concerning his pleasure’.
Drawing quickly gets under way, with the voice of the narrator stepping in to list each drawing and Mr Neville’s instructions regarding the hours of work, and the presence or absence of people, livestock, and inanimate objects. (The narratorial list is a favourite device of Peter Greenaway, and can be seen in some of his early short films.) Throughout the remainder of the film, views of the house and gardens will be seen though the frame on a stand which Mr Neville sets up in each location. But what—or who—is really being ‘framed’?
Mr Neville’s drawings proceed, and we see them being drawn. Peter Greenaway started out as an artist, so the drawings are indeed his, as are the hands we see producing the sketches. The colour scheme of the film sets the black and white of the characters’ costumes and wigs against the bright green of the expansive gardens. The marvellous musical score by Michael Nyman, deconstructing themes by seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell, is perfect.
Mr Neville is in the ascendant, ordering members of the household about, and roughly and unkindly taking advantage of Mrs Herbert’s obligation to ‘comply with his requests concerning his pleasure’. We hear snippets of conversation, from which we learn that the impotent Mr Talmann expects his son (when and if he and his wife ever have one) to inherit Anstey. Mrs Herbert is for some reason eager to know which road her husband will return on from Southampton, and whether he had taken his French boots. Mr Neville has produced one drawing with Mr Talmann standing in the foreground, but without a face—the face of Mr Herbert will be superimposed when he returns, says Mr Neville, to which the cryptic response is ‘if he returns’.
To add to the growing sense that all is not what it seems, a naked man coloured to look like a statue is seen mysteriously creeping around the property—on the roof, in place of an obelisk, or pressed up against a wall. (The longer, four-hour, first cut of the film apparently makes it clearer what role this character plays). A ladder has been placed against one wall of the house where it has no place to be, and various items of clothing and linen have been disposed around the grounds.
Mrs Herbert is increasingly unhappy with the terms of her agreement with Mr Neville and tells him that the contract is void. Mr Neville makes the obvious response that just as it takes two people to make a contract, it takes two to undo it. While Mr Neville yet again takes his pleasure of Mrs Herbert, he asks her what will happen if there is no male heir to Anstey, to which she replies that she ‘do[es] not like to think of it’. The property was originally hers, and it’s 1694, the year of the Married Women’s Property Act which would entitle her or her daughter to Anstey in their own right, but, she tells Mr Neville, Mr Herbert does not support the idea of married women owning property.
The feeling of unease continues to spread. Mrs Herbert was, we learn, originally promised to the family lawyer, Mr Noyes, who might well have reason to wish Mr Herbert dead. There is some discussion about whether the body will be found that inhabited the clothes strewn around the grounds, or whether they will lead to a corpse. Is Mr Herbert in Southampton after all? And, Mrs Talmann tells Mr Neville, ‘perhaps you have taken a great deal on trust’.
The pivotal conversation between Mrs Talmann and Mr Neville turns the story significantly at this point. In a mirror image of Mr Neville’s contract with Mrs Herbert, Mr Neville is now contracted to Mrs Talmann for the remaining six drawings, and to comply with her requests concerning her pleasure. He completes his task and leaves Anstey.
But Mr Herbert’s horse has been found riderless on the road to Southampton, and it’s not too long before a body is dredged from the water on the one side of the house Mr Neville had omitted from his schedule of drawings. Mr Noyes is concerned that he will be framed for the murder of Mr Herbert, and offers Mrs Herbert to trade the contracts—the evidence of her infidelity—for the drawings. Mr and Mrs Talmann have a heated argument in which she upbraids him for his impotence, and he retaliates with comments about her infidelity with Mr Neville.
Meanwhile Mr Neville has returned and offers to undertake a thirteenth drawing, of the south aspect of the house where the body was found in the water. While seated there in the dark of the evening, his drawing complete and about to eat a pineapple, he is approached and surrounded by Mr Talmann, Mr Noyes, and others, all masked, who beat him to the ground, burn out his eyes with their torches, club him to death, and tip him in the water. The killers departed, the naked statue appears, and takes a large bite out of the pineapple.
This is one of Greenaway’s finest films, a superb and artful twist on the English country house murder mystery with stunning visuals and musical score. The cutting of the footage to one and three quarter hours from its original four means that a number of loose ends aren’t tied up, which lends even more of a sense of intrigue.
The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.
20/00909/FUL Little Downham 88 Cannon Street Little Downham CB6 2SS Single storey rear extension.
20/01144/FUL Little Downham Land adjacent 2A Black Bank Road Little Downham To erect 2 industrial units to let – Class B1/B2 light industrial.
20/01199/FUL Little Downham 7 and 9 Main Street Pymoor CB6 2ED Proposed two storey rear extension and alterations to 7-9 Main Street, including new access and parking area.
20/01134/FUL Mepal The Granary Whitegate Farm Witcham Road Mepal Construction of two detached single storey dwellings previously part of application 19/01634/OUT.
20/01122/FUL Sutton 6 Eastwood Close Sutton CB6 2RH Porch extension.
20/00992/FUL Sutton 2 Sutton Park Sutton CB6 2RP Single storey rear extension and first floor extension above existing garage.
20/01169/RMM Sutton Land to the rear of Garden Close Sutton CB6 2RF Reserved matters for outline planning application 17/01445/OUM for erection of up to 53 houses to include public open space and details relating to access.
20/01152/FUL Witchford 27 Granary End Witchford CB6 2XF Two storey rear extension.
Further information can be found on the district council’s planning pages. If you would like to respond formally to the council about any planning application, comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me. Comments may be made
online using the council’s public access web page (the link above);
