This makes sense. There is no clear dividing line between the villages although residents face each other across Mill Lane, Water Lane and Station Road. Impington Village College serves both villages. Histon Football Club plays in Impington and, perhaps wrongly, the recreation ground is referred to as the Histon Rec. The guided bus stop is divided into a Histon stop (inbound) and an Impington one (outbound) although the station itself is in Histon.

Most of the shops are in Histon; the exception is the excellent Station Stores. So are all but one of the pubs. But the churches are split: the Methodist and Baptist chapels are in Histon but the Salvation Army Citadel is in Impington; both parishes have, appropriately, their own parish church. Most of the employment too is in Histon: what remains of the Chivers operation, it is now Premier Foods, and the offices of Vision Park but the headquarters of the International Whaling Commission is in Impington. On the housing side new developments recently have been in Impington and of course King’s Meadows south of the A14 is technically in Impington as was, until recently, the new community of Orchard Park.

It is one community and it’s characterised by being close to Cambridge but not of Cambridge. It’s heavily middle class with its fair share of the upwardly mobile. It’s relatively affluent (it is in South Cambs after all) and although there is crime it’s hardly endemic. Living there is pretty good. But there’s something missing …

The are 6 pubs in total and although they all have to some degree and quality served food you’d never call any of them a gastropub. And there’s an Indian and a Chinese and an excellent fish and chip shop. But gastronomically it’s not great. But is that changing?

I had a drink in the Rose and Crown late last year and saw that it had changed. It used to be pretty gloomy and a typical boozer: little to recommend it. Now it’s been opened up, there are bright lights and there’s a restaurant area with good solid tables and chairs. There’s a roaring fire and thankfully few distracting decorations. The pub area is still there and it’s still a pub.

Worryingly I found out that the changes took place early in 2011 but if I had not have visited I would not have found about about it although I did get a flier late December with details. Someone needs to be thinking about marketing. There is a web-site www.rosenandcrownhiston.com but the reference on TripAdvisor has it in Cambridge.

I went with the wife last week for supper.

The menu was limited and on the blackboard which implies that it changes and that the food should be fresh. I had fish and chips (it was Thursday) and the wife had a curry. The former was just right, crispy beer batter and generous real chips. The latter was what you’d expect from a non-Indian restaurant: bland.  There was a nice choice of starters and deserts (the latter includes a strawberry cheesecake but that would really have killed my new year weight loss regime), all the beers you’d expect in a pub and wines by the glass. The Sauvignon Blanc I had was drinkable.

If the Rose and Crown aspires to be a gastropub, and I hope it does because that’s what I think Histon needs, it’s still on the bottom rung. But even as it is it is what Histon needs. All power to it!

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 33 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

I say this because yesterday I went to the Glee Club in Birmingham. It’s a comedy club. In fact there are others in Birmingham and the Glee Club itself is a chain with other clubs in Nottingham, Cardiff and Oxford. Click here for its web-site. As I sat in the audience I just couldn’t imagine a similar venue in Cambridge. And it’s not a university thing. My friends from Shrewsbury, Telford and Ludlow couldn’t imagine those towns having comedy clubs either.

There’s an implication here of course viz Cambridge is a big town (or village if you prefer) and Oxford is a small city. I’ll go with that. Cambridge is more dominated by the university than is Oxford and is, I explain to people, much nicer to visit. It’s more compact and the river is more intimately a part of the city. You can walk around it.

I was at the Glee Club with a bunch of people from Shropshire and Herefordshire because we all work at Labfax and this was our Xmas party. We’ve just finished the first quarter of our financial year and it’s been pretty good so we could relax a little and celebrate. But we also know it’s going to be tough to continue being successful into 2012.

I hadn’t wanted to go but the lady who is one of my co-directors insisted. A 3 line whip and the threat of a slapped wrist and I felt obliged to go so on Friday afternoon I caught the cross-country train to Birmingham. I like cross-country trains, they do what it says on the can, they take you cross-country so you don’t just go to Birmingham. First of all you head east to Ely; then it’s north via Peterborough to Leicester; and finally it’s west to Birmingham.

Our evening at the Glee Club included dinner. It was self-service and since it was the first Xmas dinner of the year it meant turkey. Turkey can be tasteless and this was. Curiously it was sitting in what looked like turkey consome which I guess was there to keep it moist. But if you think of turkey as a platform for more tasty fare, rather like steam-baked white bread, it was well complemented by sausage and bacon, stuffing, veggies which were not over-cooked and quite acceptable gravy. And for those who didn’t want turkey there was meat. I think it was beef but it might have been something else; it looked like the toughest, driest, most well-done meat I’ve ever seen.

There was also desert: protiferoles, cheese cake and cheese and biscuits. My cheese cake was fine, Colin’s cheeses were first class, especially the Stilton. And we had a half way decent Merlot to drink so not a disaster. Anyone who’d grown up with school dinners in the 50s and 60s would find it quite palatable.

But back to the main event: I’ve seen bits of comedy clubs on the TV. Some of the acts are very professional and clearly well rehearsed but I’ve always been suspicious of the shots of the audience in fits. Yesterday I got to see how it really works in the flesh.

MC on the night was Mark Olver and he was very good. I guess comedians like him have basic routines which they stitch around people they pick out in the audience but he seemed to do it spontaneously and rather well. And yes we were sometimes in stitches. There were two others whose names escape me but were also fine entertainment.

The big surprise though was the headline act: Sam Wills ‘the boy with tape on his face’ who is a mime. Click here for Sam’s web-site. Sam got just as much laughter as the others and without saying a word. He involved several members of the audience but gently. None was humiliated and the show ended with a good feeling all round.

Live at the Apollo it was not and Mark is hardly Michael McIntyre but it was a good evening. After that there was little left for Colin and I (the more mature members of our party) to do but to pop into Los Iguanas and do a little light posing. We drank rum cocktails out of martini glasses and feel that we had just a little in common with Birmingham’s night life.

We were in Wentbridge for a wedding, my daughter’s to long-term boyfriend Alex. Clare is in the centre of the photo, Alex is on the right. The service was to be at the Church of St John the Evangelist followed by the reception at Wentbridge House, a 4 start family run hotel just 200m walk from the church. We stayed at the hotel.

It’s not often that you have a daughter married and for me this was the first, and hopefully last, time so it had to go well and be done right. So we headed up the A1 from Cambridge the day before for the rehearsal. After all as father of the bride I had a speaking role. Click here for a Steve Martin clip from Father of the Bride when he confronts this challenge. After the rehearsal it was time to eat and because we’d skipped lunch we enjoyed cream teas on the lawn, it was Thursday and the sun was shining. Check out the photo.

That evening we checked out the village pub, the Blue Bell, which does meals. In South Cambs it might aspire to being a gastropub but I suspect that they don’t do gastro in Yorkshire, just pub food.  The Blue Bell is very popular and it turned over 120 covers the evening we were there. The service was slick, the portions were generous (it seems a matter of pride that no square millimetre of plate should be exposed) and there was a choice of half way decent wines by the glass, mine was a Chilean Merlot. But was the food more quantity than quality? My haddock and chips was fine but perhaps not up to Histon Frier standard and the three chicken dishes although all different were similar. However number one son pronounced himself fully satisfied with his rare steak. And you can’t really complain when 5 of us ate for less than it cost the wife and I in one of those South Cambs gastropubs last Saturday.

The wedding was on Friday. We woke to overcast skies and a forecast of rain. The wedding was set for 2pm so there was plenty of time for rain to soak the lawns of the hotel and turn the lane to the church into a muddy path. But there was no point fretting. There was plenty to do besides worrying about the weather. Or at least there was for the ladies: hair to be done, nails to be painted, faces to be made-up and, for the bride and her bridesmaids, posh frocks to be put on. For the men it was morning suit but, hey, that doesn’t take forever. Alex went to play golf with the best man.

The morning passed without rain. Guests arrived. Lots from the locality (Clare and Alex work in Leeds), a bunch from Nottingham and points west (Alex’ family). Our lot travelled further: from Indonesia, Cambridge (were we the only southerners there?), Switzerland and the Netherlands and Wales (did that make me a double minority?). The photographer turned up at 1230 and asked to photograph the bride’s dress ‘before she put it on’. Very strange but he seemed to know what he was doing and he was active for the next 8 hours. Click here to check him out.

1345 and it still hadn’t rained and everyone was at or on the way to the church except me and Clare and the bridesmaids so it was time to go.

The service went off without a hitch. The vicar, the Rev Adrian Judd, was superb, booming voice for the congregation and sotto voce to ensure that Clare and Alex knew what was going on. I remembered my line , the registration papers were signed and soon we were out and the deed had been done. And it still wasn’t raining so more photographs, a little sustainable confetti and it was back to the hotel for drinks on the lawn.

This was the time for the photographer to earn his fee. There were 60 or so guests and he seemed to be doing his best to photograph everyone in combination with everyone else. I guess you can do this with digital so we had the bride’s family, the groom’s family, just the men, just the women, just those with posh frocks and penguin suits, just those without … and it went on. It still didn’t rain and we started to talk about the light being better for photography than sunlight … it doesn’t make people squint and the greens look more natural!

1630 and it was time for breakfast: the wedding breakfast and my big starring role which I’d tried to pretend wasn’t really going to happen. First speech up: father of the bride. I’d sort of known that it was inevitable and I’d done a little bit of thinking about it and I’d typed something up but it was a big deal and the last thing I wanted was to embarrass Clare. I showed it to number one son on the morning and he said it was OK so I guessed that I had something to go with.

The food was fine although I didn’t have much appetite and I drank little. It would be bad enough to embarrass Clare without slurring my words. I asked for a PA system and then decided not to use it. I joked about using PowerPoint and the meal took an age. I ordered a beer to be on hand for when I’d finished. And it started to rain but that didn’t matter we  were indoors.

Speech time came and went. I trembled and ad libbed when I shouldn’t have done. People laughed in the right places and clapped as well. They even laughed at other times and clapped a bit more. It seemed to go well. I coined one special concept: the divide between holding your daughter’s hand and her talking your arm: happens somewhere in her teens. I sat down, hands shaking. The wife said it was fine, Clare only said ‘oh no’ once and several people came up to me afterwards to say well done. I guess I was OK.

After that it was easy although I could have done without the disco. This morning there were lots of thank yous, as father of the bride I also had a financial stake in the day, and good byes and several promises, which would be broken, to meet up again soon. 2 days in Wentbridge, hardly likely to be repeated. For my part at least. Father of the bride, job done.

Click here for photos of the weddding and subsequent events.

In Cambridge we’re lucky. In respect of most things but including health care. In South Cambs we are measured as having well above average health anyway and although Addenbrookes may not be the friendliest hospital it is good. And this week I, or to be more precise, my wife, came face to face with the NHS in the persona of Addenbrookes.

Addenbrookes of course is the United Nations. I don’t know how many nationalities are employed there but it’s a lot. I worry that maybe there’s more Filipino nurses there than there are left in Manila. And there’s plenty of Brits too and given that it’s Addenbrookes I guess they’re the best.

The NHS is about waiting. Forget about the famous 18 week targets to get an appointment. That’s manageable. Once you know the day you just plan around it. The waiting I’m talking about is the waiting when you’re there. There’s no information and who knows how long you might have to wait. My wife went in for a couple of tests and ended up staying 2 nights … most of the time she was there she was just waiting.

The waiting generally is to see a doctor or to use some fancy kit. And the idea is that if people wait for them then they can be utilised most efficiently . Fair enough. But what is frustrating is not the waiting per se but the lack of information about how long you’re going have to wait. It’s like waiting for the gas man to turn up or for Comet to make a delivery when all it can tell you is the day (although they’re generally better now and tell you whether it’s before or after lunch).

If the doctor is a scarce resource he or she surely has a program to which he or she works. In which case can’t this be visible? Can’t some smart NHS system allow a doctor to be ‘tracked’ like a parcel at FedEx. Then the patient would know that it had time to do something else in the meantime instead of waiting in anticipation and thinking that every approaching set of footsteps is the doctor.

That’s half of the waiting problem. The other is another scarce resource. The hospital bed. Patients wait on beds and as long as one is occupied it’s blocked. Thus comparatively healthy waiting patients are blocking beds for other patients who might have more need of them. I don’t have a simple solution to that one except to point out that the absence of information for my wife turned her from an out-patient into an in-patient and that’s what ended up blocking the bed for 2 nights.

The people who work at Addenbrookes are first class, the facilities are first class and the technology and methods are first class. Neither I nor my wife can complain. But as we all know there are inefficiencies buried in the system which need to be driven out. But the way to do that is not to privatise but to employ the best people and give them a mission.

It all began with a the story of a wasp sting. I’d got one on the elbow on Tuesday and so, courtesy of an allergic reaction, I’d had a miserable mid-week but by Saturday was OK again. It transpires that the Italian for wasp is vespa, all well and good and a logical move for our conversation given that we were, as usual, at Don Pasquale, having breakfast. This was confirmed by a splendid feisty Italian lady at the next table. And so, someone asked: ‘what’s a Lambretta?’ ‘Oh that’s a motor scooter’. I guess there’s nothing more to say.

In the evening we went out for dinner. The wife wanted Indian and I wanted a change from the Castle Hill concentration. I also wanted to go a little up market and not simply pay a low price for a formulaic Indian menu.

I consulted Local Secrets (www.localsecrets.com) and found Zara in Great Shelford so we gave it a try. Actually I also thought that there was a discount voucher which I could use but when I printed it off it told me ‘only weekdays’.

Zara snuggles up close to the railway station in Great Shelford (perhaps someone can do similar to the station building in Histon). It’s long and thin and it’s bright, white and cheerful with fresh flowers, linen table cloths and smart cutlery.  And it was full with lots of table turnover and continuous traffic. So far so good. And I wasn’t put off by being spotted by Charlie Nightingale, South Cambs district councillor of the other persuasion, who asked me if I had my passport with me to venture south of Cambridge.

The menu is fine. There’s no getting away from the formulaic bit but there’s plenty of ‘specialties’ and the formulae are largely on the back page. Prices are higher that usual which is a good sign!

The wife had a Pathila Lamb and I had Chicken Jaupuri. We added bhindi (okra) and brinjal (aubergine) bhajee. The mix was good but perhaps not as hot as we claim to prefer. The portions were fine and all washed down with a couple of pints of Mr Kingfisher’s best draft. And for those who’d prefer the grape there’s a decent wine list, not over-expensive and drinkable choices by the glass. The service was good and competent , it generally is in Indian restaurants. The meal was wrapped up with a free kahlua like drink and a mix of mints (After Eights, Imperials and those little ones which get stuck in your teeth), a nice touch.

This year’s dinner was again at St John’s and the lecturer was Kevin Bishop who glories in the job title of ‘Vice President of Brand System and Workforce Enablement for IBM Worldwide’. Kevin is an IBM veteran but being in Cambridge was a return home, Kevin took a degree in Natural Sciences at the university.

However: important matters first, how was the dinner?

The evening had a good start. The sun was shining and we were able to enjoy pre-dinner drinks without sheltering from the rain which seems to be the usual practice at theses events. And dinner itself was pretty good. You can eat well at the Cambridge colleges but they also offer lower price options and then all you get is chicken and college claret. But the Marketing College had spec’d up and dinner was good.

The gravadlax was fine (OK don’t expect good gravadlax in the UK, see my previous blogpost) and that was followed by excellent lamb (a canon of lamb). Desert was a range of interesting cheeses, although the waiters were a little miserly with the portions, and a bowl of fruit. There was also a plate of excellent truffles with the inevitably mediocre coffee. And the wines were good too; I seem to recall a decent chardonnay followed by an equally decent cabernet sauvignon. Pretty safe but neither was of the ‘college’ variety.

Kevin spoke of the ‘new’ future of marketing being an update on the very first lecture which was simply on the ‘future of marketing’ given by Philip Kotler no less. The lecture was spirited and engaging, Kevin could certainly speak for Britain, but perhaps disappointing. He talked about the fundamentals that will underpin marketing in the days of social media. And what disappointed me is not that the fundamentals are not important, just that they are not new and that social media etc simply increase their importance.

These two fundamentals are ‘authenticity’ and ‘advocacy’.

Authenticity is about your brand as your want it to be being rooted in corporate character. If it’s not you will fail (brand dissonance; click here for a related post on my business blog). Kevin quoted Abraham Lincoln ‘Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing’ which is very apposite.

Advocacy is about your customers (and other stakeholders) representing you and selling for you. Nothing new again; I’ve got slides of the ‘customer ladder’ in which leads go through the journey of becoming customers and then advocates. What Kevin did reveal however was the process within the stakeholder whereby he/she goes from belief to action to confidence to advocacy.

The big issue though which Kevin highlighted is that social media etc accelerate the spread of information and that ‘bad branding’ can be fatal much more quickly and ‘good advocacy’ can be leveraged with little hard investment. Kevin put all of this into a solid IBM context which made it all the more credible.

Click here for an interesting interview with Kevin on the subject of brands at Interbrand.

After weeks of dry weather with lots of sun we finally got what the farmers have been asking for this week. First the splendid Histon + Impington open gardens event was rained off last Sunday. And yesterday it started raining in the middle of the afternoon and just went on and on. So it wasn’t a matter of alfresco dining but of huddling under umbrellas at Newmarket.

I’m not what you’d call a regular race goer. I like the occasion but I’m a little to risk averse when it comes to my own money to get much of a buzz from betting. However I do go sometimes. Way back in the 70s I remember a splendid afternoon at Chester Races with old school friend Wicked Uncle John (that’s my kids’ uncle not mine) when we financed an afternoon drinking Guinness with modest winnings and a successful forecast on the last race.

Since then I’ve been to racing in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Dallas, Ascot and Cottenham. That’s a nice eclectic mix. And so last night it was off to Newmarket.

Despite the rain it was splendid. Or perhaps because of the rain. No doubt many people stayed away so there were no queues, the stewards were helpful  and order was maintained. And because of the rain you could argue that there was something special in the display of umbrellas. We got to sit in the grandstand, we’d actually splashed out on the Premier Enclosure, we place some bets and we dined at Mozart’s Bistro.

Mozart’s Bistro would have been a pleasure on a warm summer’s evening. Last night it was a little drafty. However it has an elegant canvas sail roof and we sat away from the prevailing wind so remained dry. The service was prompt, cheerful and efficient. Can’t complain about that.

It’s not exactly haute cuisine although portion sizes are small indicating some pretension. We started with gravadlax (note to self: don’t expect to be bowled over by gravadlax in the UK; if you’ve tried it in Sweden you’re going to be disappointed), which tasted more smoked than marinated, and duck. Then we both had rump of lamb. Full marks to Mozart’s for asking us how we wanted the lamb but it was a digital choice between pink and not pink. I chose the pink and it was fine. The wife went for the not pink she said afterwards that she should have remembered that in the UK not pink really does mean not pink.

There seemed to be a good if not inexpensive wine list but a disappointing choice by the glass: house wine only. However both the white ‘French chardonnay’ and the red ‘French Shiraz’ were fine. All in all not a disappointment.

The racing itself was fun to watch. The horses thundered, the punters cheered and celebrated and the favourites, by and large, seemed to win. This put paid to my sophisticated betting strategy: bet each way on second favourites. That’s fine if they occasionally win. Not so good if all you’re picking up is place winnings at modest odds. So we ended up £11 down on the night.

Jools Holland came on at about 9.30 and played for an hour or so. His orchestra was splendid with the brass much in evidence. There were 3 vocalists: Louise Marshall, ‘special guest’ Sandie Shaw and ‘queen of boogie’ Ruby Turner.

Sandie Shaw must be the wrong side of 60, I was at uni when she won Eurovision with ‘Puppet’, but she dressed like she would have done in her heyday. From a distance she looked pretty good. Her medley of 4 songs included a dreadful dirge-like rendition of Puppet but finished with a rousing ‘Always something there to remind me’.

But star of the night and the big take away for me was Ruby Turner. Ruby’s got a big voice and worked really well with the orchestra. Despite the rain and the umbrellas the crowd was bopping on the grass as Ruby sang. And Jools as ever was enthusisatic about everything including te rain.

Great evening; Newmarket music is to be recommended. and 2 ticks out of 3 isn’t bad.

I’ve been visiting Germany since 1979 when I started work with Dow Chemical based in Switzerland. I had a succession of European jobs with Dow and it was impossible to do any of them without visiting Germany frequently and the first three that I had gave me a view of the country from 3 different, albeit chemical viewpoints.

Job number 1 was ‘distribution planning and development manager’ which required me to visit all Dow’s manufacturing sites one of which is at Stade, west of Hamburg. Although I would generally stay overnight in or close to Stade I would occasionally stay in Hamburg and have done so many times since. It’s a classy city with an international outlook which comes with it being a trading city. It’s got some fine hotels, I stayed once at the Atlantic where the doors to the bedrooms are wide enough to accommodate a sea captain’s trunk, and good restaurants; Hamburg may be the best place to eat Dover sole.

My next job was as a purchasing manager and if you’re in purchasing in the chemicals industry that means visiting the Rühr Gebeit and I spent lots of time visiting the big 3 German chemical companies and several others as well. I spent a lot of time in Dusseldorf which in those days was the Japanese capital of Europe so it was a great place to get Japanese food.

The 3rd job was as a product marketing manager for a range of specialty chemicals including Methocel cellulose ethers. It was one of the best times of my life as I worked with an excellent team to turn around a failing business and then for it to be hailed as one of the company’s star performers. Methocel itself is sold in a range of applications from paint to foodstuffs but its biggest market is in building materials where it’s a key component in spray plaster and tile adhesive. And because Germany is Europe’s biggest market for such products I spent lots of time there again, this time visiting customers and developing an appropriate vocabulary .

Living in Switzerland it was a challenge to learn ‘real’ German but I did my best and by the end of the 80s I reckoned I could communicate pretty fluently about the building industry on the one hand and hip ailments on the other, having developed a severe case of osteoarthritis which necessitated a hip replacement shortly afterwards.

After my Dow days I’ve generally had reasons to go to Germany but being more UK focussed now the opportunities are not so frequent so I was pleased to have the excuse last week and I was pleased to see that, substantially, nothing has changed.

The Villa Ratingen is a good middle class German hotel: efficient check-in tolerant of my imperfect German, registration already completed from my on-line reservation (why don’t they do that in the UK?), a big, light comfortable room and a fully tiled bathroom with a Grohe shower.

The restaurant is Italian and the service was prompt and efficient (of course). I enjoyed a mixed anti-pasta from the buffet, veal with mushrooms and ham (only eat veal in German-speaking countries and by the same token don’t eat red meat there) and strawberries with cream. Nothing to complain about but more quantity than quality. The Germans think they do Italian food well but they do it in a uniquely German way. To drink I had an excellent Pils (once more, of course) but the wine was a disappointment with only Sicilian wines available by the glass. The grappa afterwards made amends although I could have done without the free of charge top-up. It seemed a good idea at the time but next day …

Trainline (www.thtrainline.com) offered me a ticket for about £130 which seemed a bit steep, However individual tickets direct from the web-sites of  the train operating companies got me a package with my railcard for just £30, first class!

EasyJet was on time and I got to St Pancras with an hour to spare . There didn’t seem much prospect of any more than a snack on the train so I looked for somewhere to eat. St Pancras boasts the longest champagne bar in Europe and although I wasn’t going to eat there there is a splendid brasserie right next to it: Searcy’s St Pancras Grand (www.searcys.co.uk).

In an hour I wasn’t going to eat much so I stuck to a main course and since it was Friday I had fish and chips. It was excellent. It was lightly battered, perhaps not as crunchy as the Histon Frier, and the fish was fresh, moist and suitably fishy. I washed it down with a Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc (surprise, surprise) and followed that with an espresso. No problem about this restaurant having a proper coffee machine. The service was slick and speedy, the ambience classy, and it was not exactly cheap. But for a treat on a Friday it was just right and think about what I saved on the train fare!

My weekend continued in Sheffield where I enjoyed two meals at Ask! Normally that would be nothing to write home about but on both occasions the waiter asked ‘how did you enjoy your meal’. None of the ‘is everything OK’ rubbish which I’ve blogged about before (click here)  which tells the restaurant nothing but a good honest open question which really can provide valuable information. Well done Ask!

My journey home on Sunday was again by train: £13. I reckon the round trip at about £45 was pretty good value for money and with every (all three) trains being on time it was a pretty satisfactory experience.