WISBECH Town Council leader Roger Green phones with news of an important meeting on Monday when the council will be hearing the latest developments from a county council engineer on the future of Wisbech Market Place. Roger is keen that the many members

WISBECH Town Council leader Roger Green phones with news of an important meeting on Monday when the council will be hearing the latest developments from a county council engineer on the future of Wisbech Market Place.

Roger is keen that the many members of the public who keep asking him for information, and anyone else come to that, should attend. I pass on the information willingly.

Whilst chatting, Roger is anxious to know if I am descended from a certain Nicholas Breakspear who was born at Newton near Wisbech and went on to become, in the 12th century, the only English-born Pope.

It is an interesting conundrum, Roger, that the good lady and myself will devote some time to this weekend: I had always rather fancied I was descended from the Oxfordshire brewery that shares my name, but a Pope? That would, indeed, be something else.

AMONG the fall-out from the disgraced MBE fraudster, Michael Eke (awaiting sentencing on 16 charges), comes an interesting perspective from Tommy Gee of Norfolk.

He takes up the issue of whether Eke, at 38, was one of the youngest people to be made an MBE.

Not a bit of it, says Tommy, who recalls that his mother, born in 1892, received "a genuine MBE for organising parcels for POWs in Stalags around Berlin at the end of the first world war when she was 27."

SHOULD you be one of those with a passion to don a costume to resemble a greyhound, and to compound that desire by taking part in a race, then here's the very thing.

Peterborough Greyhound Stadium and Sue Ryder Care's Thorpe Hall Hospice have teamed up to host a human dog race, "giving local people a chance to experience the thrill of greyhound racing...as a dog!"

A spokesman for Sue Ryder believes " runners will certainly look the part as they pant their way to the finishing line with spectators able to place bets on their favourites to win."

The race takes place on Sunday September 17 with races for men (dogs), women (dams), kids (puppies), as well as a number of corporate races, offering businesses the opportunity to buy a race.

To sign up, call 01733 330060.'

STRANGE lot, the Church of England. Which other organisation would announce - as the church has done in this month's diocesan magazine - that a woman is "to withdraw from her post" while the rest of us would, properly, say she had quit.