Work to resurface a section of the B1249 at Churchend Bridge, North Frodingham will be carried out on Sunday 17 March.

The work involves replacing the existing tarmac with a new surface with high skid resistance properties, increasing its overall lifespan and reducing future maintenance costs.

Unfortunately, because of the narrow width of the road, it will be necessary to close it to through traffic, although access will be maintained for emergency vehicles. A diversion will be signed between Brigham crossroads and Beeford, via Foston.

The work is being carried out on a Sunday to minimise disruption to the school, bus services, commuter traffic and residents along the diversion route. It will take place between 6am and 6pm and it is hoped to complete it in one day.

East Riding of Yorkshire Council Streetscene Services has been appointed to undertake the work.

A FIRE broke out in Driffield on Sunday evening but was quickly responded to by the emergency services.

At 17.26 on Sunday March 3 Humberside Fire and Rescue Service received a call to a car fire in Church Lane, Little Driffield, and deployed one engine from Driffield Fire Station.

The call was swiftly resolved.

Swift Group, the UK’s No.1 manufacturer of Caravans, Motorhomes and Holiday Homes has made a strong start to the New Year with encouraging sales figures ahead of last years from the major shows in Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham.

The move back to the NEC in Birmingham for the February show proved to be highly successful with sales of touring caravans and motorhomes reaching nearly £13 million.

The star performers are still the new lighter but highly specified Challenger and Eccles SE ranges and outstanding value for money Sprite models which have helped take Swift Group’s overall caravan market share to over 41%.

Motorhomes saw the trend towards more cost effective motorhomes continue with the Escape range and its two new layouts selling well. Offers on high specification packs also made the companies higher motorhome ranges a very attractive buy.

On the holiday home front, the company’s new venture in to the lodge market with the new Champagne Lodge was very well received, adding a very competitively priced holiday home into this sector.

The radical Colour Concept caravan, designed by the Swift Group to explore interior design to reflect modern day living styles also proved to be a key attraction on the NEC stand. Modern painted look furniture with no wood, mood lighting, patterned wall coverings and accent floor rugs were just some of the very different features, to the traditional touring caravan, on show to gauge customer reactions.

Over 600 customers took the time to let Swift know their thoughts by filling in a questionnaire and Swift will be taking this valuable insight to provide customers with even more appealing products for the future.

“Shows are a great place for customers to see products from a range of manufacturers all in one place. With outstanding specification at the right price and great show offers it is encouraging to see that Swift Group products are being chosen by so many customers.

A large part of this result is due to the fantastic effort put in by the design team at Swift Group to keep us at the fore front of leisure vehicle design and by our dealers, sales and customer service staff during the shows.” Nick Page, Commercial Director of the Swift Group commented.

Revolutions can occur in the most extraordinary places ... and in the most extraordinary ways.

From small acts of defiance to a national uprising, there comes a tipping point when change becomes inevitable.

The Mussel Feast, a German modern classic inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, springs from the sophisticated stable at Peirene Press, a London-based publisher which specialises in bringing the best of European fiction to English-speaking audiences.

The first in Peirene’s new 2013 ‘Turning Point’ series, Birgit Vanderbeke’s striking novella, written in the form of a monologue, is a true literary banquet – an extraordinary drama played out over one revolutionary evening in the life of a German family.

First published in 1990, the book has never been out of print and is on all high school curricula in Germany but has never been translated into English... until now.

Our narrator is a nameless teenage girl who sits at the dinner table with her mother and younger brother as they wait for the father to come home, hopefully with a new work promotion in the bag.

The harassed mother has been cooking up a huge bowl of mussels even though no one in the family likes them except her husband. But something’s not right. He’s late, and he always arrives back at 6pm on the dot.

As the three of them contemplate the rapidly cooling mussels and the palpable tension created by father’s no-show, their back story slowly unfolds in ever decreasing circles of throwaway lines and sinister allusions.

Because this absent man is no standard father and husband. Little by little, we learn that he is an intransigent, oppressive and cruel bully who keeps his wife and children subjugated by his disturbing notions of how a ‘proper family’ should look and act.

The family have fled from East to West Germany and he has brought with him deep grievances, a ruthless determination to prosper and an obsession with status.

Small incidents and acts of violence, stirred almost carelessly into the narrative, reveal a chilling, bigger picture. His family are an ‘endless disappointment’ – his mother ‘smells’ of poverty, his wife is too dowdy and likes music which he regards as ‘pure excess,’ his daughter too stubborn and insubordinate, and his son too ‘wimpish.’

So while the girl’s mother reverts to ‘wifey mode’ and stores her violin in a cold wardrobe, his desperate children are left wondering what bones they might break if they jumped from the flat’s first-floor balcony.

But, as the evening wears on, the family become emboldened by the father’s unusual absence and ‘at once everything is different... people who were once stuck together fall apart, all hell breaks loose.’

Translator Jamie Bulloch has done a sterling and sympathetic job to bring us the essence of a highly nuanced story, packed with significant metaphors and colloquialisms, without once losing the flow and meaning of the original text.

Peirene’s Meike Ziervogel reveals that this was the first of her publishing house’s books to make her laugh out loud and it is easy to see why. The inflexible logic of the authoritarian father’s mind leaves him wide open to bizarre and humorous contradictions, now pounced on with glee by his dissenting daughter.

But The Mussel Feast also serves up moments of incredible poignancy and shocking, understated violence, all side dishes to a subtle and yet powerfully affecting portrayal of domestic tyranny.

Vanderbeke’s brilliantly clever sign-off confirms both the family’s turning point and the optimism that springs from revolutionary freedom, whether that is achieved on the home front or the world stage.

Astute, darkly funny, provocative, often uncomfortable in its devastating depiction of patriarchal oppression but ultimately uplifting, The Mussel Feast provides plenty of food for thought.

(Peirene, paperback, £10)

POLICE are seeking witnesses to an incident which happened at 2.50pm on Thursday February 28 2013 at the EE WHY service station, Thornholme.

A 22 year old man was arrested following the incident which involved a 35 year old man being injured due to a collision with a grey Audi A4 on the forecourt of the service station.

The arrested man has since been released on bail pending further enquiries.

The man driving the Audi is believed to have had a dispute over payment for petrol at the service station prior to the incident.

If you were in the area at the time of the incident and are able to give any information in connection with events taking place both inside the service station, and on the forecourt, you are asked to call Humberside Police on the non emergency number 101 quoting crime number 1960519.

Alternatively, calls can be made to Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

A PANTOMIME dame is set to take part in a hair-raising fund-raiser for Comic Relief.

Dave Deever, who will don the dame’s garish costume at Forgetmeline’s 28th annual panto in Sledmere, will shave off his beard for charity before stepping into the spotlight.

Angela Burton, show producer, said: “It is going to be a really fun night. There will be a collection tin there on the night if anyone wants to donate.”

In addition a percentage of the money gathered on the night will be donated to Comic Relief.

The panto will kick off on Thursday March 14 and runs until Saturday March 16 at Sledmere village hall. Tickets are £7 for adults and £5 for concessions. For more information contact Angela on 01377 267369.

FUNDRAISERS hit the streets to generate support for a national cancer charity in Driffield last Thursday.

Lynn Hall and Carole Bullock collected donations from the public on Thursday February 28 in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care.

The charity provides care to terminally ill patients in their own homes or in its hospices while supporting families.

A look ahead to the greatest week of jumps racing in the world -- with our resident tipster and expert, Scoop Racing (Richard Silverwood).

THE month of March means nothing else to those of us passionate about racing.

It’s time for the incomparable Cheltenham Festival. Four days of the best jumps racing anywhere on the planet.

A time when a quiet corner of the Cotswolds is transformed into a cauldron of spectacular sporting drama.

A time when dreams are realised and dreams are shattered. When hopes are raised and hopes are sunk. And when glasses are raised and glasses are sunk!

As award-winning scribe Alastair Down, racing journalist of the year, wrote this week: “Over the last 30 years, no other British sporting occasion has soared on an upward curve quite like the Cheltenham Festival.

“Back in the 1980s, it was something of a tweedy secret among the mud-pluggers, with 70,000 racegoers attending its three days. Now, more than a quarter of a million ram the old place for four.

“And for every enthusiast lucky enough to be on course, there are ten back home riveted to the action in betting shop, bar and front room as the best jumpers in the islands follow in the footsteps of the sport’s legends in the lee of Cleeve Hill.

“Whether you watch from the lawn in front of the stands or on the TV, you can chuck that stiff upper lip away for the duration. Because every year, without fail, the festival shivers the spine with spectacle, excitement and emotion in the raw.

“Nowhere else in sport generates an atmosphere quite like it. As the tired but triumphant wend their way back down the horsewalk in front of the stands, there is an eruption of acclaim, admiration, affection and plain unvarnished joy.”

Stirring stuff from Down, a festival veteran who freely admits his life and career have been moulded by the remarkable stories that have enriched Cheltenham’s tapestry over the years.

My first memory is of Bregawn leading home the famous five of trainer Michael Dickinson in the Gold Cup exactly 30 years ago. My first festival was the following year when the great, ill-fated mare Dawn Run won the Champion Hurdle. From the moment I had my first taste of festival fever at the Rotunda pub in the Montpellier district of Cheltenham. I was hooked.

I have been back, without fail, every year since (foot and mouth allowing, of course). Never missed a day. Never missed a race. It would be sheer sacrilege to even consider going AWOL now.

My affection for the festival is as ridiculous as my aim to make 50 years on the trot. Like some dogged, haggard, old stayer keeping on up the Cheltenham hill. I have a long way to go. The formbook notes that my health is already coming under a ride, while my finances have been awarded the dreaded Timeform squiggle.

I am often asked what it is that lends the Cheltenham Festival its magical aura. The relentless quality of the racing on offer is the obvious answer. The fact that each and every race is now a momentous event in its own right.

But in the end, the responses get as monotonous and annoying as looking at someone else’s holiday snaps. I am increasingly unable to come up with the definitive answer, except to urge the inquisitive to find out for themselves.

Go along. Suck it and see. But don’t just attach yourself to a boozy bus-trip, in one minute, out the next. Challenge your purse strings and spend the whole week there. Stay local. Soak up the atmosphere that pervades town and surrounding villages, as well as the racecourse. Mix with the Irish legions who make the meeting so unforgettable. Throw your money at the bookmakers and bartenders. Immerse yourself in the whole occasion.

You will emerge battered, broken and maybe broke. But the experience will have made a deep impression unlikely to leave you in a hurry.

It’s certainly never left Ruby Walsh. He’s ridden 34 winners at the Cheltenham Festival, more than any other jockey. He has two Gold Cups, three Queen Mother Champions Chases and one Champion Hurdle to his name. And he is currently in the envious position as lead jockey for two of the three most powerful stables in the UK and Ireland, Paul Nicholls and Willie Mullins. But still, he admits that the festival has the capacity to shoot up the hairs on the back of his neck.

“As jockeys, it’s our biggest time,” Ruby told the ‘Racing Post’ last weekend. “It’s the only time we get to feel like footballers or rugby players.

“I enjoy the crowd, the atmosphere, maybe even the pressure. I love the build-up. You walk out for the first race and the place is buzzing. You’re not walking into a cold, dank parade-ring with five old lads leaning over the rail.”

Buzzing is the buzz word as the 2013 festival draws ever nearer. Buzzing with excitement and anticipation. Tips are flying through the air, like moths circling in search of light. Soon, we will hear the roar as the tapes go up for the opening race, the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle. And soon we will know the answer to the first question of another wonderful week -- My Tent Or Yours?

A COUNCIL could be reported to a watchdog over the speed of the consultation period into Gembling School’s potential closure.

The National Association for Small Schools have begun the process of registering a complaint against East Riding of Yorkshire Council with the Local Government Ombudsmen.

It was announced in February the school, along with Langtoft and Dunswell Primary Schools have been earmarked for closure by East Riding Council.

The consultation period is currently set to end on Monday April 15.

Mervyn Benford, information officer for the National Association of Small Schools, said: “There are clear guidelines from the Department for Education for consultation. While it is just guidance and isn’t compulsory we are aware that many local authorities have not really always followed the guidance as faithfully as they should.”

For the full report see this week’s Driffield Times and Post out in shops on Thursday March 7.

A WELL-KNOWN exorcist will visit a Women’s Institute meeting in Driffield.

The Reverend Tom Willis, an authorised Church of England exorcist, is set to speak at the Driffield WI’s monthly meeting.

Rev. Willis is an ordained member of the Church of England.

The event will begin at 7.15pm on Thursday March 7 at the Masonic Hall, Lockwood Street, Driffield. It is free for members to attend and £2.50 for guests.

Driffield WI will also hold a coffee morning on Thursday March 14 at 14 Lockwood Street. For more information contact Anne Dunnington of Driffield WI on 01377 252241.

ANOTHER meeting will be held to discuss the future of a well-loved primary school.

On Tuesday March 19 East Riding of Yorkshire Council’s director of children, family and adult services Alison Michalska will answer questions about the proposed closure of Langtoft Primary School.

The meeting will begin at 6pm in the church rooms at Langtoft Primary School.

DRIFFIELD MP Greg Knight is warning people to be alert to the latest phone scam which is sweeping across the country.

Well spoken con-artists are telephoning unsuspecting people and posing as detectives investigating stolen debit cards.

The scammers then use various ploys to trick victims into revealing their card details.

Mr Knight said: “People need to exercise extreme caution when receiving these calls. Because calls to landlines can only be terminated by the caller, sometimes scammers will even stay on the line, so that when you think they have hung up and call your bank to report the incident, you are still speaking to them.”

Mr Knight added: “If you think you’re being scammed, stay calm and don’t be afraid to refuse to co-operate with the scammer.

“If they claim your card has been stolen, first of all check to see that you still have your debit card on your person and never give out your card details over the phone unless you are 100% sure of who is on the other end.”

A free event has been organised to support local businesses who want to find out more about the Government’s Green Deal and the expanding energy efficiency sector.

At the event discussions will take place, outlining some of the new opportunities for businesses interested in working in the energy efficiency and domestic renewable energy sector.

Speakers will also highlight to delegates the advantages of making better use of their own company’s energy to improve their environmental credibility.

The event will take place at the Counrty Park Inn in Hessle on Thursday, March 14 (9.15am to 1pm ).

It has been organised by East Riding of Yorkshire and Hull City councils and is free to attend following funding from the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

Confirmed speakers include experts from Walker Morris, Solarwall, Environmental Strategies Ltd and Investors in the Environment.

A strategy has been launched to promote sustainable economic development over the next four years in the East Riding.

The East Riding of Yorkshire Economic Development Strategy was launched by the East Riding of Yorkshire Local Strategic Partnership’s Economy and Skills Action Group at Brough Business Centre.

The strategy sets out a long-term vision, strategic framework and an overview of the activities the Local Strategic Partnership will seek to promote between 2012 and 2016.

The impact of the global financial crisis during 2007-2008 had wide ranging implications for the East Riding’s economy. Many businesses have seen trading conditions become more difficult, with demand falling and access to funding becoming more constrained. Delivery of economic development activity has also changed with a greater focus on local priority setting through Local Enterprise Partnerships, a removal of regional structures and competitive funding replacing programmed public sector funds.

Councillor Jane Evison, cabinet portfolio holder for economic development, tourism and rural issues at East Riding of Yorkshire Council, said: “In spite of the uncertain economic climate, there are real reasons for optimism that growth can be achieved.

“The East Riding is an enterprising area with a highly-skilled workforce and, by working with the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership, the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Local Enterprise Partnership and other key stakeholders, has a real opportunity to develop and promote renewable energy to provide a new long-term growth sector for this area.

“Opportunities also exist to further strengthen the East Riding’s visitor economy through development of the tourism, heritage and cultural tourism in our towns and rural areas. Long term plans to tackle deprivation, through work such as the Bridlington Area Action Plan, can also begin to be realised.”

more than 60 people were caught watching TV without a licence in Driffield during 2012.

This compares to more than 530 in Bridlington, more than 100 in Beverley and over 90 in Malton.

The average evasion rate remains at a low of just over five per cent, meaning almost 95 per cent of homes are correctly licensed.

Lucy Baird, TV Licensing spokesperson, said: “The data released today shows evasion remains at historically low levels of approximately five per cent, with the overwhelming majority of people ensuring there are correctly licensed. In order to be fair to the law-abiding majority who do pay for their licence, we’ll continue to pursue the small minority of people do not pay.

“We do understand some people may find it difficult to pay in one go, which is why we offer numerous ways to spread the cost.”

Firefighters dealt with a blaze involving a heating system inside the kitchen area of ground floor flat on New Road, Driffield, on Tuesday.

They used one hose reel, two sets of breathing aparatus and a thermal image camera, aloing with a PPV fan and lighting.

The electricity supply was isolated and fire damage was limited to a heating cupboard only.

Helga Weiss is a remarkable woman... she was also a remarkable child. She endured the privations of Terezín concentration camp, narrowly escaped the clutches of evil Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, survived the horrors of Auschwitz and recorded it all in her diaries.

Through one of the most vivid and comprehensive Holocaust testimonies ever to have been recovered, we can now read her story in all its raw, youthful and harrowing reality.

Helga’s Diary – predictably painful but ultimately inspirational – takes us beyond the life of Anne Frank and into a moving and shocking account of a young girl’s life in the camps where suffering and death were only ever a heartbeat away.

Weiss, an 83-year-old Czech artist who still lives in the Prague flat where she was born and from where the Nazis removed her and her Jewish parents in 1941, rediscovered her childhood diaries in a forgotten drawer several years ago.

The journal included a stack of yellowed paper, written in pencil and barely legible in parts but, page by page, Weiss typed every word into her computer, painstakingly editing it as she went along.

Young Helga began her diary in 1938 when she was just eight years old. She kept up her illustrated diary entries during her three years at Terezín and then handed them to her uncle for safe keeping when she and her parents were deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

He bricked the diaries and paintings into a wall at Magdeburg barracks and when the conflict ended, he returned them to Helga who added to them her experiences of life in the other camps she had passed through and where writing journals had been impossible.

From her first early bewildered observations on the rise of anti-Semitism in Prague – ‘The worst of it has landed on us Jews. They heap everything on our backs... everything is our fault’ – to the deportations, disease and sufferings of camp life, Helga brings us a child’s eye view of four years of living hell.

About 45,000 Jews lived in Prague at the beginning of the war and when the Nazis invaded, Helga’s father was denied work, state schools were closed to her and she and her parents were confined to their flat.

But then the dreaded ‘transports’ began and gradually Helga’s friends and family started to disappear until in December 1941, Helga and her parents were sent to Terezín, a military fortress used as a transit hub where Czech Jews were put to work before being sent on to extermination camps.

Of the 15,000 children taken to Terezín and later deported to Auschwitz, only 100 survived the Holocaust. Helga was one of them.

Helga notes in her diary the terrible noises of the place which still haunt her, the ‘thunderous steps, the roar of the ghetto guards, the banging of doors and hysterical weeping’ which ‘always sound – and foretell – the same.’

The suffering was mitigated by moments of friendship, creativity and hope – a concert in which a simple song and dance show freed thoughts from death and woe to dwell instead on ‘beautiful, unforgettable’ images of home – and Helga met her first love and boyfriend Ota.

But in 1944, Helga and her parents were sent to Auschwitz and her bank worker father was never heard of again...

Helga and her mother miraculously survived and the gruelling transports of the last days of the war, returning to Prague where Helga completed her diary aged just fifteen and a half.

Reconstructed from her original notebooks and from the loose-leaf pages on which Weiss wrote after the war, Helga’s Diary is accompanied by an interview with the author and illustrated with the vivid paintings she made during her time at Terezín.

The young Helga’s ‘half-childish’ account has been greatly rewritten and revised by the more worldly wise adult but the accessibility and expressiveness of what is an essentially youthful narration still speak powerfully and shockingly of man’s inhumanity to man.

(Viking, hardback, £16.99)

A BEVERLEY teenager is seeking sponsorship to help him fund a trip to Africa.

Daniel Magay, 17, a Beverley Joint 6th Form pupil, was selected to go abroad on a volunteering placement to Tanzania this summer.

He said: “It is run by Raleigh International and ICS (International Citizens Service) and provides a 10 week placement with the aim to improve the lives of locals in the Morogoro region of Tanzania.

“On March 9 and 10, I am doing an 80km sponsored walk on the Holderness coast in a single day - 24 hours.

“The challenge is called “200,000 Steps For Fresh Water”.

“The aim of the walk is to raise awareness about the lack of fresh and clean water available to millions of people around the world and to raise money to make a difference about it.

“Please take a look at my justgiving page http://www.justgiving.com/200000steps where you can find a lot more info and pictures.”

Graham Stuart, MP for Beverley and Holderness, welcomed new figures that show mixed sex wards have finally been eradicated in East Yorkshire.

Since November 2010 the Government has been naming, shaming and fining hospitals if patients are placed in mixed-sex accommodation and across the country the number of patients being placed in mixed sex accommodation has fallen by 97 per cent.

Mr Stuart said: “Under the Labour Government we were promised an end to mixed sex wards – an end which never came.

“Year after year Tony Blair and Gordon Brown failed to deliver. I am delighted that under a Conservative Health Secretary we are seeing fewer big promises but better practical delivery.

“Common sense management of the NHS by Conservatives means better value for money and better care for patients.

“Getting rid of mixed sex wards in East Yorkshire is a great achievement – especially if it can be maintained. When people are ill and feeling vulnerable the last thing they need is to feel like their privacy is being invaded and I’m delighted that this Government has quietly delivered dignity for patients.”

THE Richard Alston Dance Company are working with five different East Yorkshire schools from Mark 11 to 13, delivering workshops.

The events are being funded by Arts Council, England so the schools don’t need to cover any costs.

The schools will look at The Devil in the Detail which will be performed at The Spa Theatre, Bridlington on Thursday April 11 and students will get a chance to improve their technique through a warm up class first.

The workshops are aimed at GCSE and A Level dance students and there’s lots more information. The workshops will take place at the following schools: Monday March 11

9.20am – 11.50am Woldgate College, Pocklington; Monday March 11 1.15pm – 3.45pm

Headlands School, Bridlington; Tuesday March 12 9am – 11.3am Longcroft School, Beverley; Tuesday 12 March 12 1pm – 3pm Hornsea School; Wednesday March 13 10.20am – 12.50pm South Hunsley School, Melton.