Is Shenfield the nation's most influential school?

It's been a good week for my old school. Former Shenfield School pupil Philip Hammond became Chancellor in Theresa May's shuffle. Meanwhile another old Shenfieldian, Richard Madeley, revealed that Hammond was "a Goth back then, he used to arrive in class in a leather trench coat." While Popbitch added that Hammond also used to run a mobile disco in Shenfield. The Goth story is a little unlikely - in the mid-1970s Phil would surely have been more of a trenchcoat-wearing hippy carrying a Led Zeppelin album. Not to be outdone, another old Shenfieldian, Ross Kemp, was on our TV screens getting shot at in Syria in Ross Kemp: The Fight Against Isis. Never mind Eton. Now Cameron and Osborne have departed the scene, it seems that Shenfield, now a comprehensive, is the nation's most influential school.

Strange news from Essex

Just finished Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, which is a riveting read. Set in 1893, the landscape of the Blackwater estuary is in many ways the star of the book — Perry does for rural Essex what Hardy did for Wessex. Most of the action is set in the fictional village of Aldwinter, which is on the River Blackwater and appears to be somewhere around St Osyth and Brightlingsea.

The reader comes to know Perry's village intimately — the mist rolling across the salt marshes, the village church with its carved serpent on a pew, World's End cottage at the end of the village and home to the slimy-coated Mr Cracknall, Traitor's oak, the ribs of the wreck known as Leviathan, the changing skies and the rubbing of boats on shingle as the locals fear that something lurks out on the water.

There's lots of simmering passion between wealthy fossil-hunting widow Cora Seabourne and married local vicar William Ransome as they take long walks through the Essex woods, plus more love interest in the form of pioneering surgeon Luke Garrett.

Perry makes good use of historical detail; Cora first stays in Colchester, where she meets Thomas Taylor who lost his legs in the Colchester earthquake of 1884 and now begs by his shattered house. The myth of the Essex Serpent comes from a real source too, the 1699 pamphlet Strange News From Essex, alerting the villagers of Henham-on-the-Mount to the Essex Serpent.

The Essex Serpent is enjoyable for its exploration of Victorian themes, science versus faith, the stirrings of feminism, the slum housing of Bethnal Green and advances in surgery. And on a personal level, as my great great grandfather died from tuberculosis at the age of 33 in Whitechapel in 1872, it's very moving to read Perry writing of the disease's debilitating effects on one of the novel's main characters.

Overall it's an enticing, beautifully-written book for anyone who likes Essex history intertwined with a Victorian love story.

Southend brought to standstill by onions

In a truly Monty Python-esque scenario, Southend was yesterday brought to a standstill by 50,000 onions, reports the Southend Echo. A lorry overturned on Eastern Avenue spilling the said onions, blocking the road and causing gridlock. This eye-watering news could certainly lead to tears in Essex and is proof that for one day at least, the Southend world is just a great big onion. Police advice is to keep 'em peeled.