The only drink is Essex

Seems like Essex is the place to drink. Beer-wise there's Billericay Brewing, purveyors of the excellently-named Billericay Dickie and Rhythm Stick beers. The micro-brewery and beer shop produces craft ales made from natural ingredients. Every second and last Sunday at 2pm they have brewery tours and tastings, explaining the brewing process and ingredients used. You can also be a ‘Brewer for the Day’ and return 2-3 weeks later to collect your pints.

Wine-wise, New Hall Vineyard in Purleigh is one of the oldest and first vineyards in the UK to grow the Bacchus grape, which is now one of their most popular wines and very drinkable. Essex’s newest vineyard, West Street in Coggeshall, won the gold award in the International Wine Challenge 2017. It's got a restaurant serving local produce, and of course lots of wine-tasting. 

While close to the Essex Way in Constable country is Dedham Vale Vineyard, where you can grab a bicycle and tour the great Essex countryside, before returning to try some of their wines and cider. It has guided tours and tastings and you can have a glass of wine overlooking the lake, or hold parties and weddings there. 

If ever they remake the great wine-tasting road move Sideways it will have to be in Essex.

Bog snakes in Leigh

No, they're not taking the hiss. Sympathy to Laura Cowell's five-year-old son who found a three-foot long baby python down the family toilet in Leigh-on-Sea. It seems the royal python had escaped from some neighbours who had left old vivariums in their garden and then travelled up the u-bend. It was left to heroic Leigh-on-Sea pet shop Scales and Fangs to rescue the bog snake and then nurse it back to full health after some scale-rot. Indeed, fangs can only get better. Pints of snakebite all round for the rescuers. There could be enough in this story to give fellow Leigh-on-Sea resident Phill Jupitus a whole new stage act. 

Fighting hate crime in Harlow

Following the death of Polish resident Arkadiusz Joswik after being attacked in Harlow — and another case of assault on Poles —  there's a good overview of the situation by Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. Credit to the town's MP Robert Halfon for talking a lot of sense. Halfon says:  “I genuinely believe that the vast majority of people voted [Leave] because they just believed we were better off out. They didn’t like the bureaucracy of the European Union. The only thing I would say is that the Brexit thing allowed a small minority of horrific people to come out of the sewers and exploit division and hatred.”

He also points out that the Poles embody the spirit of Harlow, as a place for people in search of a better life. “They are regenerating local areas. They are ‘doing the right thing’: they are working hard, educating people; they fill up the churches. For them to feel frightened is terrifying.” To read the full article click on the link.

Things can only get Bata

There's a very interesting piece in the Guardian celebrating the architecture of the 1930s Bata factory and its workers' village at East Tilbury. It's billed as a "modernist marvel on the marshes of Essex". Sadly the Bata factory closed in 2005 and is now looking very dilapidated. It's Essex Architecture Week from Sep 10-11 and tours will be offered around the Bata village. There's also the Estuary Festival from Sep 17 to Oct 2, celebrating the area from Tilbury to Canvey Island. The days when a company would build flats, a cinema, shops and a hotel for its workforce seem long gone, and even though Amazon is opening a new warehouse in Tilbury you can't imagine them doing the same as Bata. Click on the link to read the full article.

The only way is Brentwood

There's a double-page feature in today's Guardian on my old home town of Brentwood, to mark the start of the 16th series of Towie. The tourists are still packing out Sugar Hut and the Brentwood Holiday Inn, while coach trips are still driving round the shops of Sam and Billie Faiers, Amy Childs and Lydia Bright. It seems incredible that Towie has lasted so long, since nothing much happens bar a bit of dressing up and gossip about who's dating who. 

But writer Tim Burrows makes an interesting point that the Towie tribes are basically performers of an Essex stereotype that perhaps shouldn't be taken seriously at all: "Through years of representation in Mike Leigh films, Birds of a Feather, newspaper editorials and the rest, the idea of Essex has manifested into a kind of performance. The vulgar Essex person was in part invented by the media, but in lampooning self-made men and women for luxuriating in their sudden wealth, it created a myth, and gave the children of the original Essex men and women a lucrative commodity for our age of communications: themselves." Click on the link to read.

The soggy splendour of Rainham Marshes

Spent a great afternoon on Rainham Marshes with my wife and younger daughter. In the shadow of the A13, the C2C railway line and pylons, we completed a two-mile circular walk around the duckboard paths. It's hard to believe this area is so close to London and we saw huge marsh frogs, dragonflies, kestrels, coots and an egret all amid lots of streams and giant bullrushes.

The marshes were only preserved because the land was once used an army firing range and it's fascinating to see the old shooting butts and targets still there. The Marshes have a number of very plush wooden hides and also a giant manmade anthill that humans can crawl through — some of the real anthills on the Marshes are a century old.

The main building is very distinctive and has huge glass windows offering a marshy panorama with coffee and cakes. The walk from Purfleet station is good too, offering fine views of the Thames and an old magazine (not published by IPC) that once housed enough gunpowder to blow up a sizeable chinch of Essex. Well worth a visit.

Life on Marsh

Good to hear that Rainham Marshes helped inspire Craig Bennett, the new CEO of Friends of the Earth. A recent Guardian interview reveals: "His first job was to protect his own patch, Rainham Marshes. In those days even his family thought it a dump. But last month he went back and saw a completely different landscape. 'If we can turn places like Rainham Marshes from being seen as a dump into somewhere where there are water voles, and which tens of thousands of people visit every year, we can do anything.'"

Talking of Rainham, it also gets an honorary mention in Bill Bailey's great Billy Bragg spoof Unisex Chipshop where Bill sings: "In my dreams I would see her / Running naked through the woods round Rainham/ If I had some tigers I'd train them/ To protect her / from the sexual fascism that was lurkin' / round the gherkins." Not a lot of people know that.

Teresa Gorman and Essex Man

A backhanded tribute to the values of Essex Man in the Guardian's obituary of Billericay's colourful former MP Teresa Gorman, remembered by my Billericay pal Shazzer for her orange hair and commitment to HRT campaigning. The Guardian writes: "A supporter of capital punishment, she was a natural for that part of the Essex electorate, often from the risen working class, among whom support for the free market and retribution flourished. Gorman fitted that outlook exactly: she was born Teresa Moore in Putney, south-west London, where her mother was a tearoom waitress and her father a self-made demolition contractor, having started out as a builder’s labourer."

Essex Man turns Coybynista

Whatever happened to Tory Essex Man, once referred to as "Maggie's mauler"? My old school friend Alison reports strange goings in Chelmsford, with last night's Jeremy Corbyn meeting completely sold out… Liberty, equality, Tiptree jam!

Doctor Who in Essex

My new e-book Whovian Dad: Doctor Who, Fandom, Fatherhood and Whovian Family Values is now out, and there's quite a few references to Doctor Who in Essex. The final chapter is on my interview with Mark Campbell, author of Doctor Who: The Complete Guide, held at Loughton Library as part of the Essex Book Festival. We discussed some of the Essex connections in Doctor Who and Mark mentioned the Matt Smith episode The Lodger being set in Colchester, but filmed at Cardiff. The department store that the Doctor and Craig shop in is surely meant to be Williams and Griffin, which has a crashed Cyberman spacecraft underneath it, in case you didn't know. The same story reveals that Amy and Rory had gone to live in Colchester. 

Mark Campbell also revealed that one of his all-time favourite stories, Jon Pertwee’s Carnival of Monsters, was filmed on Tillingham Marshes. While in the 1964 William Hartnell story The Keys of Marinus, companion Ian Chesterton looks at the Tardis scanner showing the sandy planet of Marinus and declares: "Well, it doesn't look like Southend!" Another possible Essex reference is in the David Tennant story Planet of the Ood when the Doctor asks Donna Noble where she learnt to whistle and she answers, "up West Ham!' With so many Essex references in Doctor Who it would be no surprise to find that Trenzalore is a suburb of Basildon… Whovian Dad can be downloaded for £2.48 via the link above.

Novel ideas in Billericay

Good night last Friday at the Speed Dating for Writers session at Billericay Library. Twenty writers and publishers gathered to dispense advice to anyone who wanted to write a book. Clearly a lot of people in Billericay have a book in them and we had locals with ghost stories set on Scottish islands, romances, memoirs, self-help tomes, children's books, science fiction ideas and novels sitting in bedroom drawers. This writer was offering tips (don't do it for the money but do have an elevator pitch) alongside Syd Moore from Leigh, whose ghost stories Witch Hunt (set in Manningtree) and The Drowning Pool (set in Leigh-on-Sea) are well worth a look and ex-Melody Maker man and music book writer Brain Southall. Thanks to Belinda and Jules for keeping the evening going with white wine and crisps and good luck to all the aspiring writers in Essex.

Live at the ERO

Thanks to everyone at the Essex Record Office who attended my talk on The Joy of Essex on Saturday. A packed Lecture Theatre and hopefully the PowerPoint pictures of Sugar Hut in its days as a coaching inn and the ERO's parchment documents referring to the Peasants' Revolt went down well. Lord Petre from Ingatestone Hall was there cutting the cake and thanks to Hannah Salisbury for doing a great job organising my visit and providing sandwiches and crisps in the green room. The audience included my old schoolfriend Alison's mum Val and an old farmer mate of my Dad's, plus some interesting questions on Warley Mental Hospital (and check out the ERO's poignant records and photos of the hospital's patients in 1897). The after-gig party saw us perusing Charles 1st's Bible, Lord Petre's music from 1600 and the the pictured map of ancient Chelmsford, complete with barrow in Barrow Field, on the archive floor. And frighteningly my performance was recorded as part of the archive… as close to posterity as this writer will get!

Essex Record Office Open Day

For an Essex lad it's a bit like playing Wembley. This Saturday, Sept 14, I'll be presenting a 45-minute talk based around The Joy of Essex at the Essex Record Office Open Day in Wharf Road, Chelmsford. The ERO is celebrating 75 years of preserving Essex archives in its eight miles of shelves. I'll be concentrating on the history included in The Joy of Essex and plan to bring in the Peasants' Revolt at Brentwood, Dickens and the Olde Kings Head in Chigwell, Tilbury Fort, what the Romans did for Colchester, Essex new towns, Paul Simon dating an Essex girl, Dr Feelgood and Canvey Island, Southend Pier and the Secret Nuclear Bunker at Kelvedon Hatch. The open day is from 10am-4pm and I'll be speaking at 1.30pm. Do come along and peruse some of the ERO's ancient artefacts, possibly including this writer, down by the banks of the Chelmer. Click on the link for details.

Joy of Essex at Gillespie Park

Thanks to everyone who bought copies of The Joy of Essex at the Gillespie Park Festival in Islington on Sunday. Here's a picture of me and Her Indoors on the writers stall, with The Joy of Essex on the right. And surprising how many Islingtonites had links with God's own county…

Hawes on Essex

A recent piece in the Observer on Keeley Hawes discusses her role in the new play Barking in Essex. It makes putting on an Essex accent seem like a tremendous feat of thespian skill… The piece reads: 

If it is hard to imagine Hawes's mellifluous accent mangling estuary English and foul-mouthed tirades, then that is a testament to her acting. She may be familiar as Lady Agnes Holland in Upstairs Downstairs (or, to another demographic, as the plummy voice of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider video game), but she is the daughter of a London cabbie.

Her voice is the result of a decade of elocution lessons that started at the Sylvia Young theatre school in Marylebone, and included putting a pencil in her mouth to perfect her vowels. The change has become so ingrained that when Hawes was cast as Jason Statham's wife, called, perfectly, Wendy Leather, in the 2008 film The Bank Job, she needed training to regress her accent.

"There are lots of actors who are posh and stick with that and there are lots of actors who are cockney and that's what they do," she says. "That's fine, but I don't think that could be said about me. I just happen to have played a lot of people who speak properly. So it was kind of thrilling when I started this play. It feels a bit naughty and I was like, 'Fackin' hell! Oh my gawd, what's me mum gonna say?'"

I've regressed my accent without any training… Click on the link to read the whole interview. Sounds like a nice gel, as Mark Wright might put it.

Heavy petting in Wickford

The Mail on Sunday sent Wickford-raised Liz Jones to Wickford's very own dog hotel The Essex Pooch Palace, run by Tracey Rust. (Click on the link to read Jones's piece.) Here dogs get pampered while their owners are out at work, have their very own stiletto-shaped dog bed and even a four-poster bed, all for £20. Liz likes the hotel though she doesn't seem to think too much of her home town of Wickford, "the last place in the world where globalisation hasn't reached". Maybe she prefers Barking. Liz is happier with the blonde staff of the Essex Pooch Palace though and pens a fierce defence of Essex Girls: "I have to wonder at people’s prejudice: not just about pampering pooches, but about a woman’s choice to dye her hair, and wear glittery nail polish, and a pink T-shirt, because Essex girls are feisty, fearless and clever beneath all that slap. Underestimate them at your peril."

Timelord spotted in Colchester

Is there a time rift in Colchester?

In a great TV week for Essex, last Saturday's Doctor Who had the Doctor finding employment in a department store in Colchester, home of Craig Owens, played by James Corden. He also saw Amy and Rory shopping and presumably happily living out their post-Tardis days in Essex.

Meanwhile it seems there's a crashed cyberman spacecraft underneath Colchester and the cybermen are having to rebuild themselves with bits of Essex men and women. Expect the first leopardskin Cyber Leader to arrive in the next series...

Dick's in Essex

Well, the new series of TOWIE has kicked off and the highlights of the first show included Mark Wright doing some very unconvincing tears and swearing to celibacy for a full 14 days. Joey and Kirk are starting to make quite a good double act. There was a heated debate outside Jess's party about the fact that Richard is short for Dick (a fact new to Joey) and some great motoring banter as Kirk explained to Joey what horsepower was (they go in the boot) and how all cars have red brake lights.

Best line though went to Kirk's dad Mick. Flash Kirk had just paid 74k for a Lamborghini, only to be told by his old man that it was "hairdressers' car". And as the astute Mick asked, how is Kirk going to sell property if he turns up in that flash motor? He can hardly plead poverty...

Educating Essex

"Educating Essex head defends 'childish' staff," read the article in Friday's Evening Standard. It was a bit of a non-story really. Educating Essex was an excellent documentary on Passmores School in Harlow (the title shamelesly cashing in on TOWIE of course). The 'row' was over the cameras catching Mr Drew playing a practical joke on his head and eliciting the matey comment "You are such a wanker". Big deal, teachers swear in private.

You have to hope Katherine Tate was watching though, as she could keep Lauren well-bovvered up for years on the surly behaviour of pupils like Charlotte.

Another controversy was the teachers jokingly calling the pupils "scumbags". Teachers like Mr Drew used humour to make history interesting and to diffuse confrontations. If you can't use humour in Essex where can you use it?

Essex in Vogue

Essex mania continues. The Guardian's travel section at the weekend had a two-page spread visiting the tanning salons of Buckhurst Hill and Sugar Hut in Brentwood. Plus "the other way is Essex", a list of more upmarket destinatins like Mersea and Layer Marney.

Meanwhile, Giles Coren has written a piece in Vogue about how he lusts after Essex Girls like Amy Childs. And tonight there's Jo Brand participating in the Maldon Mud Race in Jo Brand's Big Splash on Dave and a Channel 4 documentary on schools called Educating Essex. Clearly Essex sells.