The Apprentice docks in Tilbury

The Apprentice is continuing its love affair with Essex. The new series starts next Tuesday on BBC and the first episode sees the  teams selling the contents of shipping containers in Tilbury. These include high-visibility jackets, cat litters and novelty waving "lucky cats". All this after last season's foray into jam-making at Wilkin & Son in Tiptree and selling fake tan in Romford. Seems like Lord Sugar thinks that if you can sell in Essex you can sell anywhere. Will the candidate who describes themselves as "like Napoleon" meet their Waterloo outside Tilbury Fort?

Essex 1 Plymouth 0

America's Founding Fathers were Essex Boys, claims an article in the Daily Telegraph. (Click on the link to read.) New research from the Harwich Mayflower Project suggests that the Mayflower sailed from Harwich and only stopped at Plymouth for an hour to take on supplies. Yet it is Plymouth that has grabbed the glory for being the home of the Founding Fathers and hijacked the Mayflower. Hopefully Essex is not going to be mugged off any longer. Not only was Colchester once the capital of England, now we discover that Essex created the United States of America. No wonder President Obama supports West Ham.

The joy of Colchester united

Took the kids on a day trip to Colchester during the Eater holidays and what an underrated place it us. We started off with lunch at the Lemon Tree restaurant where you dine next to the 2000-year-old Roman wall in the basement. Then we visited the Balkerne Gate which has the best preserved Roman arch in Britain, Jumbo the giant water tower, and the outside of the castle (the interior is closed until 2014 for renovation). Then we found the monument to the two royalist commanders executed in the Castle Park and the Old Siege House where bullet holes from the English Civil War of 1648 are picked out with red rings around them.

Our party went on to the Firstsite art gallery, aka the "Golden Banana". The loitering goths outside are the best exhibit, but there's also resin sleeping bags and abandoned mattresses by artist Richard Hughes and a very good cafe that does cinnamon coffee and music that impressed my 14-year-old elder daughter. There's a chapter on Colchester in my book The Joy of Essex and the town also boasts an excellent independent bookshop in the Red Lion Bookshop, where the book is now in stock. What have the Romans ever done for Colchester? Quite a lot actually. All this, and it's the oldest town in Britain. Take that, Londinium. Proof that Essex should really be the capital of Britain.

Margaret Thatcher and Essex Man

Lots of mentions of Essex in the coverage of Margaret Thatcher's death. The BBC coverage featured Lord Sugar saying that "anyone from Essex" could become a dealer in the City, along with strike footage accompanied by a soundtrack of Barking's Billy Bragg singing Which Side Are You On? Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney was also included, a character who was the forerunner to Essex Man, billed as "Maggie's mauler" in Simon Heffer's original 1990 piece. And this morning Radio 5 was live from Basildon with its Thatcher coverage, with heated phone-ins illustrating just how much she divided the country. Many of Thatcher's policies did initially appeal to the Estuary half of Essex, the old East Enders who wanted to own their own council houses, get a satellite dish and new motor and work in the City, though when subsequent recessions and the banking crash of 2008 arrived they didn't like being sold a pup either. Like it or not, Mrs Thatcher and Essex are linked in the public consciousness. 

My parents loved her while I often felt like the only Labour voter in the village. Indeed my old local in Great Warley was called the Thatchers Arms, which visitors probably assumed was named after the Falklands War, though actually the name pre-dated the Thatcher Years by a few centuries. When I revisited Great Warley in 2010 to write The Joy of Essex there was still a tribal “Conservatives” poster on the village green. When Tony Blair was elected in 1997 Basildon was the key seat. And in 2012 David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband all visited Essex to try and claim the Essex vote. While the cast of Towie are surely children of Maggie, all eagerly starting their own businesses (Amy Childs is worth a cool £10 million) or advocating hard work in Attitude magazine as Kirk Norcross did, and some might say, like Mrs Thatcher, knowing the price of everything (but the value of nothing?). One of the undoubted legacies of Thatcherism is that Essex is now deemed the most totemic county in politics.

Come on the Shrimpers

Good luck to Southend United in their first appearance at at Wembley today in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy Final. Interesting piece on BBC Sport.com about the club's fight for survival and the plans for a new stadium that will help regenerate the club and town. Click on the link to read.

Flying Flapjacks in Canvey

Lee Brilleaux of Dr Feelgood once told me, "a bloke had his finger cut off with a penknife right in front of the stage when we played the Lord Nelson pub on Holloway Road." But one menace Canvey's  R&B legend never encountered was triangular flapjacks. A year seven pupil at Castle View School on Canvey Island was hit in the face by a triangular flapjack during a food fight, resulting in the school instructing the cooks not to bake triangular flapjacks and instead make square ones. If the original Feelgoods were playing Canvey today even the hardest men in R&B would surely have to scarper from this new menace of flying flapjacks.

Barking balladeer back on form

Country music suits Billy Bragg and his new album Tooth And Nail, recorded in America, is more personal in tone and has echoes of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and Lucinda Williams's best work. Don't expect Life's A Riot revisited, but it's his best work since William Bloke. Nobody Knows Nothing is Bragg's finest song in years ("What happens when the markets fall?") beautifully capturing the confusion of the times, while Woody Guthrie's I Ain't Got No Home sounds just as relevant today. And I might be wrong, but the excellent There Will Be A Reckoning seems to make campaigning against the BNP on a Dagenham council estate sound like it's written in the Deep South of the USA. "I'm a writer not a decorator!" also gets my vote as a motto on Handyman Blues. And as for the songwriter's beard - love the comment on Amazon from a reviewer who suggests "now he looks like the local bus driver". But a very talented bus driver it has to be said.