A Golden Age week-end

I've just returned from a thoroughly enjoyable week-end at the Essex Book Festival. This is a very well-organised festival indeed. I've been lucky enough to attend for the past three years, and each time I've been impressed by the range and quality of the programme as a whole, as well as for the Golden Age week-end at Southend-on-Sea in which I've participated. Ros Green, Jo Nancarrow, and the team do a very good job.

Two years ago, in fact, my trip to Southend inspired me to use the resort as the setting for one of the chapters in Gallows Court. And this year, I had the very enjoyable experience of being interviewed by Seona Ford, Chair of the Festival, about the writing and publication of Gallows Court. When high winds caused the lights in the hotel venue to go out for a few moments near the end of the session, it really was suitably atmospheric! All in all, the session was great fun, and so was a panel about Queens of Crime, moderated by Seona, earlier in the afternoon. My fellow participants were Barry Pike and Geraldine Perriam, and it really was a terrific session as we debated the relative merits of Christie, Allingham, Sayers, Tey, and company.

Now Essex is a very long way from home, and I felt that as I was undertaking such an epic journey, it would make sense, weather permitting, to see something of a part of England that I'm not very familiar with. On the way down, therefore, I digressed to the old Roman city of Colchester, which I've never visited before. It was a fleeting stop, but I saw enough of the place to be rather taken with it. An excellent dinner in Southend with Seona and others rounded the day off nicely in good company.

On the way back to Cheshire yesterday, I decided that, as the sun was shining (well, intermittently; there was also hail and torrential rain), I'd take a look at the island of Mersea. I've come across the place in the fiction of Margery Allingham and Andrew Garve (The File on Lester), and  Seona told me it also features in a non-crime novel by Sabine Baring-Gould. As I am very keen on islands, I wanted to see what it was like in reality.

I liked Mersea, both the quiet east side, with its mud flats, and old gun emplacements, and the bustling west side, with all the fishermen's boats, oyster bars, and restaurants. You reach the island by a causeway known as the Strood and it's definitely worth a visit. Time didn't permit a visit to the little museum in West Mersea village, but Mersea is a place with a distinctive charm, and I'm glad I visited it. And on the way there and back, I passed through Tolleshunt d'Arcy, a village where Allingham made her home. How nice it was to see that she's remembered in a street name!