Meeester Nik

Saracen’s Head, Chelmsford

2010-03-16T19:59:41Z

A bit of a sinking feeling, fortunately averted.

Rich’s mum came over for mothers’ day weekend, with Ean and Vikki and we’d booked ourselves into the Saracen’s Head for lunch.

A bit of a spur of the moment booking after the other places we tried were either full or had gone ‘family friendly’ and installed ball pools. Still, it looked nice and the menu was good.

Then we had to change our booking, and that’s when I found the reviews. Terrible, terrible reviews. And even worse, an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares in the kitchen there when it was called D-Place. Lots of Ramsay swearing and then, apparently, it went bust.

According to the News of the World:

In Chelmsford, Essex, D-Place went bust just two weeks after the cameras left. Owner Israel Pons said: “The menu Ramsay came up with was extremely poor. We dropped 50 per cent in sales. He wasn’t the saviour everyone seemed to think he would be.”

This, I kept quiet about. It was far too late for us to go anywhere else.

I’m so glad I did. The service may have been a little slow, but food was excellent, and Ean even declared the pate the best he had ever tasted.

If I could remember where I’d read the reviews I’d head back and add my own, refuting them.

Out of five? A good four.

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Walking in Cressing

2010-03-07T19:10:15Z

It’s a long, long time since I’ve been to Cressing. I went years ago, when I was a student and had no money on a day off college and turned around when I got to the barns and saw that you had to pay to get in.

Anyhow, today we headed back there. The sun was out for pretty much the first time since October and it felt like the first weekend of spring, so we dug out the walks book and opened on a random page. This is where it took us.

The walk, which started in White Notley, followed a short stretch of the Essex Way, an 80-odd mile footpath that stretches from Epping to Harwich through surprisingly unspoiled countryside.

White Notley itself is little more than a small town, with the dinkiest train station (one platform, one track, no car park) sat at the start of the walk. We quickly broke away from the road, past old farm buildings and across ploughed fields.

Eventually we found ourselves at the famed Templar barns, now coming up for 900 years old and in remarkable condition. If you’d told me they were replicas, build five years ago I could quite have believed you.

We didn’t go in. We got diverted by the tea shop and sat reading about what was inside them, but as soon as we discovered it was waxwork people and ‘display boards’ (yawn) we skipped the cultural bit and headed off across the fields again.

All in all, though, an excellent walk of four and a bit miles out in the middle of nowhere. Let’s hope this heralds the start of a good summer of walking. We could do with it after the winter we’ve just had.

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New chickens!

2010-03-06T19:37:12Z

We’ve got some new chickens. Our little flock of three was always supposed to be a starting point, from which we’d eventually expand to 10 or so over time. Well, today was the first step in that expansion.

We’ve had Barbara, Gerry and Margo for a year and a half now, so it was a bit of a shock for them when Gabrielle, chicken and chicken appeared in the coop overnight. They should have been chicken, chicken and chicken as we were determined not to give them names, but one of them has a dodgy eye, and so she immediately became Gabrielle.

Whether it’s this that makes her such a softie, I don’t know, but she is very happy being picked up and held. I even put her on my lap and she just sat there without me hanging on to her.

Anyhow, as recommended we dropped them into the coop tonight when the other chickens were in bed so they’ll all wake up together tomorrow morning.

I’ll track their progress over on my other blog, Blagger. Check it out to see how they’re getting on.

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Walking back in time

2010-02-28T19:26:20Z

A lucky escape. A bit of a grotty weekend and then an unexpected break in the clouds. Too good an opportunity to pass up, we jumped in the car and drove out to Ingatestone to walk.

There is a loop you can take, out past the end of the village, along the lanes towards Stock and then back on yourself past Ingatestone Hall, the setting for the BBC’s most recent adaptation of Bleak House, across the railway line and into the village to head back to your start point.

While we were walking it, keeping an eye on the fast-approaching rain clouds, I had the rather shocking realisation that it’s probably 18 years (or more) since I last walked it. That’s literally half a lifetime away, yet it feels so recent.

We did – just – make it back to the car as the first spots of rain began to fall, and as we slammed the doors and buckled up the heavens opened. That was our lucky escape. Despite the inclement weather, though, it’s reminded me how nice it is walking around there, and as soon as it’s held off long enough for the fields to dry out properly, I’d like to head back and rediscover some of the other walking routes of my youth.

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Anglia Ruskin campus is coming down

2010-02-24T16:45:39Z

This will be of precisely no interest to anyone who doesn’t live in Chelmsford.

However…

I always regretted not taking a picture of the bus station before they knocked it down. And I always regretted not taking a picture of the half-finished Kings Tower as they built it up.

So, not to repeat the mistake, here’s the pile of rubble that now constitutes what was once the town-centre Anglia Ruskin University, soon to become a 20-odd story block of flats.

Such a shame. The campus wasn’t pretty, and the university does now have smart new buildings in the north of town.

Anyhoo, the picture below shows the state of the site right now, as the knocking down is well under way and the building has yet to begin.

The shonky angle is down to stitching together two images to make a single picture.

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Aperture and the book

2010-02-24T16:52:26Z

So Apple squeezed out a new edition of Aperture (and it’s actually rather good). It’s just unfortunate that it’s come now as I’m contracted to write a new edition of this book

The deadline is mid-April.

Fortunately that’s eminently do-able. It just means that the novel is going to have to take a bit of a back seat for a little while.

Is that a good thing? Yes, and no, I think.

No, because I’m really enjoying it. I never resent opening the same old file yet again, as I have done almost every day for most of the last year, meeting the same characters, working out whether they’re saying what they should the way they ought.

Yes, because it might do me good to have a break.

I read that Stephen King recommends putting your work aside for six weeks between writing and starting on the edit. I didn’t do this, so maybe I didn’t have a chance to step away from the words and view them a few weeks later with a fresh, unsympathetic eye.

Enforced exile could do me good. And it could do the book good, too.

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Abbaworld at Earls Court

2010-02-20T17:51:01Z

So we found ourselves in London, waking up in a very nice hotel on Saturday morning courtesy of a night out with Adobe on Friday. Now, neither of us is a great fan of taking the train into town on a weekend, so the opportunity to do something different when we were there anyway was too good to pass up.

Abbaworld it was.

This is an exhibition under Earls Court that started a couple of weeks ago and runs for a couple of months. ‘25 rooms of memorabilia’, it promised, and that’s exactly what you got.

Original outfits, press clippings, about a billion gold discs*, a reproduction of the studio where they recorded all of their songs, the front of the helicopter from the Arrival album cover (they said, but we had our doubts), more gold discs, and more TVs showing clips and interviews than Agnetha could shake her hips at.

Now I had guessed it would take us a couple of hours to go around it (Rich thought I was overestimating) but as we looked at our watches on the way back out it had been three hours. And that was without doing any of the karaoke, dancing or performing with the hologram Abba. That has to be good, doesn’t it? Doubly so since we’d not noticed the time passing.

So, recommended? Very much. If you’re in London already and don’t have to struggle in on third-rate public transport it’s about as close as you’re going to get to the Abba experience without a time machine.

* possibly actually fewer

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The Railway Detective by Edward Marston

2010-02-07T17:03:13Z

It all looked so promising. A Victorian-era murder mystery set in the 1800s. Except the dialogue felt to this reader more like a script from the 1980s.

The Railway Detective is the first book in a series of novels about Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck. The Great Exhibition is fast approaching when a daring raid is launched on the mail train. Death, theft and blackmail follow as our dashing hero tries his hardest to solve the case.

There are a lot of points on which Marston has hit the bullseye. The plotting is spot on, his unravelling of the story can’t be faulted, the logic behind the investigation is strong and believable. But the main character isn’t particularly likeable, the villain’s motivation isn’t (I don’t believe) entirely plausible, and the words spoken by the characters feel strangely detached from the era in which they were spoken.

That’s where my important lesson lay.

My book is set in the years spanning 1856 and 1871 – almost the same era as this one – and like this is a detective story. The other thing it had in common, in the first draft, was fairly modern dialogue. I had wondered about that and whether it mattered, and having read this book I now see that it really does.

You can paint a scene, describing the look of the characters, the clothes they wear and the utensils they use, but unless the reader believes that they live and act within that scene in a logical and fitting manner, they feel detached and less believable. That, I think, is why I didn’t feel empathy towards the characters in this book – I didn’t believe them, so I invested very little time in hoping for a good outcome for each one.

Needless to say I’m spending a lot of time revising my own dialogue in the hope of convincing more readers that the words spoken – although spoken by fictional entities – really could have been said when I say they were.

And, of course, making sure my (hopefully) published sentences aren’t as tortuous and twisted as that one.

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Bond 23

2010-01-22T09:21:30Z

From The Guardian:

The [23rd James Bond film] would be Mendes’s first proper action film – the director is best known for taut relationship dramas such as his 1999 debut American Beauty, for which he won the Oscars for best film and best director, and last year’s Revolutionary Road. However, he has dabbled in more high-octane fare before: on the 2005 Gulf war tale Jarhead, as well as the 2002 gangster flick Road to Perdition.

Well if it’s true it would make perfect sense, and would point ever more clearly to Bond 23 being the third part of a trilogy that kicked off with Casino Royale.

At the end of that film (and indeed the book as it was a fairly faithful adaptation), the treacherous Vesper lay dead and Bond retreated into the emotional shell that sees him through the rest of the series with the immortal words ‘The job’s done and the bitch is dead’. They were lifted directly from the book.

It’s only when he meets Tracy – an equal – that he is finally able to let down his guard where women are concerned.

Quantum of Solace picked up an hour on from the end of Casino Royale, and followed Bond on his quest to track down the Quantum organisation, which was ultimately behind Vesper’s death (through revenge of duty? Who knows – it could be a little of both). In the closing scenes he confronts Vesper’s betrayer in a Moscow flat, but apart from leaving him more or less alive we know nothing of what happened between them or the content of their discussion.

Bond 23, then, must surely repeat Quantum’s trick and pick up the story an hour later as Bond sets out to use the information he learned in the flat, find a way to reconcile himself to Vesper’s betrayal and finally become the a fully-formed, rounded character who can leave this thread behind in Bond 24 and beyond.

The 23rd instalment will be Bond’s final counselling session. So who better to direct than Mendes? A man who, in the words of The Guardian, is ‘best known for taut relationship dramas’?

That’s what Bond has been since Casino Royale.

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How would you vote?

2010-01-11T15:06:58Z

Reviewing papers at work today, I came across a poll on the Oakland Tribune:

What a dilemma.

Not quite opposites, are they, but somehow still not sufficiently illogical to fox at least 199 voters to far…

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