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.

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.

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.

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

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.