You know when you look forward to reading a book, and when you get to it, it’s a bit… hmmm.

This was one of those.

Whatever the disclaimer might say, Humbridge is too close to Ambridge, the fictional village in which The Archers is set to be a coincidence. Need more proof? Its subtitle is An Everyday Story of Scriptwriting Folk. The Archers was originally billed as ‘an everyday story of country folk’. Anthony Parkin, Humbridge’s author, spent 25 years as the agricultural story editor on The Archers.

All of those factors drew me to it, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by what I found.

It’s a nice story (and I use that word with caution, as the absolute pinnacle of uninspired review writing is the word ‘nice’). A really nice story – the kind of thing you’d expect to find on ITV, mid-1980s on a Sunday night.

Man moves to the country and makes a new life for himself. Stuff happens. Not much stuff, but some stuff.

The trouble is, the world has moved on and for the most part we now expect more ‘stuff’ happening in our stories. We watch a lot of 80s TV – we’re currently working our way through the last few DVDs of our Howards’ Way box set, we’re mid-way through Hi De Hi, we’ve just finished The Good Life – so we’re used to seeing stories that reveal themselves a lot more slowly than they do today. It’s nice (that word again) as it lets you relax, soak up the atmosphere and identify with the characters.

The trouble is, there’s a lot of potential that isn’t realised. Two dead blackbirds turn up on the doorstep and there’s talk of either racism or witchcraft, but after that brief mention it’s left alone. Someone dies, but its impact on the flow of the story is minimal. The ending is realistic and utterly believable, but not what I (and, I imagine, most other readers) would have liked for a satisfying tying-off.

Nonetheless, if you look at it as a carefully-observed slice of everyday life it’s excellent. The dialogue is spot on, as you’d expect for someone who has worked on The Archers for so many years and the characters and their motivations are utterly believable.

Humbridge, then. Technically spot on, with a well-plotted story arc, but a few too many unexplored opportunities to have entirely grabbed me.

It’s £8.50 from Amazon.co.uk.

We went to see Chess last night and got home at two this morning. The car held us up.

It was at the Palace in Westcliff where I’ve been so many times before (Bjorn Again, Bob Downe, Julian Clary…) but getting down to the river’s edge anywhere along the south of Essex always leaves me foxed. It took us over an hour to get there, leaving us just enough time for some tasty fish and chips at The Olive Tree. It’s small and steamy and does the best flaky battered fish I’ve possibly ever had.

We bolted our food and were sat in our seats just in time for the two-and-a-bit-hours performance. It was very good. Not excellent, but very good and brilliantly staged. It must have taken an age to cast as all the performers were dancers, singers, actors and instrument players, with up to 30 on stage at any one time, leaping around with trombones and violins.

It was loud, and it was sometimes difficult to hear the singers clearly enough over them, but other than that it was great and I’m glad I can say – at last – that I’ve seen it.

So, by the time we left it was just gone 23h. Twenty minutes later we broke down for the first time. The lights dimmed and blinked out, the car started to spurt, and then it went quiet and we rolled to a stop.

It was an absolute miracle that we broke down where we did, as the last of our engineless forward motion took us into the drive of a garden centre and off the dual carriageway.

The RAC arrived 50 minutes later, and the guy with the van spent until almost 1h tinkering under the car. He diagnosed the problem – a faulty part – but couldn’t swap it out and couldn’t tow us home with Rich’s existing membership as we were more than 10 miles away. The only solution, other than paying £100 to have him hook us up to a rope was for me to join on a more expensive membership and use that to get us going.

I did, we moved off, and ten miles later we broke down again. Another miracle sliproad saved us once again, and we parked up silently and without any power beside a badly squashed… something. Not sure what, but it had claws and matted fur and lots of blood. We hooked up to the van again for another 10 minutes of charging.

That extra juice got us just – really only just onto the driveway. It couldn’t have been any closer. The front wheels were on, the back wheels were off and we ground to another silent halt.

No more charging. We pushed it the last few feet. It was 2h.

All in all we’d been out of the house for as long as a working day. The cat was not impressed.

As I say, good show, though.

It’s taken me an awful long time to get around to starting this trilogy. Not a long time since I’ve had them, but a long time since the rest of the world latched on to them.

It was… hmmmm.

Let me start by saying that I did buy the second and third books in the series as I approached the end of this one and I’m very much looking forward to reading them, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did feel a bit disjointed by the time I got to the end. I’m not sure why – particularly not as the first two thirds were so tightly written.

The story is a pretty simple one, and at the same time it’s intriguing. Without giving away any spoilers, Mikael Blomkvist is contracted to solve the murder or Harriet Vanger. The book is set in the present day, but she was last seen in the mid-1960s.

(And no, she’s not the Dragon Tattoo girl – that’s Lisbeth Salander, whose parallel storyline intersects with Blomkvist’s somewhere around the halfway mark.)

That’s the premise, and Larsson’s slow unravelling of the story is both perfectly-paced and utterly convincing. Blomkvist doesn’t make any enormous and illogical leaps to come by any particular piece of information that helps him reach his conclusion, and although it’s tricky keeping track of who is who in the extensive Vanger clan (even with the help of the family tree printed in my copy’s opening pages) it’s easy to follow his line of thinking and come to similar conclusions.

Sadly, though, the resolution really didn’t do it for me.

I didn’t guess what it might have been, even though every single clue you need to reach it is written in clear black and white through the story. That’s clever – very clever – so it leaves me at a bit of a loss as to why I feel slightly cheated when the resolution is logical, ties up all of the loose ends and answers the opening questions about Harriet Vanger’s fate.

I’m having a break before cracking on with the second volume, currently reading Humbridge (now out of print), but I’m keen to see how the trilogy pans out and wondering whether they work best as a single extended work in three parts.