I don't just throw these things together you know...

No, and the proof of it is, Welcome To Essex (which regular readers will be aware were the final words of the previous entry) is a new zombie apocalypse movie, a key scene of which was shot early the other Sunday morning in Brentwood High Street. I normally spend my Saturday nights in Ingrave, but this was all too psychogeographically apt to resist. The Gazette had rather gone to town on the whole thing – God knows what they'd do in the event of a real zombie apocalypse – even to the extent of producing a pull-out 'commemorative issue' in which the events of the film were reported as fact. A casual reader, leafing through their local paper without paying too much attention, might have been alarmed to read reports of a half-decapitated corpse found in Copperfield Gardens, or a woman killed by 'pale-looking rioters' in the High Street – I envisaged a War Of The Worlds-style panic, which would at least give them something to talk about in next week's issue.

In fact, most readers probably just tutted and shook their heads, having always assumed that it would come to this. There was, naturally, an article about the effect of the zombie apocalypse on house prices. A downward trend was predicted.

On the day itself I heard a voice say: 'Now everyone get to your positions', and then woke up. It was 7:30. When I left the flat at 8:10 a lone zombie was walking towards me down King's Road. In truth he didn't look so scary, more like a volunteer at a Face Painting By The Terminally-Depressed class. I thought he'd probably be the only zombie I saw, such is my luck, but I needn't have worried – the High Street was swarming with them. Or lumbering with them.

In the event it wasn't all that different from a typical Saturday night, except that it was daylight and you could clearly see all the open wounds and festering sores. The director, Ryan Fleming, seemed to be that tall guy who used to live a couple of doors down from us at Copperfield Gardens. Of course, we never spoke to him. As I remember, he even invited us to a party once and we didn't go, so determined were we to maintain our outsider status. Well at least now I can say that I have played a part in his film. A man in a high-vis jacket told me to get out of the way 'mate', and I did. Thus, I can honestly say that I made this film possible.

As I watched grey-faced people in tattered clothing milling about in search of direction under strangely appropriate shop signs (Co-Operative Funeralcare, Blockbuster Video – itself now deceased) I wondered if I was in fact witnessing a premonition of post-TOWIE Brentwood. To counteract this cultural apocalypse my suggestion is that they now make this an annual event. As Maldon has its Mud Race, so Brentwood will have it's Zombie Parade.

On the very same afternoon the Historic Chapels Trust were opening up the Petre family's chapel in Thorndon Park, with its skeleton-filled vaults, ransacked by Satanists in the 1970's for skulls to throw at police stations. The dead weren't rising here – the crypt was 'blocked by masonry', we were told, although a mosaic inset in the floor is actually a lift on which coffins were placed for their journey to the crypt just below. We weren't allowed a go on it, but if the Historic Chapels Trust is a forward-thinking organisation, it has no doubt considered turning it into a ride, down to the vaults, where wired-up skeletons will get up and rattle their bones for the delight of shrieking children. Why leave sacrilege to the Satanists?

My Dad was born in Mortuary Cottage nextdoor. Obviously, in keeping with the times, it has since changed its name. To House of The Living Dead.