My sister, Linda, lived in Tring in the early 70s, as (completely coincidentally) did my best friend Andrew Wiltshire and his wife Ann. So it’s a small town with lots of happy associations for me. For the past three or four years it has had a fabulous independent bookshop called ‘Our Book Shop’ which organises lots of events in the Baptist church next door to the shop on Tring’s bustling High Street.

This was my second visit having done an event for ‘The Late Train to Gipsy Hill’, the first in the ‘Mangan’ trilogy. ‘Death on the Thames’ is the third and so there was much more Louise Mangan to discuss. To my delight Pippa Chappell and the wonderful audience stuck much more to book questions without the usual forays into politics which I’m used to. In a general election year I’d rather leave questions about Labour’s policies to the Party’s new generation of politicians than show how rusty I am after seven years out of Parliament. It was a fabulous evening.