I’m in a crummy hotel somewhere too boring to name because I have an early meeting in the morning, starting at 7.45am so I needed to travel tonight.

Somehow these meetings just don’t get any easier to drag myself away over the Tamar for but still, I must.

Still fired up from my two day course, I decided that tonight I’d make a bit of effort and try to get a half-decent shot despite only the lighting available to me being the ‘house lights’ in my room, a packet of plums from Marks and Sparks on the station and a small bit of Oak tree that I pilfered from a garden on the way past. It’s probably not great art but it’s quite OK – especially when considering that the light is tungsten and I am less and less enamoured of the way it drives colours yellow. (Yes, DM, I know I could have done a custom white balance but the way to do that has escaped me for tonight – yet again.)

The plums are from Kent – so there are still fruit growers there after my question last week. The grower is even named – a chap called John Myatt and the variety is ‘Marjorie’. How cool is that? You can actually feel like it’s ‘real’ food when you know the name of the man who grew it.

While processing the photo and writing this, most of them have found their way into my tummy and they are yum. Sweet on the palate as they go in but with a sharpness in the aftertaste. Quite delicious.

I have been fiddling around with the packaging partly out of curiosity and partly because I am losing weight – yep, it’s true – I AM losing weight and I wanted to check out the nutritional content. I was quite amused by the closing statement on the nutrition table. It says ‘The Department of Health recommends that we consume five 80g portions of different fruit and vegetables every day.’ While this pack contains 600g, it doesn’t count because only the first 80g counts – all the rest are meaningless according to that measure of ‘goodness’. The best bit is the way it’s been written. I smirked at the ‘we’ – very inclusive. I expect someone just like me sat there and thought ‘How can we make this more inclusive so that it looks as though we’re all in the same boat here?’ I know, we’ll say ‘we’ not ‘you’. Eureka! It works. I feel better already……..

last year, I had a good evening and a bad night after a meal loaded with monosodium glutomate!