So, another day, another salad. Did my exercises today, no sweat. Well, actually, quite a lot of sweat, but that’s a good thing, right?

Oh, gawd, whilst I am trying to type this, I am also trying to deal with British Telecom, and the stress and hair that I am pulling out whilst doing so is bound to help me lose weight.

All I am trying to do is take a phone number off a business tariff and put it onto a residential tariff. That’s all, no change of address, customer or anything – yet you would think that I was asking them to cure avian flu or land a man on Mars. And, to cap it all, I’m getting thoroughly sick of their damned on-hold muzak. Can’t think why, I’ve only been listening to it for over an hour!!!

So, anyway, I went shopping last night, and I decide that I was going to have to convert myself into one of that mysterious and inexplicable group of people who think that celery is a good thing to eat.

There is this myth, which may even be true, for all I know, that celery is a magical substance that actually costs more energy to digest than it actually contains. Well, I mean to say, if that’s true, then I really need to be getting myself some of that.

You see, fruit is all very well, but every now and then, I crave for something savoury to snack on. Currently my nibble of choice is hard—boiled eggs. However, too many of these cannot be good for one, so I thought that celery, being more of a vegetable than a fruit, and therefore not really sweet, it ought to be the snack of choice for me; especially with it’s miraculous fat reducing properties.

The trouble is that the bloody stuff is disgusting. Now I don’t mean just “not very nice”; I mean actually nasty. I am a person who will eat almost anything. There are a number of foods that I am pretty indifferent about and won’t buy, but there are very few things that I actually dislike the taste of – and celery is one of them.

I have tried, and tried hard, but celery just tastes nasty. I don’t know if you have ever tried, but describing a taste is actually a very difficult thing to do. So, in the interests of literature I am actually forcing myself to eat a piece of celery as I write, just so that you, dear reader, can have the benefit of understanding just exactly what is wrong with it.

For a start, it is actually quite sweet, but that isn’t really to be held against it - onions are very sweet. But as well as the sweetness, you also get, along with the relatively unpleasant crunchy-stringy texture and squirt of tepid celery juice, a rather nasty bitter taste that attacks the back of your tongue. All in all, it’s pretty much what you would expect a parking ticket to taste of, and not, in any way, a good gastronomic adventure.

So, miraculous thin-making qualities notwithstanding, I will not be converting to the ranks of the celeriphiles. This doesn’t make me a bad person, even if it might make me a fatter one…

Oh, yes, and by the way, I am going to Scotland tomorrow for my parents 50th wedding anniversary party, so I probably won't be posting here until tuesday.