More orangey-red tomatoes greet us on arrival this sunny Monday morning.

This helps most staff get over the deadly nightshade exposé and the stiff finch scandal.

As it turns out, we are not the first Londoners to be just a little bit iffy over tomato plants.

Brought back to Europe from South America by the Spanish in the 16th century, tomatoes had been cultivated by the wise Aztecs and Incas for at least 800 years previously.

The mainland Europeans were soon growing and pulping them for tasty sauces and so on, but not the suspicious British. Elizabethans called tomatoes 'wolf peach' and insisted the bright red colour made them dangerous. Eventually we got over it, and the rest, as they say, is history.