The Diet

Cookery writer Damien Trench has all the ingredients for a perfect life. He lives in a delightful house in a nice part of London with his committed partner Anthony, and between writing cookery books, 'keeping house', and monitoring the work being carried out by his builder, Mr Mullaney, he barely has time to fit in anything else. He certainly hasn't time to give any thought to writing a column for a supermarket, Waitsbury's, that his agent Iain Frobisher is keen for him to do, especially as it's the builder's birthday coming up, and of course, he has to bake him a cake.

But when Anthony takes up a new diet - a twist on the 'cabbage soup' diet, involving copious quantities of courgettes - Damien is piqued into taking the Waitsbury's job to rail against fad diets, and his world starts to collapse like a slowly cooling souffle.