Spent the afternoon watching pink peach blossoms against the blue sky. When we drove down Cherry Street, Chelsea, Oklahoma, I left the following message in a Whittard's tea tin along with our card and a Polaroid photograph of me in Chelsea.

I was sitting with my dad in the garden of my parent's house in Kent. The blossom on the plum tree was out in full and he was hoping for an abundance of fruit that year. I was reminded of the plum tree at my grandparent's home in London. Every summer the branches groaned under the weight of the fruit. My grandmother would be industriously occupied with bottling, preserving and baking. There was never a bad year and I always looked forward to picking the fruit from the lower branches and letting the juice spill down my chin.

As I sat reliving the halcyon days of my childhood, my dad revealed just how it was that my grandparents had come to own such a prolific tree.

During the second World War blitz in London, the flying bombs caused much damage to the area in which my grandparents lived. My father and his brother were amongst the many evacuated, although not before coming home from town one afternoon to find the whole diningroom wall blown in. Anyway, these flying bombs blew up all the walls dividing the gardens on my grandparent's side from the gardens of the houses that backed onto them. Just after this, my greatgrandmother decided to take her daily constitutional just a little further than to the end of the garden and back. This time her walk took in an investigation of the newly exposed neighbouring gardens. After a while she returned from her walk somewhat out of breath with a small plum sapling under her arm, which she proceeded to plant in my grandparent's garden. Now she always claimed that she had only planted a sucker tree, that she had found growing from the roots of an original sapling. But the thing about sucker trees is: they don't produce any fruit.