The Opal Fruits are laid out on my desk in rows, each row of a single colour. I am planning to eat one off each row in turn, starting at 2 o’clock; one very hour. I’ve arranged the colours in order of my preference, left to right from my least favourite red to my most cherished green, and I’ll work my way from red through to green by 6 o’clock – then start again with red at 2 tomorrow afternoon.

I like to make each one last as long as possible, so no chewing! – and only a minimum of sucking. I’ll start by putting the sweet in my left cheek and try to keep in there for a minute before moving it across to the right cheek for another long soak. It’s very difficult not to have a little suck on the way from left to right, so I don’t expect a sweet to last as long as ten minutes.

I’ll have taken the waxy paper off carefully and while I’m concentrating on not chewing, I’ll fold the paper into an origami triangle that’ll fit together with the next one to make a two-colour six-pointed star. Then I’ll stick the stars around the edge of my computer screen. I’ve done something similar before and it looked great, but after a few months it got rather scruffy and dusty, so I’ve scraped the decoration off ready for a fresh look.

It’ll be 2 soon and then I’ll be tied to my desk until 6, so I’ll pop to the loo now, and check that Jane’s OK. There are two Opal Fruits left over after arranging the bag-full into sets of five, so I’m going to let her have the spares. I’ll take the papers off now, though; they’ll make another star. I won’t have time to go in to see Jane, so I’ll put the two naked sweets in an envelope, pull out the blanket that I use to seal the gap at the bottom of the cellar door, and push the envelope through for her.

Then we’ll both be enjoying our sweets this afternoon.