Bad location," muttered the photographer, when I told him we were meeting very attractive celebrity gardener in cake shop, to conduct interview.

"Attractive women and cake shops don't mix. Couldn't you have found somewhere a bit more stylish?"

"Well, she will have been working all day and won't have eaten and it has a nice roof terrace, with plants, where you can snap away," I said, trying to persuade him it was an excellent location for all of us.

"And anyway, it's more a restaurant which happens to serve nice cakes."

I'd chosen it partly because it was near place of meeting celebrity gardener was coming from, partly because it was central and easy to get to from Victoria, partly because I knew it had that nice bit of outside space with plants and largely because, when I used to work in London, I used it as a regularly location for meetings, on account of its exceedingly nice cakes.

"So you arranged to meet there solely because you wanted to stuff your face?" said Thomas a few days later when photographer forced me to eat my words.

"There are worse reasons." I replied, looking at the photographs he'd emailed me and which were indeed proof he had been right about the location.

"Though at the moment, I can't think of any ..."

The photographer's concern over location choice had been partly that, despite having greenery-laden roof terrace, it was a very urban place and he would not be able to fool anyone into believing gardener was actually in a genuine garden and partly that he'd been reading too much about Catherine Zeta Jones and was fearful she (gardener not Zeta Jones) might sue him if we ran out of time and he was forced to shoot her while she was still enjoying her hard-earned tea.

I pointed out celebrity gardener appeared a lot more reasonable that Zeta Jones, who must be the only person who only has one wedding photo of her eating, when the rest of the world only has one of them not eating - due to trend of placing cameras on tables at meal times, which means all guests start snapping just as food arrives and wedding looks like one big pig-out.

Anyway, gardener approved of the location, not least because she was starving after day spent ripping out bedding plants on behalf of some TV show, and ordered humongous portion of carrot cake which she tucked into as I asked her about her last holiday in Provence.

Thinking it rude to allow her to eat alone, I too ordered humongous portion of passion cake and took mouthfuls, in between asking her about the bedding plant industry in the South of France. Meanwhile, photographer paced around, flexing light meters and taking the odd snap.

A few days afterwards he emailed me a lovely photo of gardener on roof terrace, looking intently at foliage of potted plant, which he though would be suitable.

A few moments after replying, to say it was great and his fears about the location were unfounded, he sent me another email which contained a threat.

"Let me be the judge of whether a location is suitable in future," he wrote. "... Or everyone gets a copy of the attached."

Attached was a close-up of self, with cheeks so large they looked as if I had bitten off more of the humongous slice of passion cake than I possibly could chew.

Added to this already unflattering image was the fact that my hand, with another obscenely large chunk of cake in it, appeared in the shot, apparently attempting to get more cake in ...