There are runner bean sleepers and very bright blue skies with gingham oilcloth backdrops Pasta carriages Everything except marmalade skies. Very nice art direction.Then they switch to the product, all plated up on white tablecloths. It's all bright - doesn't a bit of red and yellow pepper make a difference - rice or pasta-based popular fusion food - a bit Italian, a bit South-East Asian with all the difficult bits taken out. I'm not bothered about authenticity - actually I think it's a dead giveaway word for a fatal bourgeois fallacy, but don't get me started - so I quite fancy them.However, I've been eating this stuff for about three years already. It may be new as tomorrow at Bird's Eye but microwaveable steamed ready meals like this have long since arrived at Marks & Spencer Marble Arch. And I was an early adopter.The M&S product is cook-chill, but the Bird's Eye one is frozen - presumably you have to microwave it for longer. And because the M&S brand commands higher prices from better-off people - Bird's Eye is subject to the world of the corner "convenience" shop - the Bird's Eye stuff will be more tightly cost-controlled and the children's pieces will be smaller and fewer and so forth.The branded food manufacturers are almost always behind the big retailers on the innovation trail now.

But soon enough somebody'll come along and make a lovely nostalgic documentary about the Freezer Age 1950-1990.Peter sru.co.uk. Kathryn Flett Kathryn Flett Worked on 'The Face' Sacked in 1989. Now 40 and TV critic for 'The Observer'I got made redundant in a dark and strange set of circumstances and then I got my .. revenge is the wrong word. Let's just say three years later I was back employed by Wagadon [then publisher of The Face] on another magazine. I didn't belong to a union and there were no financial packages. I remember being incredibly miserable but then seeing the point a bit later. There's some Pollyanna-ish spin to redundancy that you're sometimes forced to do things you would otherwise resist Journalists are a fairly insecure bunch of people.

But it's musical chairs; there's always another job for you somewhere else.Mark PalmerWas executive editor of the 'Daily Express' when fired in 1998. Now 50 and freelancing - as a writer and consultant, and as a commissioning editor at the 'Daily Mail'I'd joined with the new editor, Richard Addis, in 1996. But Lord Hollick came in, turned the Daily and Sunday Express into a seven-day operation, cut 90 jobs, and tore the heart and soul out of a great paper. Then he decided that he wanted a more left-liberal title, brought in Rosie Boycott as editor, and that was it for me and Richard I actually felt a huge sense of liberation.