A lone blueberry flops to the left of the pavlova, a criminal fleeing the scene. The raspberries are studded unevenly across the surface. Some are huddled together like hostages, while others lie solitary and stranded, lost and away from the herd. The strawberries are leaking their dark balsamic syrup, sullying the white skirts of cream with rusty drips.
As I poke another errant blueberry into the Sorry Heap it dawns on me that I possess the plating skills of a toddler drunk on laudanum.
Plating is like sex. If you think about it too hard, too much, or generally obsess about it, it's probably going to be awful. Or perhaps I've just conjured up this platitude to comfort myself; the correct placement of fruit eludes me so thoroughly and I am very, very bad at it. Either way the facts are unassailable - I cannot make food look pretty.