Time for a berry update. Finally, the Poorhouse got round to ingesting his "miraculin" (science!) filled recreational pills of delight.

Review follows below.

Pill entered mouth, and was sucked around a bit to allow decent coverage over taste-buds. It proved a little hard to maintain pill position in back of mouth but the sweet sweet tongue tip was surely slathered enough. The pill tasted pretty bad. Not Paracetamol bad, but still bad. It may be berries, but it's not strawberry jam-like in its flavoury delight.

During this, some preparation of test foodstuffs took place.

• Raw lemons
• Vinegar
• Guiness (the nasty beer)

After a few minutes, the Poorhouse started with the lemons, dripping that sour sour juice into the mouth-hole and munching on the bitter pith. Result: at the front of the mouth, the lemon did taste pretty damn fine. Sweet as lemonade is a plausible description. Tasty. Where it went a bit wrong though is swallowing. It still had the cough-inducing response of standard bitter lemon making the experience a little annoying.

And at this point, the Poorhouse forgot exactly what a lemon tasted like in the first place. Was the miracles in the making, or are lemons actually quite nice anyway? Tip: try your foods first before munching down "mysterious fruits". In retrospect, lemons raw are pretty harsh, so yes, miraculin gets a few PH-accredited points if not exactly mind blowing.

Next the vinegar. Risking stomach PH levels to the max, the Poorhouse sipped a glass of vinegar. Hmm. Pretty similar to a lemon, insomuch as the taste itself was far better than usual although hard to describe, a bit more sugary, but mouldy sugary. Oh, just try it yourself, it's hard to explain. The cough reflex still kicked in though once it went down the hatch. The throat knew this was foul acidy food decoration, not a delicious milk shake. And the taste wasn't nice per se, just different.

The Guiness. Now this was odd. It tasted revolting. Yes, Guiness generally does, but after hearing stories of it magically turning into chocolate milkshake there were high hopes, which did not come. You could sort of get what the tales were about if the Guiness could be kept exactly in the centre of the tongue, but along with the less-bitter maybe-chocolatish-but-maybe-in-my-mind taste was the "ugh" effect that pints of this foul black liquid normally inspire. In fact, worse than ever, the Poorhouse couldn't even finish the drink, which is a very unusual state of affairs.

Having only had minor-mind-blowing events occur in part 1, the Poorhouse did his normal process on taking anything mind-expanding that happens to be on hand, and double dosed. And would you believe, the next pill tasted a whole lot more delicious than the first! Yes, apparently miraculin combines with miraculin to produce a taste of miraculin squared. TASTY. The pill seemed far less dry and powdery, and far more fruity and flavoury.

After a bit more of the above tasting sessions it became time for tea. The Poorhouse thought the miracle was only supposed to last a while so in retrospect didn't time it super well, having dinner maybe 30-40 minutes post experiment. Potatoes and ketchup was on the menu, what a treat. Special times. And here is where the miracle berries unexpectedly performed their most impressive, yet most evil, effect.

Potatoes tasted like....potatoes. Ketchup however tasted like, well, some sort of sweet fruity yum yum desert topping.

Bonus, you might think. But no. One of the billion-ish Poorhouse primary food rules is an ban on combining sweet and savoury foods. Yes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Chocolate Pizza, this means you. Yes, weirdoes that have grapes in their meat, or cheese with their cake, it's all wrong. There are a few hypocritical exemptions to delight in of course, but far be it from the Poorhouse to ever remain entirely consistent in his beliefs. You really would not credit his oft-proclaimed vegetarianism for more than a few seconds of seeing his freezer contents, or stomach contents, for example.

So this was like having potatoes and strawberry sauce, or similar. i.e. INNAPPROPRIATE and pretty disgusting. Ugh. So much so that in an event the Poorhouse never thought he would come across he had to stop eating dinner, and get a knife (swiftly followed up by a dishcloth, that must have looked odd - you never normally see the Poorhouse polish his potatoes in public) to scrape every last segment of the red formerly-wonder that is ketchup off the potatoey spheres. The potatoes themselves were OK, if unexceptional, but the ketchup just was exceptional (-ly bad in this context).

Further experimentation not ruled out. They certainly work some level of magic in the mouth.