School meals blogger's charity fundraiser passes £60,000

Back online: A picture from Martha's blog.Martha Payne/NeverSeconds

A nine-year-old blogger has raised more than £60,000 for charity after council chiefs overturned a ban on her taking photos of her school meals.

Martha Payne wrote on her blog that she was "looking forward to sharing my dinners and yours" after being told she would now be allowed to continue taking pictures.

Argyll and Bute Council banned Martha from photographing her meals on Thursday. It said staff were fearing for their jobs amid press coverage of Martha's blog.

But on Friday, council leader Roddy McCuish confirmed the local authority was to reverse its decision.

Martha's NeverSeconds blog is raising money for the Mary's Meals charity. And by Saturday morning its JustGiving page had raised more than £61,500.

"Thanks to everyone that has helped to get my blog back on track, Martha wrote on Friday night. "I worried yesterday that I would never reach enough money to buy a Mary's Meal kitchen in Malawi but we have raised a total of £45,889.46 which is more than one kitchen! It could be many kitchens or one kitchen feeding many children for years.

"A small thank you isn't enough so here's a big THANK YOU to you all!"

The blog has notched up more than three million views in just six weeks and won the support of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

Martha's food reviews featured a "Food-o-meter" scoring, often very high, the number of mouthfuls she had taken and a health rating.

On Thursday she had written that she was removed from her maths class by her head teacher and told she "could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper".

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