I applied because I thought it would be a start, something to tide me over until a better offer came along. Even though I knew a lot about perfume, I was pleasantly surprised when I secured an interview. I had wavered over whether to include my academic qualifications in my application but I couldn’t highlight my employment record, my skills or strengths, without referring to them. To make myself appear less bookish, I also drew attention to all the hours I spent working after school in a real corner dairy during the late seventies.

I arrived early for my interview and was shown into a pleasant wood-panelled room with a large vertical garden along the entire length of one wall. I was offered a cup of tea and invited to sit on a stunning-looking stool that rocked and tilted whenever I shifted my weight. The sensation of almost falling was very unsettling and to my embarrassment I capsized, spilling tea down the front of my skirt, and had to ask to use the bathroom to clean myself up. When I returned, a well-dressed young man with blotchy red skin was in my place. He didn’t notice me but continued explaining something about the health benefits of core-strength balance stools to an older woman who stood listening while scrolling through a tablet in her hands. Eventually the older woman looked up, saw me and asked if I was Siân. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Anna. This way’, and disappeared through a door in the vertical garden.

I liked Anna, who was the recruitment manager, from the start. She was warm and professional and she struck me as smart. Her description of herself as ‘old-fashioned’ simply meant that she preferred to interview applicants rather than rely on psychometric tests.

‘I’ve been in business for thirty years now,’ she said, ‘and I still don’t trust those tests. As far as I’m concerned nothing beats face-to-face communication. It keeps you honest.’

I agreed, noting that the lack of human interaction had been one of the worst aspects of my redundancy. Anna expressed sympathy and then we talked in general terms for a short while before I began to sell my ideas for the perfume counter.

‘I’ve given it a lot of thought because I like perfume.’

‘Good,’ said Anna. ‘That’s good to know. Go on.’

‘Well, I’d like to go beyond mainstream perfume retail and create a scent library. For example, we could arrange perfumes by note rather than house, with displays for chypres, orientals, florals, gourmands, aldehydes and so on.’

‘Nice. Sounds good.’