That’s it! I’m hungry. I haven’t felt like this for – I don’t know how long. I want something to eat right now.

‘It’s lovely to chat to you, Mrs Goodenough. But I think I need to eat now. It feels like a new experience awaiting me. Which is ridiculous, since I’ve been eating all my life, but there you are.’

She smiles, and I go and sit down at a table of old ladies.

We’re all shy, suddenly. As if we’ve been at a party the night before and can’t quite remember what we got up to. I went to a few like that in my youth. We’re white-haired and wearing sensible shoes now, which is a long way from what we were like back then. At least in my case.

‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I’m Margaret. I don’t know if we’ve met before.’

They introduce themselves. Sylvia, Pamela and Jane. Sylvia remembers me. The others don’t.

‘I wasn’t too bad,’ says Sylvia. ‘I mean, my memory was OK. Not my body though. My legs. Today it’s as if they fitted a new set in the night.’

And we all talk about the way we’ve been renovated, with great excitement and amazement.

‘How can it all happen so fast?’ asks Jane. ‘I can sort of see how these nanobots do such a marvellous job, but this is very sudden.’

We all ponder this question.

‘I suppose,’ I say, ‘if we’d had an operation, we’d expect it all to be done in a few hours at most. I mean, you hear of longer ones, but most of the time it’s all finished in half a day. Or less.’

‘Then you have to recover. That’s not so quick, at our age,’ says Pamela.

‘No. I suppose these nanobots are like an army of surgeons. It would account for the speed of the repairs. And then after a normal operation, a lot of the recovery is from all the cuts. Well, these surgeons are inside us. Therefore, no cuts.’

Everyone nods, as if we understand the science. Which I for one don’t. All I can think is there must be thousands of these tiny robots whizzing round, and moving things about. Most remarkably, in our brains.

At this moment, food arrives for us. We all look as if we’ve never eaten before, and conversation stops while we try it out.

It doesn’t disappoint. It’s the usual kind of breakfast food, but it’s manna from heaven. If manna was basically bacon, which is unlikely.

When we’ve finished, we all sit back in a stupor.

‘They seem to have reinvigorated my taste buds,’ says Sylvia. ‘I hadn’t realised they needed it, but apparently they weren’t tuned up. They are now.’