At work, bunnygate is still the full focus, and it’s the presence of limestone in the product that the press have latched on to. Never mind that it’s only ‘trace amounts’. When you consider it’s mainly used for concrete and aggregate for road building, any amount feels like too much.

However, Rose is keen to move forward with plans to not only rescue our company’s sullied reputation but, as she puts it, ‘to embrace a bright new future as a modern, customer-friendly brand’. So perhaps Jean, the payroll lady, was right, in that new opportunities may be on the horizon – for all of us.

Startling words like ‘nutritious’, and even ‘fresh’, are being bandied about our offices. With impressive speed Rose has gathered together a bunch of top-level food technicians, who have been marching about being loud and jovial as if Flaxico is already one of those fun-filled workplaces you hear of, where everyone seems to spend an awful lot of time playing ping-pong and lolling on beanbags with their dogs. Do such places really exist?

Today we’re having a brainstorming session in the lower basement. Everyone is invited to take part – even the tall, gaunt man with the veiny nose whose role I’m pretty sure is to sporadically attend to faulty light fittings and suchlike – because it seems that this is the kind of company we work for now. It is inclusive.

Tellingly, there are no menopausal sandwiches this time, no desolate buffet bringing to mind E. coli and early death. Instead, there’s a sprightly array of tempting salads, savoury pastries and a gigantic platter of exotic fruits. Perhaps the normal canteen staff were locked in the kitchen while this delicious fare was ferried in.

‘Can you believe this is happening?’ asks Belinda, one of my lunch buddies who works in HR, as we divide into teams. Rose has asked us to come up with ideas for new products – not just in pellet form, but finished deli-type lines that would be recognisable as food, and which we might actually like to eat.

‘You mean real food?’ someone asked with a splutter.

‘Yes,’ she said dryly, ‘real food. Get to it, people. We’re talking blue-sky thinking, no holds barred. This is the start of our bold new future.’

‘It does seem like a heck of a leap,’ I mutter to Belinda, wondering how our company intends to shift from extruded pellets to the likes of pea and mint patties and feta and olive tarts. I doubt that an olive has ever entered this building before. If it had, it would have been drummed right out again and reported on in the monthly news bulletin. However, Rose keeps insisting that we should ‘think without boundaries’, and goes on to outline her plan to bring in teams of youngsters – not just those from food technology courses but from the worlds of marketing, media and design.