Catherine Hartley and three of her directors sat down at the long table. They looked at the blank screen. Then at the packet of biscuits.

“No slides?” said Catherine, raising an eyebrow.

“No slides,” I said. “Just a story. If that's all right.”

She sat back. “Go on, then.”

I opened the packet of Digestives and put it in the middle of the table.

“My dad's name is Ken Hughes,” I said. “He started at your factory in Gateshead in 1987. He was nineteen. He worked on the Digestive line for thirty-one years. Six in the morning till two in the afternoon. Every night, when he came home, his jacket smelled of warm biscuits. That's what my childhood smelled like.”

I picked up the marker and wrote one word on the whiteboard.

HANDS.

“Every Hartley's biscuit has been made by somebody,” I said. “Mavis, who's packed biscuits since 1979 and can do it with her eyes closed. Liam, who's nineteen, and whose great-grandad worked in that factory during the war. Six hundred people. Real people. Making something good, the same way, for a hundred and twenty years.”

I looked at Catherine Hartley.

“Young people don't want another advert with a yacht in it,” I said. “They want to know where things come from. Who made them. Whether they're real.”

I tapped the packet of biscuits.

“This is real,” I said.