Fraudulent expense claims, it is said, account for around £350m while the other £670m should never have been paid because the items were not covered by company policy. Here, I guess, is the rub.

Examples listed in the survey (based on more than 4.8m expense sheets from over 100,000 employees in 140 companies) include the purchase of 20 bibles and a visit to a strip club. Claims for haircuts were common, and one employee submitted a betting slip as a receipt. Anybody in vending would have been more creative - wouldn't they?

Financial services, it seems, were the biggest spenders (sorry Siemens and co), accounting for almost a quarter of last year's claims for hospitality and entertainment. Media and publishing were the second biggest (though not personally, you understand).

Here's a plea to those worthies who configure or fill in-cup vending machines. Excellent as they are in many ways, their very nature means that most of them restrict the user strictly to what's packed in the cup. No flexibility. So when I came across an in-cup machine recently which offered seven choices of coffee, I was disappointed (to put it mildly) to see that only one of the options included sugar - and that was empty, presumably because it was so popular!

Now, I'm no chocoholic - in, fact I don't really even have a very sweet tooth - but I do like sugar in my coffee, and cannot accept that people like me represent a ratio of one in seven consumers - as suggested by that in-cup machine.

Back to the tap and eating like budgies. In the States, market research specialist Mintel has taken a look at likely food and beverage trends over there during 2008. Among some not-too-surprising findings, one could have a small but interesting impact on vending while another almost knocked me off my perch.

Mintel quite reasonably forecasts a backlash against bottled water this year, based on the much-publicised environmental impact of all those plastic bottles and the cost of their trans-global transportation. Fair enough, all good news for manufacturers and operators of point of use water dispensers - for who can foresee a return to water fountains or ‘naked' tap water?

What is interesting though is that Mintel also reckons that this will result in a big boost in demand for functional waters (I'm still not sure exactly what they are!), including sports drinks and those with added vitamins and calcium. That could indeed be another opportunity for our industry, egged-on by some tempting margins. Some of those products actually taste half-decent, too - a case in point is Slazenger's new S1 ‘hypotonic' (I'm sure I'm not the only person to think, at first sight, that the label says ‘hypnotic') good-for-you drink.

Now to the perch. The same piece of Mintel research predicts that some strange-sounding grains will move out of the dark corners of health food shops to appear in main stream everyday products. Speaking as one who grows things from seeds, rather than eating them, examples quoted like amaranth, quinoa, teff and kamut left me largely none the wiser. But then came millet! Even I know that's what aunty Polly's budgie eats. Now while I am a strong supporter of the healthy eating fraternity, are we really destined to chirp, say ‘pretty boy' and bounce with health?