Thankfully for me, though (depending on how you felt about working for a temperamental astrologer who believed her menstrual cycle was controlled by galactic forces), Trish had put her personal feelings to one side when, on the first Friday back at work after our New Year’s knees-up, Zara had stormed into the green room late, screeching that her PA had ‘buggered off to the Turks & Caicos’ with a boy-band member over the New Year break and failed to return. Like a true friend, Trish had bolted right over to her, armed with a tray of Danish pastries, and told her she knew of the perfect replacement for her erstwhile assistant. That would, apparently, be me. Although, I’m not sure how my five years of experience in the marketing department of City Plumbing Supplies (although I solemnly swear I didn’t come up with the slogan ‘Our Toilet Fittings Won’t Drive U Round the Bend’) qualified me for a job as a celebrity PA.
True to form, when she’d called to give me the news, Trish’s honesty had been about as subtle as a nuclear missile with PMT.
‘Look, it’s not like you’ve got any other options on the table. And she’s desperate–she’ll take anyone. She’s really been left in the lurch.’
‘Trish, I hate to point out the obvious–but if Zara was any good at her job, wouldn’t she have seen it coming?’
‘Leni, do you want the job or not?’
I’d hesitated. The truth was that I probably didn’t. You see, much as my vino-fuelled rant at New Year had been made with wholehearted conviction, as Stu had sweetly pointed out, I did make that announcement on an annual basis. However, courtesy of a lifelong aversion to taking risks of any kind, my resolution for change never lasted longer than the New Year hangover.
I’d love to be adventurous and relish the thrill of spontaneous acts, but I’ve enough self-awareness to realise that I’m, well, a bit of a plodder. I’m comfortable with familiarity. I’m consistent. Predictable. I even occasionally relish boredom. And on the rare occasions that I do make a concerted effort to be more daring and open to life’s experiences, my ‘New Challenges’ gene gives up after five minutes and goes back to lying on a couch munching crisps and watching reality TV.
‘Leni? LENI?!’ Trish’s voice had boomed from the handset.
As her agitation had emanated up the phone line, my eyes had flicked to the book sticking out of my handbag: Ten Steps to a Whole New You. Waste of a tree and £6.99, because I’d finished it on the tube that morning and had realised that the old me was still rooted to the spot. My anxiety levels had slid upwards as I mentally prepared myself to utter the ‘thanks, but no thanks, you’re a great pal, good of you to think of me’ platitudes.
‘Trish, thanks…’
I’d lost track of the conversation, because right at that moment the head of design, Archie Botham, arrived, beaming in such a proud manner you’d swear he’d either won the lottery or given birth to the second coming. As he’d slapped a mangle of plastic down on my desk, I’d realised it was neither.
‘This ballcock will revolutionise toilets,’ he’d declared, with all the excitement of someone who realised he was a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize for Sanitary Ware Design. ‘Draw us up a provisional press release, Leni,’ he’d demanded in his thick Lancastrian accent. ‘Aye, girl, this is really going to put us on the map. I’m calling it The Botham Ballcock.’
They say that when your life is about to end you get flashbacks of the highlights. I suddenly realised that if I, Eleanor Olive Lomond, aged 27, got killed by a dose of salmonella in my chicken mayo baguette one lunchtime in the foreseeable future, the last thing I’d see was my name at the bottom of a press release announcing superior flushing technology.
‘I’ll take it!’ I’d blurted.
‘The ballcock?’ asked Archie, with more than a hint of puzzlement.
‘What?’ bellowed Trish.
I’d gesticulated to the phone sandwiched between my neck and shoulder and motioned to Archie to give me a minute. He’d backed off, clutching his revolutionary invention to his chest.
‘I said I’ll take it–the job,’ I’d whispered, anxious not to burst Archie’s euphoria by alerting him to my potential desertion.
‘Wise decision. She’ll have to interview you first, though.’
‘Just tell me when and where.’ I could do this. I could. I’d just taken one giant step (albeit with Trish pushing from behind), and all I needed to complete the rest of the ten steps to a brand new me were courage, determination…
‘And you might have to tell her you’re a firm believer in the paranormal–you’ve seen her on telly, she’s on a oneway ticket to Loon Central.’
…and bold-faced lies.
Thus I came to be sitting in front of Zara Delta, nursing a debilitating groin strain while channelling Zen. I felt it wasn’t an opportune time to tell her that the only Zen I knew owned our local kebab shop and was under investigation by Environmental Health.
In the manner befitting a wonderfully efficient PA (and to take my mind off the fact that this was only the second interview of my adult life), I’d meticulously researched the do’s and don’ts of successful interviews. Embarrassing revelation, number one: Ten Steps to a Whole New You wasn’t a one-off random purchase. In fact, there was a good chance that I was single-handedly responsible for keeping the entire self-help industry afloat. Other people read gossip mags. Some collect stamps. I’ve got a high-grade habit that involves lots of books with the words ‘Steps’ and ‘Dummies’ in the title. By rights, I should be able to manage any situation in one minute, unleash the giant within me, and be capable of doing a PowerPoint presentation while winning friends, influencing people, thinking positively and re-bonding with my granny.
The emphasis on that last bit being ‘should’. Somehow those affirming bibles of improvement seemed to have an expiry date approximately eight hours after I’d turned the last page, when my inherent personality traits kicked back in and shifted my paradigms right back to the ones I was born with. Yet I couldn’t stop reading them. I was like the shoe-holic who bought four-inch platforms in fourteen different colours even though she’d never wear them. To be honest, I thought I’d only be cured when I found a self-help guide to cure me of my dependence on self-help guides.
Unsurprisingly, none of the techniques or questions recommended in the self-help section came up during the first interview–well, I say interview, but the reality was that every time I spoke she shushed me and told me it was interfering with her attempts to connect our spiritual forces. That was a week ago, and now, to my frankly gobsmacked surprise, she’d called me back again. My spiritual forces must have been acting particularly slutty and welcoming all advances.
In the seven-day interval, my natural tendencies (the ones that were begging me to forget any crazy notions of new jobs and mad astrologers) were kicked to the kerb by intrigue, and the reminder that if I didn’t make the change now I’d be contemplating Botham’s Ballcocks right up to my pension years.
I’d read in Prepare Yourself, the Job Is Yours (£9.99 from all good bookshops) that employers form impressions within seconds of clapping eyes on you, so for our first meeting I’d gone a bit formal and pulled my eternally uncontrollable red, shoulder-blade-length hair back into a (only slightly messy) chignon, donned my one skirt suit (black, polyester, Primark, £19.99), a white top, and shoved my protesting feet into black court shoes with three-inch heels. Afterwards, I realised that the outfit probably gave the impression that I was about to serve her a chicken cacciatore at an Italian bistro. And since the heels made me about five foot eleven and a good nine inches taller than my potential employer, I decided to re-evaluate for our second meeting. This time I’d gone casual: black skinny jeans, ballet pumps, white T-shirt, soft grey merino wool