‘I think you should take your mental rug-munching friend home – get her back on her meds,’ says Jason, heading to the bar in pursuit of the waitress.
‘Yeah, send my love to …’ I rack my brain for the name of a famous clown … er … how come I don’t know any famous clown names? Now that really is embarrassing. ‘Send my love to … to Coco!’ I shout after him. Yeah. Coco. That’ll do. He was a boy clown. I think.
Danny whispers something to Rebecca and follows his mate to the bar. Rebecca just stares at me.
‘What?’ I say, twiddling my umbrella and checking whether the up-down mechanism on it works. Cool, it does! I love the fact that these umbrellas could actually function as mini parasols, for ladybirds or something …
‘Bloody hell, Suze,’ she says. ‘You need to stop doing that.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Being insane and aggressive when hot men are chatting us up.’
‘He wasn’t that hot. Anyway you fancy the barman more than you fancied him.’
‘Not the point.’
‘Come off it, he was booooring. And his nob-head friend was rude about Adele. I’m standing up for womankind. And he made that moronic comment about lipstick and I was merely trying to explain to him that … you know … you shouldn’t objectify women, and lipstick doesn’t make a girl sexy …’
‘Shall I tell you what else doesn’t make a girl sexy, Suze?’
‘What?’
‘Verbally attacking random men.’
‘Random dipshits more like …’
‘Whatever. Either way, you come across as angry.’
‘Becka, I’m only angry when I’m provoked.’
‘Look, I know you’ve had a drink …’
‘That’s your fault! You’re a bad friend! You made me have five drinks on a Tuesday night and you know I don’t get along with Jägermeister at the best of times, hideous Alpine medicine …’
‘Hang on a minute …’ she says.
‘What?’
‘The lipstick thing …’
‘No, it’s not what you’re thinking!’ I hold up my hand to stop what she’s about to say.
‘Isn’t Jake’s girlfriend a …’
‘Rebecca, it has nothing whatsoever to do with that.’
‘You’re not still looking at her stupid blog, are you?’
‘No.’
She looks at me.
‘Not really,’ I say.
‘You are. Oh Suze, why are you doing this to yourself?’
‘I’m not. There was some stupid piece in ES Magazine last week about Spring’s New Make-Up Looks. I saw her name, and then there was a little photo of her with her bloody Birkin bag like some wannabe Victoria Beckham, doing some model’s lip gloss at a show … I wasn’t Googling her, I really wasn’t.’
‘Oh Suze, she is so irrelevant.’
‘They’re still together, Rebecca. She’s posted some new pics on Facebook. God, I need some carbohydrate, I feel dreadful.’
She shakes her head and puts her arm round me. ‘Come on, you drunken, crazy fool. Let’s get you home for your meds.’
‘Only if by meds you mean two McDonald’s cheeseburgers for the road? Please, can we?’
She nods, resignedly.
She’s a very good friend.
Wednesday
I will never, ever let Rebecca order me a Jäger Bomb, ever again.
I wake up in my clothes with half a pink umbrella in my hair, a splitting headache in my left eye and the taste of McDonald’s dill pickle in my mouth. It’s fine. I’m not late for work or anything. But as I lie here in bed, talking myself out of chucking a sickie, I can’t help but think ‘Why, oh why am I still working at NMN?’
I’ve been there for six years. I moved there from BVD, an even crappier agency, where I worked on a yellow fats account. (Yellow fats = butter, anything that behaves like butter, or that you’d say was butter-y-ish if you had no taste buds/someone put a gun in your mouth. In fact a gun in your mouth would taste more like butter.) I moved agencies because I thought the problem was BVD and yellow fats. But I’ve come to realise that the problem wasn’t my old agency. It wasn’t the spreadable butter-replacement solutions. It’s this business full stop.
Oh I know what you’re thinking: daft cow, of course advertising is full of tossers! Since the 1980s, ad ‘folk’ have been second only to estate agents as figures of hate. But in recent years two things changed all that. First, bankers and politicians (never high on your Christmas card list), made a running sprint, like at the end of the Grand National, for Public Enemy spots number one and two. The guys from Foxtons slipped down to third place, and ad folk – well, we fell off the podium.
And second: Mad Men came on TV. The men were chauvinists but sexy chauvinists. The women looked like actual women. Everyone smoked and drank and had sex with everyone else in the office. The industry suddenly looked glamorous and grown up and intellectually stimulating. And suddenly people seemed to forget that Mad Men is a made-up TV show rather than a documentary, and started thinking maybe advertising wasn’t so bad after all.
Friends began asking if it was anything like Mad Men at NMN. To which the answer is surprisingly twofold: a bit, and not at all. A bit: the men are still chauvinists. Everyone drinks. Some still smoke. Everyone still has sex with everyone else in the office (apart from Sam and me). But glamorous? Grown up? Intellectually stimulating? See ‘not at all’ for details. And as for women who look like actual women? I’m one of only four females in the building who’s bigger than a size eight, and two of the others are pregnant.
Anyway – I think, as I force myself to crawl out of bed – it’s all going to be fine because I have THE plan: execute this new brief perfectly, stay out of trouble with Berenice, get my bonus and promotion at Christmas, then go and find something fun and fulfilling to do in the world of food instead. And no, I will not be serving fries with that.
It could be a lot worse, I figure as I head to the tube. At least I don’t work at Fletchers.
Fletchers is a rubbish supermarket. They’re the seventh biggest in the UK. They used to be fourth, but they’ve steadily cut the quality of their food and staff. If you go into a Fletchers after 2 p.m. on a weekday, chances are they’ll have run out of milk and bread and you’ll be lucky to find a chicken in sell by date. They’re plagued by bad PR stories: the guy on the meat counter filmed by an undercover Sun reporter picking his nose and then touching the pork belly; donkey meat in the burgers; the relabelling of mutton as lamb; the job-lot of tomatoes from China that were genetically modified in an old nuclear plant.
They’re still pretty popular with shoppers though. Why? Here’s why: firstly, you can feed a family of four for two pounds at Fletchers. Secondly, a large proportion of the British public love the Fletchers ‘brand’. Devron, Fletchers’ Head of Foods and Marketing, is on record as saying ‘If you crossed James Corden with a can of Tango and a Geordie hen night, that’s what our brand stands for: down-to-earth, honest, cheeky fun.’ And all that cheeky fun is down to the advertising we’ve done for them over the last six years. Advertising that I have, in some small way, been involved in. Good job I don’t believe in re-incarnation or I’d be coming back in