The Happiness Recipe. Stella Newman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 the next life as a vajazzle.

      Fletchers hired NMN as their agency because we are the diametric opposite of Fletchers. We look classy (from the outside at least). We are big. Shiny. Expensive. We do ads for famous beers and jeans; for deodorant that is in every bathroom cabinet in the nation.

      Our offices are plush and tasteful. They reek of sobriety.

      We’re not wacky, soothe the white walls in reception.

      We are solid, reassure the marble tiles in the first-floor client loos. We won’t take your overpriced t-shirt brand and ‘sex it up’ so that next year the only people wearing it will be gypsies on a reality TV show. Gosh no – not our style at all.

      Take a closer look, whisper the spot-free windows in the second-floor boardroom. Here, borrow this ruler so you can measure how thick the chocolate on our client biscuits is. See? Isn’t that wonderful? Everything’s going to be just fine.

      (It’s a good job clients never take the lift above the second floor. Up on fourth, the creatives inhabit their own little Sodom. Management up on fifth is Gomorrah. The smell of fire and brimstone is masked by copious amounts of Jo Malone Red Roses air freshener but that doesn’t fool me.)

      And then we come to my desk, here on the third floor – home of the account directors. It’s a metaphorical floor plan. Below us are the clients, when they come in for a meeting. Above us, the creatives. We are stuck in the middle of two warring factions, the filling in a sandwich that you would be well advised not to eat.

      I dump my bag on my chair and take a deep breath. Right: I’ve made a decision. Today is going to be a good day. Yes, I’m hungover, which isn’t ideal. But I have a large white coffee in one hand, and a brown paper bag with buttered white toast and Marmite in the other. Caffeine. Salt. Fat. Carb. Chair. Those five nouns: what more could a girl ask for?

      Even better! Jonty’s not here. He’s off on a course all week learning how to manage his workload. Bless, I don’t think he needs any help on that front, he’s given it all to me.

      And in other good news Rebecca is out too, on a shoot, so she won’t be able to nab me over lunch break and try to make me talk about last night. Rebecca is one of those friends who thinks it’s important always to confront the truth. Doesn’t she realise no one ever thanks you for telling them the truth? Denial is a healthy psychological state, designed to protect us from ourselves, and should be respected accordingly.

      So СКАЧАТЬ