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10.45 a.m. – 6 p.m. – spend entire day at the viewing facility preparing for groups, looking through stimulus, reading documents that keep being changed by the client every two minutes
6 p.m. – clients arrive and change everything that you’ve been working on all day
8 p.m. – 10.30 p.m. – German colleague moderates groups, clients talk German so you can’t understand anything that’s being said. They also hate you on sight because you’re too young/blonde/British/tired/depressed. Sit behind a mirror manically typing up everything the simultaneous translator is saying, then try to make sense in terms of which of the dreadful ideas is the least negative. Tell client your thoughts whilst he/she looks at you with disdain. Leave for hotel and feel sad, wishing you were a pop star, novelist, playwright etc.
11 p.m. – 1 a.m. – order room service, send emails and start to get grumpy emails back from the clients who are unhappy because the people you spoke to were wrong and they are going to ignore everything you suggest anyway. Watch infomercials for strange vegetable slicing machines and exercise contraptions whilst brain ceaselessly whirrs around and around and you worry about whether you’re going to sleep through your alarm and miss your dawn flight home again
Okay maybe there’d been a couple of trips that had been fun. New York, for example. And you got some time in the day to walk around the city. It wasn’t all bad or if it was, why was I still here?
The last five years I’d stopped travelling – it made me too anxious. I was glad when I only had to get a train to Manchester or Leeds and if I was lucky, I could return the same night and sleep in my own bed.
Then Phoebe became my boss and things changed. The mood changed. It felt like things were even more accelerated. There was rarely time to sit down and eat lunch, and sandwiches were shoved down your neck whilst typing with one hand. It became permissible to take client calls in the loo whilst urinating. There was no down time or if there was you were called into a brainstorm.
Phoebe walked past as I was writing notes in my book. Writing notes was a good way of looking busy and avoiding her attention.
‘MORNING REBECCA!’ she boomed. ‘TRAIN TROUBLE AGAIN?’
I was glad that everyone was wearing headphones and couldn’t hear her.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was on a client call and had to miss the first train so I could finish the conversation.’
‘A client conversation with whom?’ she said walking backwards towards my desk, and looking down at my notes which so far said: must get a scented candle for Pete’s mum’s birthday and pick up coat from dry cleaners.
‘Um it was that cleaning wax enquiry. Remember? The one from a few months ago?’
She raised an eyebrow and clearly didn’t believe me.
‘Well send the brief over so I can have a quick look before you make a start,’ she said dismissively and walked off.
She didn’t walk. She STRODE. She was Sheryl Sandberg (the famous female head honcho at Facebook), to the power of ten. Later I would need to invent a reason as to why the brief hadn’t arrived. I would drop her an email, and say that some other agency had got it instead.
The other problem I had with work was the fact that there seemed to be resentment coming from the younger generation. The previous Thursday during one of our ‘Share & Care Hours’ (you had to take a colleague you didn’t know out for coffee), a young man had informed me that Gen X were to blame for everything that was wrong with our country – the flagging economy, corporate greed and corruption, not enough cheap, good quality housing in urban areas. He listed everything about my generation that he despised, whilst I quietly drank my coffee and reassured him that I wasn’t personally responsible and weren’t these coffee brainstorms supposed to be uplifting for us both?
There was a part of me that felt that there was some jealousy perhaps – we’d had fun, it was true (the travel had felt exciting for a while) and we’d been hedonistic (yes, me definitely, from what I could remember) and raved and all that, and now this generation were spending their youth taking photos of their food. The only office banter seemed to involve food or food-related activities.
There was a new Korean street food shop opening.
There was a place that sold seaweed soaked in gin.
There was a stall selling kimchi that had been aged for four years straight.
I loved eating as much as the next person, but where were the wild nights spent getting off with strangers? Or losing footwear whilst moshing at the front of a gig? Food was for old people who couldn’t dance anymore. My generation had eaten chips and didn’t worry about their ‘carb-load’. We didn’t find food sexy. We avoided it and spent our money elsewhere – fags and booze, mainly. Every time I went into the kitchen I braced myself for a lecture on the best coffee beans to buy (Jamaican, £12.99 a bag) and why I couldn’t continue using Nescafé.
About seven years in, I’d started getting the itch to leave Mango-Lab. I had a few different ideas but none of them had much of a commercial angle. These included:
A Rock and Roll café, selling cupcakes inspired by seventies rock legends; a risotto takeaway business, with hot risotto delivered to your desk, ‘Risotto to Go for the Days When Risotto is too Slow’; a vintage brooch dealership, this was very niche but at the time I lived in Ladbroke Grove, and admired Portobello market. I wanted to be one of those cool, bohemian women in long fur coats who sold knick-knacks and nattered to one another all day. That was the thing with cool jobs. They were often poorly paid. Though some would claim my job was cool too, I guess.
Whilst it wasn’t as bad as some industries, marketing could still be a relatively sexist industry. If you were a woman, it made sense not to put your neck out or say anything too controversial. If you were a man you had to do the opposite. Early on in my career there’d been a male colleague (long gone now – he’d been head-hunted to work in advertising), who constantly scratched his balls whilst waiting by the printer. After scratching for a couple of minutes, he’d then lift his palm and sniff. It was a low-down, dog-like behaviour, but nobody said anything as he was seen to be a ‘creative genius’ and said ‘fuck’ a lot in boring meetings, which created a lot of excitement. I knew early on that this tactic wouldn’t work for me.
A woman scratching herself and swearing wasn’t the done thing. It seemed like men had more leeway to be themselves. Swearing became a bit of a trend. The ball scratching didn’t take off but instead there was lots of expansive body language that the men used to take up as much space as possible. The women who did well were of two ilks; pretty and hard-working to the point of nervous breakdown, or un-feeling and robotic. I had built my career on being sort of okay-looking (blonde, blue eyes, enormous arse), and saying ‘that’s interesting’ a lot. I made very high quality cups of tea.
I listened to boring men and told them they were right just so they’d shut up. I sometimes imagined what size penises they had. Other times I drew pictures of penises on my writing pad as they spoke. It was a small form of rebellion. It was a counterpoint to being so nice and not itching my fanny by the printer. Phoebe was different of course, because she had the stamina of a horse, and didn’t buy into the whole people-pleasing thing.
If people were thirsty in a meeting then their mouths could remain dry and their spittle stuck in the corners. If a man swore then she mirrored this language right back to him. She was the only woman I knew who could actually play golf (and enjoyed it). She was old school in that way and had gotten into it to infiltrate the old boys’ network (most male clients still loved golf). She also did long distance running. If I ever worked late (this was rare), I’d catch her running past with her laptop jiggling up and down in her rucksack, wearing a neon T-shirt that said ‘LET’S DO THIS.’
Overall at Mango-Lab, even if you set the sexism to one side, the priority was ‘high-quality strategic thinking’, which basically meant well-written decks on Pot Noodles, fizzy drinks and eye creams, peppering these presentations pulled together on PowerPoint, which we called ‘decks’, with one or two words that the client didn’t understand, so they came away with the feeling that you were cleverer than them and they were lucky to have listened to you for well over an hour.
Phoebe and I were the same age, but she came across as far more put together.
I really wasn’t happy this particular Monday. That wasn’t unusual.
I had a creeping sense of unease. I had become a ball of the stuff.
Two (#u4b54af73-a544-5de0-8358-0d6ca3987936)
A FEW HOURS HAD passed and I was trying to write the final presentation for a project I’d just finished.
The client wanted to launch a wipe that cleaned a baby’s bottom and also made them fall asleep. The name of the product was ‘Goodnight Bum’ and there was some mocked-up packaging and a potential scent idea (Lavender and Tea Tree oil). It was ambitious but had legs, or at least that was my argument. You see parents will always seek out anything that promises sleep, and nowadays we all believe there’s a product that can fix anything. I’d interviewed twelve groups of mums in focus groups. They all reacted the same way. At first, they’d found the idea appalling (they were worried about the cleaning/sleeping benefit – was there some secret/toxic ingredient?) but I needed to come up with a positive slant for this presentation. Clients don’t like to be told that their idea is shit. It’s just like when a child holds up their drawing for approval. You try and be diplomatic and find something you do like – You’ve drawn a cat with eight legs. How lovely! It’s a spider cat. Don’t cry, love. It’s brilliant!
‘The ‘Goodnight Bum’ proposition is both challenging and disruptive,’ I typed into PowerPoint.
I sipped my coffee. I didn’t have my headphones on, but there was complete silence in the office. I often wondered why we didn’t all work from home. It would save a lot of money and wasted travel time. At least the quiet afforded me some thinking space.
‘The challenge for ‘Goodnight Bum’ is to find a sweet spot between calming and cleansing.’
My phone buzzed with an incoming text. ‘Bella has sustained a small head injury whilst hanging off the climbing frame but we applied a cold compress and she seems to be in good health,’ it said.
I felt a surge of panic. Nursery had been sending texts for some time now. I still felt it was more appropriate to speak to the parent, but then I also acknowledged that speaking was becoming far less common because it was so time-consuming. I resisted the urge to Google ‘minor head injuries in small children,’ and tried to focus. Bella was that kind of child. She was boisterous and outgoing. She loved to try new things. Hopefully she’d never experience the slog and sheer averageness of my own life. She was in good health. All was well.
Back to the presentation and the phrase ‘sweet spot’ was a good one. I used it a fair amount. It made me think of ‘G-spot’ and was just as mythical – it was where the truth lay, where an idea suddenly sprang into life and resonated, where it made people orgasm. In life, I’d failed to find this blissful truth for myself. For now, I could hear the boy next to me playing MC Hammer through his headphones. It brought back memories of a night in South London in my youth when I’d snogged a boy called Freddie. Freddie had been a very good dancer but a terrible kisser. I’d gone out with him for four months before finally realizing the truth. I wondered whether this music had come back into fashion, or was it part and parcel of this irony thing, where anything shit was cool? What was Freddie doing these days? Had someone taught him to snog properly?
Was he working on a ‘disruptive proposition to send a baby to sleep whilst you cleansed its bottom?’
‘Bella is still in good health,’ a new text buzzed.
‘Thanks for the update,’ I replied.
‘Log onto our portal for updates on our menus this week,’ the next text said.
Was this a real person?
And would they text me when they took her to A&E? Or when she was in intensive care? I needed to call them to check she really was okay but that would mean staying an extra half an hour, and missing bedtime. Bedtime was the key objective – if I could get home by bedtime then my life wasn’t completely messed up.
I tried to get back to work again.
‘The idea is overwhelmingly negative,’ I typed as this was closer to the truth, but this sounded, well, rather awful. ‘The idea works on some levels,’ I concluded.
I looked up and the MC Hammer fanboy was wearing a baseball cap with the word ‘TWAT’ emblazoned across the front. He looked up for a second and then back at his screen. Many of these young folks thought I was an elderly person hired by the company to help with our diversity initiative. He had no idea that back in the day I’d been a hot shot. No, that wasn’t true. I’d never been a hot shot. I wasn’t strategic enough and I worked hard but not so hard that I ended up in hospital with nervous exhaustion.
A proper sissy pants, me. Besides not all of us can be Phoebe-Sheryl Sandberg-BIG-BOSS-PANTS. Not all of us want to be her right?
I checked my emails, and there was yet another one from Mum complaining that Dad was being anti-social. I didn’t know why she was surprised by my father’s tendencies to lock himself away – they’d been together for forty-five years now.
Your dad refuses to try line dancing with me. He says he’s too busy but it’s pretty obvious that he’s just hiding away. I never thought my life would be so lonely.
Mum was prone to being dramatic. I could empathise as I could clearly see that there was very little to recommend getting old (unless you were rich and old). They lived in a different part of London, I rarely saw them. It took me two and a bit hours to travel from Acton to Beckenham where I’d grown up. It was quicker to take the Eurostar to Paris. Dad was usually tinkering in his shed with his model railway. He’d retired five years ago and had a history of depression. Maybe it wasn’t depression but was just low mood. He’d set the railway up so it ran around the garden. Mum was a social animal and needed to be around people. Dad was happiest when he could spend uninterrupted periods alone. Mum was constantly experimenting with a range of different evening classes, from watercolour through to Mandarin. They were relatively healthy but each time I spoke to either of them there seemed to be the arrival of another ailment. It was hard to see how there could be much of a silver lining.
Both my parents had always instilled how important it was to work, to have a dependable income, to have financial stability. Sometimes I wished they hadn’t.
And I went for a walk this morning and another big, frightening dog attacked Puddles. He’s shaking with fear whilst I type this. I am at my wit’s end.
Love Mum
Mum was often at her ‘wit’s end’ and Puddles was my parent’s Yorkshire terrier. Puddles was an unhappy dog that shook when he went for a stroll (or more accurately a ‘shake’), shook when he took a dump, and shook when you offered him a treat. He was constantly being attacked by mean dogs and lacked confidence (something we had in common perhaps?). I made a mental note to ring Dad. We usually talked about the weather at great length and then I’d ask him how he was really and he’d say he had a cold (which meant his depression was mild) or the flu (which meant it was pretty bad) or a stomach bug (which translated to needing more antidepressants). We never used the word depression and yet this time I was worried about his reclusiveness. At the same time, I envied the fact that he could avoid people for long periods of time with nothing but Classic FM blaring out of the old ghetto blaster that had resided in my teenage bedroom. He didn’t have to get crammed onto a train or listen to sad men swearing in meetings and he could amuse himself fixing little carriages together with glue and drinking tea (he even had a kettle in there so Mum had enabled him to be more of a recluse). He’d spent his working life in academia and this was how academics were. They pootled and liked quiet. This behaviour was not out of the ordinary.
Lunchtime arrived, and like every other work day I walked listlessly round the local boutiques trying to dispatch the sad feeling that lived inside me. It was cold and windy, so I bought a bobble hat. A scented candle. A new pair of gloves. None of these items were satisfying, and I went back to the canteen upstairs, bought my protein and salad lunch, and hunched over my phone, trying to see what was going on in the world of Instagram. It seemed that everyone else was doing far more interesting things than I was. There were a lot of motivational quotes about how today was the day where my life would finally take off. Others were preaching the benefits of feeling good about our bodies (which felt rather obvious, I thought, but these posts always proved popular). I spent ten minutes trying to think of something witty to fling into the mix, and then gave up. I called Pete instead. He worked at a catering company that provided posh lunches for corporate clients. He hated it but was good and rarely moaned. He accepted that part of life was doing a job you disliked. We were both very different in that regard.
‘What’s up?’ he said picking up after the first ring.
‘Not much. I just had lunch. Are you having a good day?’ I asked. ‘The nursery texted and said Bella fell off the climbing frame again.’
‘Is she okay?’
‘I think so. No she’s definitely okay or they would have sent another one. How’s work?’
‘Bit of a pain. There’s a massive order in for a conference tomorrow. I’ve been on my feet all morning but I’m going to buy some tinned tomatoes on my way home and make a nice prawn pasta for dinner.’
‘Did you take the prawns out of the freezer?’
‘I think so.’
‘If you didn’t take them out then we can’t have prawn pasta can we?’
‘If they haven’t thawed I’ll do that sausage pasta thing Bella likes.’
‘I don’t think the sausages are still okay,’ I said.
‘I’ll check when I get in,’ he replied.
There were a lot of conversations about freezing and defrosting these days. I wondered if all couples were the same.
Yet I knew I was lucky to have Pete. He made delicious food. He still took pride in his appearance and hadn’t lost his teeth and hair. He did more on the domestic front than many other men – in fact some weekend mornings, it was a race to see who could get the washing in the machine first. There was sometimes a tinge of passive-aggressiveness to it. We had sex every two months but there were also long periods where we didn’t do it all and watched TV. Yes I needed to practice more gratitude. The problem was it was hard work, this long-term relationship stuff. The practicalities of life took over and you were left with two people exchanging functional information on how to get from A to B. A bit like when you ask someone directions and then don’t listen and walk the way you originally intended anyway.
An image of Pete popped into my mind. The night we’d first met in a bar in Ladbroke Grove. It had been back in the days before mobiles, before screens, when people looked at each other a lot more (I’d heard from younger colleagues at work that this rarely happened much anymore). I’d had quite a lot of beer to drink (back when beer was trendy for girls to drink), and a friend had introduced me. He was tall, had a mop of dark hair, and an Irish accent.
‘He’s bad news,’ my friend had said. ‘He just goes from one girl to the next.’
I was a woman that loved a challenge and I treated getting Pete like a project.
We’d spent that first night kissing in the corner. We kissed a lot. I tried not to think about it now because it felt like two different people. It had been. Two people without a kid, without the stress of paying a mortgage and bills each month, without all the domestic hum drum that took over, without acres of TV to get through each day.
Just two people that really liked one other.
In the beginning our relationship had been exciting. Like all couples, who fancy each other, we’d taken every opportunity to have sex. We’d had sex in a park, in a toilet, in my old bedroom when I took him to meet my parents (my parents weren’t there for the sex part). Pete had never been a massive talker and had grown up in a family where his mum talked enough for the entire family – the rest of the family nodded or shook their heads. Nevertheless we had that initial phase of getting to know each other, sharing key childhood experiences, music we loved – all that stuff.
Then, like many couples who have been together a long time, we stopped asking those questions. Pete often said things like ‘You told me that story already,’ or ‘I know how this one ends.’ And it was true, there wasn’t much original content. And he hated my work chat. Initially I’d come back full of venom and stories about my day, I’d download them the split-second I came through the door. I had that need to get it all off my chest. Pete was oftentimes looking to provide a basic solution to these problems, so he’d say things like, tell him to bugger off, or just don’t do that project if it isn’t in your job description. This was fine, but what he didn’t understand was that I didn’t want a solution. I JUST WANTED HIM TO LISTEN. And sympathise. Like a friend would.
‘You can’t have conversations with your partner like you do with your mates,’ Kath said.
But this left me wondering what you could do with your partner if conversations and sex were often off the agenda.
What did that leave?
And so I stopped telling him these work stories. I stopped telling him the old stories (he’d heard them all). I stopped telling him. It made me sad but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about it. It didn’t feel like something that dinner in a nice restaurant would fix.
On top of this we’d been through three miscarriages after Bella. Miscarriages can bring you closer together but they’d seemed to push us further apart instead. We wanted to stay together.
But life was tiring and we didn’t have energy to put into it anymore.
After lunch, I went back to the silent, air-conditioned tomb. The air con had been turned up so high that several of my colleagues were wearing thick blankets wrapped around their shoulders. It made the whole place feel a bit desperate – like we were in some sort of disaster zone, just trying to hold our shit together until somebody rescued us. I shoved my headphones on, and spent twenty minutes trying to construct a Spotify playlist that would encourage me to run more often.
Phoebe came back into my field of vision. She mouthed the words, WHERE’S THAT BRIEF? at me and I made a sort of shrugged shoulder, not sure where, gesture and she was off again. It was obvious that there was a need for more briefs today. We were very busy but not busy enough.
I whacked some KRS-One on. An old P. Diddy track. The minute those beats started I felt more energetic. Hip-hop made me feel like I could conquer the world. Hip-hop artists never struggled with their careers or worried that they’d spent too much on a bobble hat and would need to return it. I love hip-hop (classics from the 90s). This stemmed back to my childhood growing up in Beckenham – basically you either liked hip-hop or dance music and I tended to be more of a hip-hop gal. It seemed as if those lyrics were written for a white, middle-class girl dealing with boys who thought I was too tall and boyish for them and friendship dynamics which changed every two minutes. Now if you clocked me in my Boden skirt, grey roots just starting to show through, you’d think I was listening to Coldplay or some such dross but I retained my tiny sliver of youthful abandon through listening to LL Cool J, DMX, Dr Dre and Wu-Tang Clan.
There was something about hip-hop that was remarkably confidence boosting.
Like many females, I didn’t over-index on confidence and was drawn to people who did. LL Cool J never woke in the morning with imposter syndrome. He didn’t have to read positive affirmations to know what he stood for or what he wanted to accomplish that day. It’s was awe-inspiring. One day I would launch a magazine and it would give advice from rappers to middle aged women. It would be called Dope Housewives, and would blow Good Housekeeping out of the water. Who wanted to look at Judith Chalmers in a floral jumpsuit or read articles about body brushing when you could read ‘Snoop Dog’s 10 Tips for a Hot Damn Sex Life?’. It was accepted that your tastes became more conservative, the older you became but why did this have to be so?
Eventually, I came back to the slides I needed to finish off. Some of the presentation seemed to be rather repetitive, but I could always hide those slides, or delete them once I’d finished.
I couldn’t help myself and checked Instagram first, scrolling through another fifty images of women who were apparently ‘killing it’, ‘nailing it’, ‘embracing the day,’ and the like. I wrote another slide. Then went back on social media. I kept this not-very-virtuous-circle going for the rest of the afternoon.
‘The synergy between cleaning and sleeping doesn’t feel optimum for a bum product offering.’
‘Today’s the first day of the rest of your life.’
‘A core barrier is the fear of toxicity next to baby’s private parts.’
‘The only thing to fear is fear itself.’
‘The optimized proposition needs to reassure on naturalness as some respondents feared rashes and reactions due to strong offensive odour of product.’
I was increasingly feeling like I was just arranging words in different configurations, and they made very little sense. I took a few screengrabs from various baby websites and stuck smiling faces all over the deck. That jollied it up somewhat and made it feel a bit more accessible. At around three p.m. it was time for a team meeting. Darren was my team leader – I’d hired him just before going on maternity leave and he was now my line manager. It wasn’t uncommon of course. Having a baby was not a good idea and your career rarely survived – unless when you came back you worked ten times as hard and denied the baby’s existence. It was a thorny issue and one that showed no signs of going away.
‘So, are we all SMASHING it today?’ Darren said as the four of us settled around the table.
There was something about him that gave me a visceral response – a queasy feeling. He was a strange hybrid of ‘macho surfer’ and ‘steely banker’. It was a horrid combination.
