Sofia's birthday in the office. As we cut the cake and sang happy birthday, Saskia (who we call Sask-yah because of her very posh accent) asked about Sofia's age and exclaimed: 'Oh. My. God. That is, like, so, like old yah? Actually.'
Sofia is 26 today.
---------------------------------------------------------------
And so to lunch. At The Market Porter pub, a little bit of London life in the heart of Borough Market to meet two women who run a PR company with whom we may or may not get some work out of.
Got there and they were already at the table - spartan but clean, quite neat but without any fancy adornments, old fashioned in a traditional sense. And the pub was quite nice too.
They were both over 25 which was a good sign but then we spotted they had already ordered their own drinks and one was on Coke and the other was orange juice.
Never a good sign.
I'm not much of a lunchtime drinker but we instantly had a beer each just to reiterate the fact that we were independent enough to have a drink at lunchtime if we wanted to!
It is increasingly rare to have a 'getting to know you' lunch these days which involves booze. We are constantly meeting up with PR people who offer us a proper drink but then stick to mineral water or Diet Coke themselves.
It was not always that way. In house PR departments, for instance, often included at least one boozy former journalist who took you to lunch as an excuse for a good old booze up on the company's expense.
Although this could be misused. There were a couple of guys at the BT press office - Ted Graham and David Orr - who were two of the main men in trying to give BT a better profile with us at The Sun.
When Kelvin was editor he was forever trying to find way to kick BT in the nuts. It led to some of my best bylines in the paper. A couple of us used to do the BT profits story every quarter or so.
They kept making billions and Kelvin hated it because of their virtual monopoly. But after a while we were struggling to find a new way of saying 'Greedy bastards'. So we were mulling over how to write the story that BT had made a billion quid's profit while phone boxes still smelled of piss and the price of a phone call was continuing to rise.
We had already reconstructed what a billion pounds would look like in piles on a table, how it would reach to the moon and back if laid end to end, how it weighed as much as three elephants if in ten pound notes etc etc.
But we were running out of ideas, us 'specialist writers' - there was Patrick Hennessy and I doing industry and David Yelland on the City page if I remember rightly. Paddy is now the Sunday Telegraph's political editor and Yelland, having edited The Sun, now earns big bucks in PR. And I'm happy too!
Kelvin wanted a new angle. He kept coming over and muttering 'a billion quid, you just can't imagine a billion quid.'
Then he said: 'Even if I worked for 100 years I wouldn't earn that would I?'
So we started working it out. I forget what the exact profit figure was but we began to calculate sums on the basis of how much you would earn a week to earn a billion odd quid in the period being talked about. But it was still too much.
Then we came up with it. Whatever the profit was, and I think it was around a billion pounds, we worked out how much that was a second.
And so the headline for the front page splash was 'BT makes £103 a SECOND' and the damage was done.
After that, everyone - and I mean everyone from the BBC to the FT to news organisations all over the world - started referring to BT's profits by the second. And not just BT. Every time any figure was too big to comprehend, it got broken down into seconds.
Britons spend £27 a second on beer, ITV sells advertising during the World Cup for £200 a second, footballers earn £100 a second and so on.
We began to get a lot of good BT stories so Ted and David came up with a new tactic. They took us to lunch in January. We expected a boozy time so would pile into the wine. However, Ted would go 'dry' in January as a new year's resolution so he remained sober and the poor hack would be pissed by the cheese board. Not me, actually, but a very esteemed colleague who had got a great story about BT ditching their old ad campaign for a bizarre 'piper' logo (for those who remember it).
Ted and David remained sober and my colleague, who shall remain nameless, got drunk, was quizzed about his source, accidentally blurted it out and BT found their mole!
So perhaps not drinking with contacts at lunchtime isn't such a bad idea after all.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The nice thing about working in Bermondsey is that I have a couple of bridges nearby to wander over when I want to return north of the river.
This evening I had a stroll across Tower Bridge, past all the tourists taking photos of each other, with wonderful views both left and right of old London with all its history and the new, the big shiny monoliths to capitalism. The Shard is wonderful but The Tower of London remains my favourite building of all. I love watching Americans get to grips that the Tower is several hundreds years older than their nation.
Being in London I went for a drink at, naturally, the Bavarian Beer Cellar where the barmaids are East European but wear those German wench outfits. That proved too much for me and my drinking partner Nigel Hughes, author of the Ear I Am blog - linked to this page - and responsible for my small but loyal following in his hometown. Respect to the Newton-le-Willows massive.
So we went to The Cheshire Cheese, which is geographically more up his street. I love London.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
My wife and I first met when I was a junior reporter on the Ilford Recorder and she was a press officer at the local Redbridge council. I used to think she rang me up with stories because I was either a) the best reporter in Ilford or b) she fancied the arse off me.
It was only later I found out that when the council had some piece of rubbish they wanted the Recorder to run, they would tell her 'ring Solly, he's lazy.'
They may have had a point. I could be lazy.
Also, at that time I was trying to get to grips with very uncomfortable hard contact lenses. For those who remember them, they were a nightmare if worn for more than a couple of hours and I used to wear mine for 24 hours straight.
So my eyes were inevitably bloodshot. I had dyed blonde hair and an earring and wore shiny suits from Mr Byrite and black suede pixie boots from Shelleys. So they warned my wife-to-be that I was not only lazy but on drugs.
They may have had a point on that one too actually.
All of us had to do our share of council meetings which would start at around 7pm. We finished work at 5.30pm. So I would go round to the house of one of our subs who introduced me to the pleasures of a bong.
Sometimes it was only that or imagining Cllr Hazel Weinberg in a leather dominatrix outfit that kept me going during those planning sub-committee marathons.
Any other business? No? Then the press are excused. Thank you for your attendance...Solly
No comments:
Post a Comment