Leftovers Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 no lunchtime shaming. In fact, today’s lunch is going to be the start of the rest of my life: Devron’s finally briefing me on Project F and I’ll