Adland

Over eleven years ago, when I was a green, green graduate, I took a job at an advertising agency in Soho. I thought it'd be a sparkly kind of profession, and in some ways it was. In the beginning I always got a kick out of seeing my agency's ads out there in the big, wide world. They didn't need to be Cannes-worthy, simply to point at something and say 'I helped make that' was novel enough for me. Sometimes, in the very early days, I even snipped ads from the paper and sent them home to my ever-encouraging mum; anything from budget travel to posh cars, from power tools to kids' TV, with the breathless note, 'this is mine!' It's been a long time since any press ad has given rise to such bursts of unbridled pride. And an even longer time since I sent one home to my mum. But the below, as it appeared in the inside front cover of the Debuts supplement of New Books Magazine, is, to me, deserving of both. Call me sentimental (and, okay... self-indulgent), but in all my time in adland I don't think I ever saw one lovelier. Thanks to Vicky Cowell and Headline for such a splash!