I don’t know what made me wheel out the winking face emoji, but it felt right. Again, I worry that he’ll get the wrong end of the stick and associate it with the ‘good fun’ comment. Oh well. If he starts to get randy I’ll kick him into touch with the others.

Sounds interesting! By the way, if you want to move to WhatsApp or something at any point, I’m on 07700 900624. Tinder can be a bit unreliable with messages sometimes! No pressure though x

I smile at this. He’s not the first person to suggest swapping numbers fairly early on, but he’s got a good point. The app does have a habit of crashing or losing access to messages. And anyway, he seems alright. I save the number in my phone as a backup but decide to stick to Tinder for now.

Thanks - will save for future reference ;) Anyway, better dash now. Long day ahead. Chat later? x

The reply comes within a few seconds.

Definitely. Looking forward to it already xx

2

Monday 18 November

I love my job, but it definitely has its stressful moments. Today has been full of them. I’ve been working on a launch event for a new art gallery in town — the sort of thing which should be fairly straightforward. Unfortunately for me, the client loves changing her mind every five minutes, which makes the whole exercise a thousand times more tedious than it needs to be.

At one point, she even wanted to change the location of the event. The official opening of an art gallery, held somewhere that isn’t the art gallery. How do you square that one? Thankfully, I managed to talk her out of it, but that came at the expense of having to give in to other, almost equally ridiculous, demands.

She was determined she wanted some form of celebrity to do the opening, but there was nothing else attached to that particular instruction. She claimed to know plenty of celebrities, but they’d all be attending as friends and couldn’t possibly be the ones to cut the ribbon. She didn’t tell me if she wanted a musician, actor, politician, artist, reality show star, sportsperson or what constituted a suitable level of celebrity for her precious gallery.

In the end I phoned up a couple of agents I knew, asking if they had anyone in town on that date who might be willing to turn up for a couple of hours for a reasonable fee and some bubbly. Ultimately, we settled on a TV personality who presents a daytime antiques programme and was willing to take five hundred quid for popping in to cut the ribbon.

It infuriates me to have to do it, but we need to try and keep her sweet. Work’s been slow for us this year, particularly after a rival company set up in the area.

Pelham-Saunders has been trying to aim itself at the same high-end clients as we’ve traditionally chased, and for some reason they’ve been winning them. We’ve been losing pitches to them left, right and centre, and there’ve been rumours that we might have to let some people go. I’m fortunate enough to be well-liked by the bosses, and the buzz in the office is always positive and friendly, so I’m pretty sure we can pull through it. We’ve got through worse.