Free Blue Collar by Danny King Page B

had been made. Naldesco had agreed to sit down and listen to what the agency had to say about the benefits of
     a regional strategy, so Charley was pulling stats and data from similar past campaigns to smack ’em over the head with and
     make a bit of a fist of it.
    It’s bonkers when you think about it really, isn’t it? All this fuss, money and talking over something you’re going to empty
     over your chips – and just once in all likelihood. You’d think it would be simple, wouldn’t you? Stick an ad on the box along
     the lines of: ‘Buy Rocket Man Sauce. It’s fantastic’, run it six or seven million times until we’re all ready to kick the
     telly in every time it comes on, then repackage the product and repeat the process a year later when Naldesco finally gets
     the message that we don’t want any. That’s what everyone else seemed to do. Just because it was Rocket Man Sauce, it don’t
     mean it was rocket man science, did it?
    ‘Remind me what you do for a living again?’ Charley asked in her defence.
    I gave her that one but still, it was stupid. You’d think intelligent, well-educated people would have better things to be
     doing than wasting their time on this load of old rubbish, wouldn’t you? No wonder we hadn’t found a cure for cancer yet.
    I thought better of sharing this last observation with Charley and we got on to the subject of our families. Both sets of
     parents were still alive and while Charley was an only child, I had the full set, an older brother and a younger sister.
    ‘How do you get on with them?’ Charley asked.
    ‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘I go round there for tea once in a while, borrow a couple of tools off my old man every now and again
     and call in on my sister when I need a few shirt buttons sewing on, that sort of thing,’ I explained.
    Charley wiped a mock tear from her eye and asked me if I ever saw them when H&S Hire and Sketchleys weren’t closed. She didn’t
     quite phrase it like that, but that was the general gist.
    ‘But do you get on with them? Do you love them?’ she asked.
    ‘Do you tell them that you love them?’
    ‘Well, yeah, you know, I don’t know, I mean, we don’t go around bawling our eyes out in front of each other and plastering
     the old man with kisses whenever he’s off the bog, but we do all right. Same as everyone else, I suppose,’ I babbled, a touch
     off balance in the face of such questions. ‘Well, what about you? What are you like with your old folks, then?’ I countered,
     figuring attack was the best form of defence.
    ‘My mum’s cool. I speak to her most days and tell her about my life.’
    ‘Have you told her about me?’ I asked.
    ‘No,’ she said, saying all there was to say on that particular subject. ‘And my dad’s lovely, though he worries about me constantly.
     I guess being his only daughter and all that. I’m Daddy’s little girl and always will be to him. He’s very protective of me.’
    ‘Is he here now?’
    Charley laughed and told me he was waiting outside in the car with a cricket bat.
    ‘What does he do for a living?’
    ‘He’s an investment banker.’
    I didn’t really know what an investment banker did but it sounded like one of those bowler-hatted sorts of jobs that got you
     enough money to buy a house in Berkshire, cover it with ivy and park a Mercedes outside it.
    ‘Do all his pens come with little those chains on the end to keep ’em attached to the desk?’ was about the only thing I could
     think to ask about investment banking.
    ‘Yes. It stops representatives from the CBI sticking them in their pockets when he’s not looking,’ Charley confirmed.
    ‘Smart.’
    We talked for a few more pints, interspersing fact with nonsense as we got to know each other inch by inch and I learned a
     couple of things about Charley that both surprised me and watered down my optimism all in one.
    For a start, she was minted. Not super-rich, shopping at Harrods and a big plate of caviar and