Stella Newman - Pear Shaped

The worst ever time that Devron touches his nose though, is in a Phase 4 meeting.

A Phase 4 meeting is the final stage in taking a new range to market. Phases 1 to 3 involve briefing suppliers, tasting initial product ideas, doing shelf life, transport and safety tests, and evolving the products accordingly.

Phase 4 meetings are the reason why I will never leave this job voluntarily – you’ll have to cart me away in a straitjacket.

At a Phase 4, you basically sit around like a bunch of Roman emperors dressed in Next suits instead of togas, and eat the entire range – whether that’s 12 fools and 8 trifles, like my meeting today, or Eddie’s meeting last week where I sampled 23 different curries in an hour. Of course, you don’t eat the whole dish – you just take a bite, and the majority of people ‘spit in the cup’. Yup, they gob out their food in a paper cup, like a Bulimics Anonymous Christmas party.

I never ever ‘spit in the cup’. It’s not about etiquette. Many women, and even some men, manage to spit quite discreetly, so you barely notice the person next to you opening their mouth to eject a half-chewed lump of naan bread. No, I refuse to ‘spit in the cup’ because I think it’s cheating. Any food that goes in my mouth goes in my stomach. Admittedly, I also see it as a badge of honour – there were six men and four women at Eddie’s Phase 4, and I was the only one to make it through all 23 curries without spitting. It’s just as well I only go to the Phase 4s that are mine, Lisa’s or Eddie’s, and that I walk in to work every day.

The official rules of a Phase 4 are as follows:

you change forks with every dish you taste

you don’t double-dip your fork in a communal dish

you pretend you’re only eating as a duty, not getting real pleasure from the food, for fear you’ll be taxed on it as a perk

Devron ignores all three rules and invariably digs in to the food with the hand that has just been inside his nasal cavity.

Whenever I’m arranging a Phase 4, I make sure to order two of everything – one for Devron and one for everyone else. However, this rarely stops Devron sitting in front of two identical cherry pies, flitting between the two with his sucked fingers. Fingers/nose/fingers/nose. Once Devron has touched a pudding I can’t eat that pudding, even if I try eating it from the other side. I just can’t. I’m pretty sure one day I’ll flip and pie Devron in the face, or ram a churro up his nose and kill him.

Today I pop down to the fridge to fetch the samples my supplier, Appletree, has sent in. I love working with my contact there, Will Slater, not least because he always sends me down a box of custard-filled éclairs he’s had the head chef make specially.

Zoe, our fridge manager, tells me I’m looking a bit skinny, she prefers me with curves. If I ever decide to date a woman it will be Zoe. She has Pantene hair, great Patti Smith t-shirts and a super-fast wit, and above all else, she has an even better job than I do: FRIDGE MANAGER.

This is not just any fridge. This is a fridge the size of a WHSmiths at a major railway station. If it wasn’t quite so cold I would seriously think about living in this fridge. Rows upon rows of shelves, floor to ceiling, stacked with samples of everything we sell and everything we’re thinking about selling, and everything our competitors sell. Zoe calls it ‘Paradise Frost’. I can never think of anything funny that rhymes with fridge in response.

And then there’s the freezer! While I daydream about moving in to the work fridge, I have nightmares about being locked in the work freezer. Our fifteen ice cream variants would only keep me diverted for the first hour or so, and then the thought of a slow icy death with nothing to eat but Coated Protein (that’s fish fingers to you) – death, there is thy sting.

‘Zoe, I can see the fools, but where are the trifles? Zoe?’ I walk through the fridge and back out, and find Zoe deep in the freezer, headphones on, sorting through a stack of giant frozen turkeys.

‘Huh?’

‘Didn’t Appletree send in the trifles and fools on the same courier?’

‘New system … Div-ron’s making us file by packaging colour …’

‘What?’

‘Ridiculous, worse than organising your books by colour …’

‘No, that is really bloody ridiculous. They’re all in different colours according to the fruit.’

‘Don’t worry, babe, I’ve got you covered. Aisle G, shelf 3 on the left – your éclairs are there too. He’s checking in on me this week, but as soon as he gets bored I’ll switch back … man, he is one giant fucking dickhead …’

I load two of every pudding into a giant orange crate and schlep it round to Tasting Room 12.

There’s only three of us attending today – Devron, Ton of Fun Tom and me. I lay sixty spoons, a stack of paper plates, and three glasses of water, then arrange the fools and trifles in the most ramshackle, non-colour co-ordinated order I can think of.

I wait for Devron and Tom to arrive. It’s quarter past, they’re late … Neither of them answers their phone. At half past, I head back up to my desk and find Devron and Janelle laughing at a website that features a selection of goats wearing jumpers.

‘Are you coming to the Phase 4, Devron?’ I say.

Janelle intercepts. ‘I had to move it to next month, I just sent you an email a minute ago.’

‘There’s twenty products that need sign off today, launch date is May,’ I say.

‘Sophie, I’m sure you can push back on suppliers, we give them enough business,’ says Devron impatiently.

‘Fine.’ I go back to the fridge and call up my friends from various departments and tell them to come to Room 12, immediately. Zoe puts the kettle on and six of us eat fruit trifles, chocolate trifles and eight types of fool and take it in turns to do impressions of Devron at the point of orgasm with a frozen turkey.

Afterwards, I return to my desk and a flashing light on my phone. A text message. From James!

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Ah, the relief.

I know I should be cooler – he’s left it till Thursday afternoon to ask me out for a Friday night – but I believe in momentum and if I don’t see him soon, I fear I’m going to lose it.

We agree to meet at the Dean Street Townhouse at 9pm. It occurs to me that I have no idea what country he’s texting from.

I wonder if he’d have contacted me if I hadn’t called him.

What does that matter now?

On Friday, I run out of the door at 5.54pm. I’m sure I see Janelle make a note of this in her Book of Snitch. I consider waiting for the bus. I have only three hours’ turnaround time before I’m due back in Soho and an über-emergency-face-and-body-makeover to perform. On Tottenham Court Road I hail a cab, even though I really can’t afford it.

Last night I did as much of the home makeover as I could bear to. I washed my sheets, hoovered for the first time in a fortnight, dried the sheets, and attempted to tidy the piles of recipes, post-it notes and newspapers that adorn any horizontal space in my flat.

I then tried to re-arrange my bathroom products to convey the fact that I am a natural beauty who doesn’t sweat or have body hair: hide all make-up, my razor and deodorant, bring out the cheapest, simplest £3 Superdrug moisturiser (it’s very good, actually).

I am not a total sloven, just messy. My bathroom is always clean, and my kitchen is spotless. I love to cook, and this kitchen brings me more joy than any other room in the flat. Although it’s only Ikea, it’s fairly gorgeous. White units, a grey worktop, a pale yellow glass splashback. The only thing I did in the kitchen last night was pop the bottle of beautiful white wine that Maggie Bainbridge gave me for Christmas into the fridge, just in case.