What would you do if you were celebrating your fifth new client in three months? Lavish praise upon yourself on some industry navel gazing site? Send self-conglatutory group wide emails to people who had never heard of you? (or worse still hoped you’d left after your “crazy” antics at the last Christmas bash!)

Well at BB North we prefer something a little more suited to our very own culture. That’s why we’re sitting back with our belt buckles threatening to assassinate any low flying wildlife within a 300 yard radius - why you ask - because we’ve just tucked into fish, chips and peas (veg option for Loz i.e. no fish) all washed down by a nice cool glass of champagne.

Cheers to you all !!!

Ian Fleming’s legacy is palpable for a number of very fine reasons. There’s a predeliction for rafish bow ties worn even in bed (allegedly). His efforts in the war, including the brilliantly entitled ‘Operation Ruthless’, a plan to capture the Nazi’s communications encoding devices. However, nothing really comes close to his most famous creation - Commander James Bond.

Agent of the British Secret Service, Bond was a jet-setting womaniser who’s taste for danger and destruction was only matched by his penchant for dry martinis, fast cars and sharp suits. Every boys hero, every man’s grudging role model and every woman’s bloody nightmare I’d expect. Still, if there’s one thing to be said for the man, he really knew how to cut a swathe between saving the world and hitting us with some of the worst punnage imaginable (Moore’s immortal ‘keeping the British end up’ springs to mind).

From Dougie Haywood’s epic suits for Connery to the latest bespoke Row numbers Daniel Craig’s been jogging about in, I’ve always harboured a bit of an urge to kit myself out in a bit of Bond-style finery. However, the look doesn’t come cheap.

Key to the look? The suit. I wandered into Kilgour on Saville Row a couple of weeks ago, only to realise that, save punting a kidney on Ebay and remortgaging my siblings, i could just about afford some of their horn buttons. On the tick. My chances of trading up the Flik-Flak for a shiny new Omega also rest between ’slim’ and ‘none’. Aston Martin? I’ll be walking.

However, there is hope. The humble martini. A man can still feel genuinely Jamesesque for the same price as a couple of packets of gaspers. And, after drinking more than two of them, you’ll forget the fact that you’re wearing the sort of tailoring that bouncers in the midlands favour, your car’s a Lada and you work in a call centre in Basildon. It might sound more Oddbins than Oddjob but, believe me, it’s cheaper in the long run!

I wasn’t so well this weekend. I fear it may have been prompted by a somewhat indulgent Friday night. But I’m sure one can still have a seasonal cold when the season hasn’t exactly been massively different from the whole rest of the year. Anyway, on Saturday morning, I reached - gingerly - for the only book with the perfect description of how I felt. I cut and paste it here:

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

‘Lucky Jim’ is the novelistic (if these is such a word) equivalent of comfort food. And so funny. So clever. And such an accurate portrayal of that most perilous emotion - boredom. My old copy has such a wonderful cover with a typically scratchy and very apt illustration by Quentin Blake, far better that the one on the Amazon link, but I can’t find it anywhere on the whole interweb. There’s lots about the bread-flogging band Lucky Jim though.

Apart from that, it was all about the papers and a mixtape I’m doing, but all should hopefully be revealed on that front soon. Talking of mixtapes, how great is this?

It’s cold in our office today and I’m hungry. So that’s it for now…

This Sat I’m going to one of the 21 concerts Prince is putting on at the O2 Centre - and I seriously couldn’t be more amped about it! I wouldn’t particularly say I’m a Prince fanatic, but I do enjoy his hits and would never pass up the opportunity to see him live. Come on, he’s a legend, and at £31 for a ticket, how could I say ‘no’??

The amazing thing I find here in this country, tickets aren’t all that expensive (disregarding the USD to GBP ratio - as it’s all bad for me). I think the most I’ve paid for tickets in this country (out of the three shows I’ve paid for since Oct last year) was £50 for Justin Timberlake. Ok, I probably sound like a teeny-bopper for putting up $100 USD of my student loan money to see him - but it was all worth it - every single penny of it. Serious entertainer, heart-throb, dancer, AND he can play the guitar and piano. Who knew? AND Timbaland and Fergie graced us with their presence as well, so it was (as they love to say in this office) ‘groove-tastic’.

But seriously, Prince for only £31? I really don’t get it (but really, I don’t need or want to). In the States, they total exploit us, and I’m gonna have to double check, but for someone as LEGENDARY as Prince, I’m willing to bet you couldn’t pay less than $80 for the nose-bleed seats. I’m going to embrace this bit completely and take advantage of all the cheap-o concerts and shows I can go to in London. Plus, for the rest of my life, I get to be like, “Oh, Prince? Yeah, I saw him in London back in the day. He was amazing. Yeah. I’m kind of a big deal.”  Rock on.

‘I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member’ quipped the immortal Groucho Marx. The delicious irony, of course, is that if our beloved brother tried his absolute damnest to become a member of the eponymous club right now, he’d almost certainly be told to join the impressive waiting list of reality show cast-offs (castaways?) and call back in a decades time. It seems odd to me that in the largest Metropolitan centre in Europe, we refuse to accept our capital for what it is. It remains a tremendously colourful and exciting place to many. But it also remains aloof; an impersonal, ever-changing circus where we all ‘reside’ but rarely ‘live’.

Hence the relentless popularity of the members club. Face it, we all want to belong. And we all want the hottest ticket in town. Oh, and wouldn’t it be nice if we get to walk through a few doors that only noteriety, status, cash or a ‘Russian passport’ (all three) buys a key to? Absolutely. Except that actually joining one of London’s exclusive private members clubs is a singularly impossible task, akin to feeding a dozen oysters into a parking meter in under a minute (urban bush-tucker trials anyone?). For a start, there’s the three year waiting list at Soho House. “I live opposite and a like a drink or two” didn’t cut me any slack with Shoreditch House either. Forget the old-school ones like Blakes or Whites - for a start, unless you’ve had carnal knowledge of at least three Winchester choirboys, can decant a Montrachet in five seconds flat, link your DNA to the waiting staff of HRH, and answer to the name of ‘Bufty’ or ‘Spiggins’, there’s no chance.

I can, of course, scoff at these rebukes with a Marx riposte. And join the Mile End Snooker Club on Bethnal Green Road. A pound a pint, a free scratchcard once a month plus entertainment in the form of a bloke that plays the spoons every Thursday. What could be more fun?

Hello all! I’m very new to Blackbridge, having worked here for one week now (ooh my first ‘anniversary’ at the company!). Oliver thought it’d be a good idea to post something, so here it goes.

So who am I and what am I doing here? Good question, I have no idea.. no, no I’m only kidding! Well I moved to the UK from the States last Sept to get my Masters in Journalism at Westminster. I had fallen in love with London when I studied abroad here over three years ago when I was a junior, and I actually interned at several companies (mainly magazine publications companies and a music promotions company). Having studied in a college town for four years (Amherst, Massachusetts - which literally is an all-American college town as there are five major universities in the surrounding area - in the middle of nowhere) and moving back to my hometown in the suburbs of Boston, I started dreaming about going somewhere BIG and fab for my post-grad education. Hello, London calling. I applied, got in, the rest is history.

After an intense year (I use the word ‘intense’ loosely) of work, I’ve since finished my MA and will be graduating in Nov. As most of my friends and family suspected, rather than moving back to the States following my studies, I started applying to jobs in London, and oddly enough after years of studying journalism am now in the advertising business. I suppose it’s not too far removed, but some of my friends were a bit shocked at my choice. However, I’m happy with it. I get to be creative, using InDesign and Photoshop, as well as copywriting (ahh - journalism skills at use!). I can feel myself fitting in quite nicely, or at least I hope I am. The first few weeks at a new job are always a bit weird and exciting. I love all the people here - I really have nothing bad to say!

A lot has happened in the past year of my life that I never would have expected - but that’s what I love. Life’s an adventure, and I say ‘bring it on!’ I look forward to blogging on here often. Hopefully, not boring anyone.