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…

‘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?

Well, it’s that time of year where my weekends welcome the return of the football season and at noon on Sunday, I was back at Seat 1010, Row 16, Block 32 of the Lower Tier of the Emirates Stadium as Arsenal welcomed Fulham. And bloody great it was too, though 2-1 doesn’t quite illustrate how we snatched victory from the jaws of terrible first-day of the season defeat. As one of my pals said, it was the perfect game for him - 80 minutes of bitter complaining and then 10 minutes of rabid excitement. Though it was 15 minutes after Fulham’s appalling time wasting. Terrible business.

I don’t often feel at my best at 12pm on a Sunday - the kick-off was a consequence of the new Setanta deal with the Premiership - but felt distinctly lively when the time came for a post-match libation. That said, Islington being Islington, the conversation soon turned to the cultural runnings area - at least once we’d fully covered the smoking ban. My friend has given up, he explained - being 41, he worked out that stopping smoking could make the difference between him being half-way through his life and being two-thirds of the way through. Anyway, we talked about Don DeLillo’s ‘Underworld‘ which he is definitely half-way through. I like DeLillo’s early books more than some of the later novels, but ‘Underworld’ certainly aims for ‘classic’ status pretty successfully in my view.

I’m always up for a discussion about the Great American Novel, aren’t you? The purist will go for ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. The attention-seeker, ‘Lolita’. I’ve heard Norman Mailer’s ‘The Naked and the Dead’ get some votes. Saul Bellow’s somewhat provocatively named ‘The Adventures of Augie March’ would be my sleeper choice, but Bellow was of course Canadian. But nah, it’s ‘the Great Gatsby’.

Talking of the American novel, I’ve been casually reading Henry James’ ‘What Maisie Knew’. I’m never really sure about Henry James - I can’t quite work out why I don’t find his work as satisfying as one is supposed to. That said, I really like ‘the Aspen Papers’ and scary ‘the Turn of the Screw’, novellas both. Oh, and my kind co-worker Jamie White has lent me a copy of a book called ‘A Perfect Mess - the hidden benefits of disorder’. I’ve long maintained that while my desk may look somewhat erm… dishevelled, I know where everything is. This book, I’m convinced, will prove this. Once I find it of course, it’s somewhere around here…

If you work in a creative industry for any length of time, sooner or later you have to make a big decision. It’s not about artistic license versus license-to-print money. It’s not about creative freedom versus commercial reality. It’s about something simpler than that - suit or slob.

Every agency in the world used to delineate its crop of talent with these two points of reference. At one end of the office, a thrusting executive clad in the softest mohair, distinctive Parisian silks and the crispest Italian cottons, tapped a John Lobb heel whilst waiting for his counterpart to provide the latest crop of ideas. At the other end, a generation Y manchild, replete in rare Japanese dunks, loose selvage denim and an ‘ironic’ hoody shook his head. And sulked. In medieval times, rival liveries depicting vibrant beasts and singularly terrifying weaponry would have sufficed. Now, the communications agency typifies its rival factions of creative and commercial by a simpler means - threads.

Or is it? Nowadays, you’re just as likely to meet a creative flouncing around in Savile Row finery (Evisu-tailored, of course) as you are a new business manager wearing a pair of pink flip flops. Dress down Fridays and relaxed organisational policies on business attire at places like Orange, Virgin and even Morgan Stanley have had a long term effect on us all. It’s a confusing world (nay wardrobe) we face nowadays. The point is, clothes do not maketh the man. But they did at least let you know which department he worked in.