But I can’t think of any more. I need to get Nina to programme a few into my phone. Some of us are born with hashtaggery within us and some need it thrust upon us.
Finally, I manage to share my thoughts on each platform. Or a happy version of my thoughts.
My actual thoughts are less ‘wheee, so happy!’ and more ‘I want to go home, get into bed, pull the duvet over my head and ruminate on plans to kill my husband’s first wife.’
But I have a job and that job entails cheerfulness. Actually, fake cheerfulness.
Social media done, I lean back against the car seat, find the buzziest music radio on the car stereo and pull out into the traffic.
6
You got this
When I wasdiscovered, which is what the TV production guy, James, likes to call it, I was working anine-to-five, not very well paid job for a company that made reasonably expensiveready-cooked meals for busy people who could afford to pay someone else to cook boeuf bourguignon or fish pie, package it into little ovenproof dishes, and sell it in delis and upmarket supermarkets. My friend Jocelyn, who’d also trained in the Prue Leith School, and I had tried private catering but the bottom had fallen out of that market pretty quickly, so we were back working for someone else. The Make Life Easier business had leapt to employ us and to be honest, after a few years, I was getting bored.
In a drive to broaden their market, which was faltering somewhat, one of the bosses had decided that Jocelyn and I should start spreading the word by doing cookery demonstrations around the country at food festivals.
First up was a prestigious Dublincity-centre weekend food festival and Jocelyn, who hated public speaking, was shaking in her chef’s clogs.
It was years since I’d done anything like this, so I was a bit anxious myself.
This had not put off Kieran, boss of the company, who was very alpha male and knew nothing about cooking, but had joined his sister, Peg, in setting up the business, which made him an expert – in his eyes.
‘How hard can it be?’ barked Kieran as Jocelyn and I made our fears known.
Kieran didn’t cook. He was the accounts/business/time and motion end of the company. He thought cooking was like making instant coffee: impossible to get wrong. He had no concept of the food industry shifting and moving all the time.
His sister andco-owner, Peg, did cook but was very keen on spending weeks in luxury spas to take her mind off work, so she was never there to discuss our concerns.
‘Throw a few ingredients in a pot, like you do here – what’s the problem, girls?’ said Kieran.
Since he thought we were looking for extra money for the day of demos – which we weren’t, but should have been – he sent us out of his office pronto.
‘I guess that’s Bozo’s version of saying we’re on our own,’ I said to Jocelyn as we made it back to the kitchen.
‘Shush! He might hear you!’ she said.
‘I don’t care if he does,’ I said suddenly, beyond irritated by Kieran for any number of reasons, least of all his calling us ‘girls’. We were women, not girls.
‘We run this business for him and he doesn’t respect our work at all. We have to get out of here, Joss,’ I added crossly. ‘Set up on our own.’
‘That’s so not going to happen, Freya,’ she replied. ‘Our mortgage is murderous. Could we kill Kieran, piece him up in a stew, pretend he’s gone on a cruise and left us in charge?’
‘He’d be full of gristle,’ I replied, and then we both laughed at the very idea. ‘Plus,’ I added, ‘you’d need a stake through his heart and a silver bullet – he’s some sort of Teflon werewolf/vampire combo. You’d never be able to kill him.’
‘They always find out, anyway,’ Jocelyn added. She loved to watch forensic crime series likeCSIon TV. ‘It’s the hair transfer, the teeniest smudge of a fingerprint, a piece of car carpet: you’ve no idea what they can find and analyse. We’d be caught.’
And then we collapsed into hysterics in the tiny office kitchen and had to have some of myhome-made protein balls and a quick coffee to recover from the madness.
On the morning of the demonstrations, we set off early. All the way into the city in the Make Life Easier jeep, we talked about how excited and terrified we were about the whole thing.
‘What if nobody comes near us?’ said Jocelyn, applying her lipstick again as she kept chewing it off.
I hadn’t even bothered with lipstick yet. Jocelyn, who was good withmake-up, was going to make me presentable when we’d done everything else.
‘It’s not our job to attract people,’ I said. ‘That’s Kieran’s area. He’s paying for the slot. My worry is what if the hobs are terrible and we burn everything in front of paying customers,’ I said. ‘That’swhen a crowd will gather, they’ll see it all falling apart, put it up on Facebook and then, if we don’t inadvertently give someone food poisoning from trying to heat it up in a dodgy oven, we’ll break the internet with how hopeless we’ll appear to be.’
People can die from food poisoning,Mildred helpfully reminded me.
