DIARY: Free with every order: who’s nibbling whom

What would we have done without them? What would you have done without

them? Anyone who’s ever been to Campaign’s office to spill the beans

will have been offered a cappuccino from Sheila’s - if you weren’t, we

didn’t really like you. I think that’s the right way round.

Sheila’s is more than just a sandwich bar. Robbie, Verity, Eileen, Ed

and Pili could give most of the agencies in town a lesson or two in

service. The Diary’s own editor could learn a lot about remembering

names from a team who would run the Ivy’s Jeremy King close.

There’s so much to say about them that we don’t know where to begin -

probably with the fact that they were (inevitably) the first people to

tell us that our employer, Haymarket, a publishing company supposedly

full of nosey reporters, was moving to Hammersmith.

While we’re on the subject, they’ve always seemed to know far more about

not just who was touching and who was nibbling in the city of sin, but

to be up on all the agency parties, too. As for them, we never really

got behind the counter to find out why Ed was always smiling.

We leave them just as most of us had started to work out what Eileen was

actually saying. We never did find out about brooding, macho Robbie’s

secret life, or just who Verity was with that time in Soho Soho. But the

biggest mystery will always be: whatever happened to Ed’s glasses?

So, thanks for the coffee, the gossip and the Walkers Double Crunch, the

views on Di (good) and the miners (bad). No Campaign journalist will

ever forget the experience of lining up for a cuppa behind the largest

collection of builders’ bottoms this side of Kilburn.

This article was first published on Campaign