baby lara is about to take her very first steps! smile at her determination as her lifelike little fingers grip yours and she totters bravely on her tippy-tippy toes! in her favourite pink romper suit with its true mother-of-pearl buttons, this fearless little mite is really to take on the world!
william took a pen and ran a line thrugh the word 'grip' changing it to 'grasp' then reread the text. he sighed and ran another line through the words 'lifelike little', changing them to 'tiny lifelike'. his gaze strayed from the paper in front of him to the view of tottenham hale tube station through the window, and he had one of his occasional yet overwhelming reality checks: william had the silliest job in the world.
he was perfectly prepared to admit that. you couldn't work in the marketing department of coaldoed swann collectibles without being able to admit that to yourself. no one who worked here took it seriously. coalford swann was a family-run business based in essex, which had been producing trecly porcelain monstrosities such as bethany belle for forty years. as well as legions of tiny pink-cheeked little children in hand-stitched clothing, they also made reproduction victorian dolls with spooky faces, a small range of terrifyingly lifelike newborn babies complete with swollen eyelids and umbilical stumps, and a whole cutesy miniature town by the name of blissville which was designed to be collected tiny building by tiny building and displayed in the faux-mahogany shelving system, which came free with orders over 100.
coalford swann advertised in the filmsier of the sunday colour supplements, but still saw itself as very much at the higher end of the 'modern collectibles' market. and, indeed, william couldn't deny that the products themselves were beautifully and thoughtfully made, full of detail and lovingly rendered. when you saw the dolls in close-up, when you looked at the tiny glass eyes, the hand-stitched silk dresses, the weeny leather buckle-up shoes and touched the soft, silky hair, you could only agree that they were worth every penny of the £59.99 they were being sold for, but for all the quality and craftsmanship there was nothing that could take away from the fact that they were truly disgusting in every way.
every week a large parcel would arrive, slathered in 'fragile' stickers and addressed to william's boxes, a twenty-eight-year-old by the name of melanie. every monday morning melanie would call a department meeting and the four of them would come into her office to find a new coalford swann creation sitting proudly on her desk. and every monday morning the four of them would almost wet themselves laughing for at least five minutes.
it was william's job to create the copy that accompanied each new product in the advertisements that went out weekly. it was widely recognised that, of all the silly jobs in this department, william had by far the silliest, and the rest of the team never failed to be impressed by the saccharine literary depths to which he was able to plunge with his. biro and a blank sheet of paper.
william still wasn't sure how he'd ended up in this job. he'd taken a diploma in media studies after his year out, done some work experience at an advertising agency for six months after leaving college and had somehow ended up in their copywriting department. he'd left the agency with absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, and given that his six-month stint of copywriting was the solitary rose in the experiential desert of his CV, he'd somehow been forced on to that path and here he was, three years later, advertising copywriter for the tackiest company in the world.
every few weeks he'd have a mini-crisis, think to himself, what am i contributing to humankind, to the future, to own sense of self-worth? he'd toy with notions of working for charities, joining the VSO, writing a novel, becoming a care worker, but then he'd have a couple of laughs at work and the thoughts would recede into his subconscious like sun-dazzled moles creeping back into their holes.
YOU ARE READING
loving someone || skam fic
Fanfiction[MATURE] seventeen years ago noora and william met, parted and never said goodbye. and soon they're going to have to ask themselves: could it be that they actually found what they've both been looking for, back in the mid-eighties, in a holiday park...
