Every group gasped at the moment they passed between the lions. That is how it always started.

The drive ran straight through the gate, the beautiful gardens on the left, until the chateau rose in front of you. A twelfth-century keep on a hill above the river Vienne, four corner towers, six centuries of stone. That view. I see it still.

Two stone lions flanking the entrance to the courtyard. Always there. And always, beyond them, her. Hands lightly clasped, hair perfectly done, dressed as no one is dressed for a Tuesday afternoon in rural France - Herta Ogilvy.

Eighteen tired strangers from Cape Town to Stockholm. They had been on a plane that morning, then Montparnasse, then a train to Poitiers, then a taxi out into the Vienne. By the time they arrived they were ready to be somewhere. The breathtaking Château de Touffou and its grand lady didn’t disappoint.

She greeted us one by one. Spanish, French, English, German, sometimes a little Dutch. Whichever language opened the right door first.

I had been bringing groups to Touffou for years by then. The final session of every Ogilvy leadership training programme. After everything else, in other cities, the participants came here for the close.

Herta came down to every breakfast. Every lunch. Every dinner. For every group, for all those years.

Aperitifs the first evening were on the tournament terrace, set into the wall above the Vienne, swallows cutting low across the water just before the light went. Didier brought the champagne out on a silver tray. Didier was the gardener, and the man who fixed everything that broke, and the man who carried every suitcase up to every room. Serving champagne, however, was clearly not in his original contract. He poured with the expression of a man who was hoping to be back in the rose garden as soon as possible.

Herta moved through the group asking the questions she would ask all week. Where are you from. What do you do at Ogilvy. Tell me about your family. What has your boss been up to. She remembered the answers. By dinner she had placed people next to each other based on what she had heard at aperitif. By breakfast the next morning she was asking each of them follow-up questions. By Friday the shy participant from Madrid was sitting up straighter than she had been on Tuesday.

That was tending. To people.

Dinner was inside. Au Salon Bleu. A small dining room, round tables, blue porcelain on white linen, thick curtains drawn against the cold of stone walls. The cheese plate arrived perfectly à point - un Camembert, un chèvre, un Bleu d’Auvergne. Ah, the smell of soft rinds alone. The servant did not portion it. He carried the platter to the first diner, who reached up to take it, as you do. The servant did not let go. A brief, polite tug-of-war over a Bleu d’Auvergne. The diner blinked first, understood, and cut their piece from a platter that was not going anywhere. The conversation resumed.

After dinner, upstairs to the living room. Her room. Soft light. Everything in it chosen by her. An enormous open fireplace. Deep, soft couches around it. The participants edged toward the flames, and Herta in her armchair, beginning to talk.

Not a speech. A conversation.

She would gesture toward the gate at the bottom of the drive, and say, every time:

“That is where David and I met.”

The room would go still. The fire would crackle. Eighteen people who had arrived that morning thinking this was a training programme would realise slowly that they were now on the inside. Of the Ogilvy culture. Not the welcome speech. Not the posters.

Even after he had stopped officially working, David wanted to know everything that was happening in the company. Herta was how he stayed in touch.

Senior executives received notes from David. His observations about the business. What he thought a competitor was up to. What he sensed the agency was getting wrong. After he died, she kept the correspondence going. She wrote to the leaders herself. She asked what they were watching. She passed on what they told her to whoever needed to hear it next. She had her own opinions about most of it.

Touffou felt completely current the entire time you were inside it. Six hundred years of stone, kept alive by one woman who tended every part of it. The chapel. The towers. The dungeon. The frescoed Francis I bedroom - sixteenth-century, the most heritage-protected room in the house. The four rose rooms in the upper garden - David’s favourite flower, dark hedges around them. The strawberries the size of small apples.

And the library.

I stayed in the bedroom next to it more than once. David’s library - floor to ceiling with books, history, biography, architecture, art, advertising. The spines summed up a man’s life. I would slip in before breakfast and pull something off the shelf at random. Half the books had David’s handwritten notes in the margins. A question. A correction. A single word, underlined. My favourite, on a flyleaf:

“If you found this book, I stole it from the New York library. Cheers, David.”

You could feel him there. You could feel her there too. Because the books were dusted, the spines were straight, and somebody had cared for that room every day for decades after the man who built it was gone.

The week I want to tell you about, Pierre arrived on the Wednesday. A rare occasion - meeting each other in the middle of too much travel.

He had come straight from a free-diving trip and had come up too fast on the last dive. He had lost the hearing in one ear. He looked pale and slightly off-balance when he walked into the courtyard.

That night, after we had gone to bed in the room next to the library, there was a knock on the door. I opened it.

Herta. In her peignoir. Curlers in her hair. Holding a wax candle and matches.

The most elegant woman. The woman whose hair was, on every other day of every other year, perfectly done. Standing at the door of a guest bedroom at midnight, in curlers, holding a candle.

She had a folk remedy. The wax was meant to drip into the ear. She was certain it would unblock him. She handed Pierre the candle and the matches, explained the procedure, and went back down the corridor.

We did try it. We had to - because Herta had told us to. We giggled our way through it. If only she had known it would ultimately take a hyperbaric chamber.

The next morning she drove Pierre to the doctor herself.

While we waited at the surgery, Herta and I talked. About love. About marriage. About wanting children and how hard the road can be.

She told me how David had courted her. With letters. Slipped under her door. She had kept them. She told me what he had written.

“Because of your gaiety, your brains, your tenderness.”

I have spent thirty years in the company of David Ogilvy’s words. I cannot imagine that any woman who received those had a fighting chance.

I told her Pierre and I had been trying. She told me to keep on. She told me how much she had loved being the mother of her three children.

Years later, when Lyllou was born, a dress arrived from Herta. Sleeveless, long, white, with a coloured pattern. Lyllou wore it the entire summer. Every time I dressed her in it I thought: this is from the woman who hosted Al Gore at Touffou for a week to prepare his climate summit, and who remembered I had been waiting for this baby.

Touffou was the final session of the programme. The graduation. By the time we got there I had spent months watching each participant - across multiple sessions, in different cities - listening, taking small notes for myself. At the graduation each one received a diploma, a book, and a handwritten note from me. By name. With specifics. The thing that made them them. The thing they could not yet see.

They left Touffou different from how they had arrived. The note in their pocket was the smallest part of it. That is how it always ended.

Herta lives in Laval now. Touffou is no longer her daily view. I am going to see her once more in a few weeks to tell her that I am leaving Ogilvy. That it will never leave me. Nor will she.

If you ever spent time at Touffou, send me what you remember.
A paragraph. A page. A photo. I will share them with her.
She gave us all the experience of being seen.
I would like to give her, now, the experience of being remembered.

Herta Ogilvy on David’s Courage (from personal archive so forgive the quality)

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I remember meeting Mariella distinctly. She was very pregnant with her second child. Introduced as high potential - a strategist, like me. We bonded immediately over being mothers with demanding jobs we couldn’t imagine abandoning. Lyllou was five. The jigsaw of small children and demanding jobs is something you don’t need to explain to another woman solving it.

There was something else on her face, though. A very polite version of a question every one of the 500 employees at Ogilvy in the Middle East was privately wondering about: how is this going to work?

Fair. I was asking it myself.

I had just been appointed CEO of Memac Ogilvy MENA. First one ever who wasn’t Eddie Moutran - a 74-year-old bigger-than-life entrepreneur and founding father of the entire advertising industry in this region. An Ogilvy giant in every sense of the word. That was who I was following. A Belgian woman with no experience in the Middle East. No Arabic. One functioning French accent and a very confident handshake.

For everyone involved, including me, this was a genuine social experiment. I’m sure it also was for Mariella.

Lebanon. The only country in the world where you can ski on snow in the morning and swim in the Mediterranean in the afternoon. An hour from the slopes of Mzaar, there is vibrant Beirut. The Middle East version of Cannes. Where religions mingle. Where history and contemporary meet. Where the clubs go until four in the morning and the food is extraordinary and nobody particularly wants to go home.

There is a nightclub built on the site of a former refugee camp, its roof retractable so you can dance under the stars, the booths shaped like coffins. Dress code applies.

I am not making any of this up.

This is a country of people like us. Educated, multilingual, curious, funny, fiercely attached to their families and their tables and their opinions. They could be - many of them are - in London or Paris or New York. They choose Beirut. Or Beirut chooses them. Same thing.

A precarious choice. Because the drive from the airport tells you everything. The first half hour you pass the evidence of what this city has been through. Buildings with no windows, the frames still standing. Walls with bullet holes. Bomb sites. Posters of men with guns. And then, almost without noticing when exactly it shifts, the city changes register. The cafés appear. The rooftops. The people dressed with the care of a city that has decided beauty is non-negotiable regardless of circumstances.

You arrive at the office, if you are me, slightly intimidated.

Because the Middle East advertising industry was built by Lebanese. Men and women, trilingual from birth - Arabic, French, English before breakfast - educated at universities that punched far above any regional weight, creative and commercially sharp and extraordinarily adaptable. People who, faced with a country that kept pulling the ground from under them, got very good very fast at making something from nothing. They moved to Dubai, to Riyadh, to Kuwait City, to Bahrain, and they built. They built the agencies, ran the creative departments, led the networks, founded what became the major holding company operations across the GCC.

The office I walked into was full of them. Mariella one of them.

She plays violin. She calls herself an unapologetic working mom. I approved her candidacy for Ogilvy’s 30for30 programme, which takes thirty high-performing women across the global network and gives them the specific permission to take up more space. The reports coming back from Beirut on what she was doing to that agency made the decision easy. When I heard she had been appointed General Manager, I cheered. Quietly, from Brussels. But loudly.

When the conflict escalated, we ran daily stand-ups across the regional leadership team. Every market reporting back - what had happened, who needed what. We always kept Lebanon for last.

Because the question was too hard to ask in any other order.

Mariella would report. Calmly. Steadily. The air strikes. The families. The colleagues who had moved or couldn’t. People staying not because they weren’t afraid but because they wanted to make sure their homes were still there. Colleagues working because what matters is to show that life goes on, work goes on. Always.

And at the end of it, every time, she would say: but everybody is safe.

On April 8th I woke at two in the morning. Ceasefire. Relief I had no words for. The stand-up a few hours later had a different register — smiles, lightness, breathing room. We turned to Lebanon, where it hadn’t stopped. Mariella, with a faint smile, reported more explosions. Close. And then: but everybody is safe.

April 9th was declared a National Day of Mourning in Lebanon.

Resilience is a word we use too casually. What I watched in Mariella was quieter and harder than that. It was absorbing all of it and staying useful anyway.

I have been humbled by a lot in thirty years. I have not often been humbled by a morning stand-up.

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I never properly sat across a desk from Annette. Not once. Not in all those years.

We were at Ogilvy at the same time for two decades - she in the thick of it in London, me watching from a respectful Belgian distance, in regional roles, both reporting into Paul O’Donnell. Different orbits. Close enough to feel the gravity. We were different and alike. We were, in the way Ogilvy works, family.

And then more recently, there was Umbria. The green heart of Italy we both fell in love with. We were there at the same time, at least three times that I know of. Plans were made. Something always happened in the last minute. I cannot tell you how much I regret that now. I really can’t. I would have loved to spend time with Annette under her olive trees, testing which Umbrian Orvieto Classico was better than her favourite Chardonnay. I would have failed in every way.

Where I did succeed was in observation. And with Annette, that was an education in itself.

I noticed her hair before anything else. That sounds ridiculous, but stay with me. For years she was the only other woman at Ogilvy with short hair. I had enormous hair envy - quietly, consistently, for years. Mine stayed short because I could never manage the transition. Hers grew. Slowly. Beautifully. Defiantly unruly in the best possible way. And she wore it like she wore everything: completely. There is, if you think about it, the whole Annette King story right there in a haircut.

Fierce was always the word people used about her. It’s the right word. But fierce is easy to perform. What Annette had actually costs something - fearlessness. Real fearlessness. The kind that made me uncomfortable. That made us feel alive. That made her dress up as a British Airways stewardess and walk into a pitch room and own it completely.

I learned to win pitches watching her. The narrative, the work, every slide and every word, the rehearsals, and yes the pitch cheese - I wanted it perfect because perfect is the only way to win. Annette taught me that. So thoroughly I once made Paul hold a kitchen ladle in a telco pitch. Needless to say… we both won a lot.

I remember when Annette left for Publicis. Arthur Sadoun wrote about her leap of faith. The risk she fearlessly took. As the other Ogilvy woman in Paul’s work life - considerably less entertaining, I should add - I noticed he was upset. But they made up quickly. Of course they did.

Because fearlessness came from heart. A giant heart. That those close to Annette loved. And Annette loved them back.

When Nelly Andersen died, that heart broke. Annette shared her grief openly with Nelly’s circle of trust I got an exceptional invitation to. No armour. No upper stiff Dame lip. Just tears, raw. I loved her more for that than almost anything else.

And then there was the dinner in London. At her beautiful home. Everyone got pasta. I got salmon. She had remembered - quietly, without making anything of it - that I had been on keto for years to manage my own cancer risk. I was told husband Henry made sure I got my own dish. That detail. That specific, unremarkable, entirely extraordinary detail. Because that is the other thing about Annette that the fierce narrative sometimes overshadows: the care. The fierce and the warm were not in competition. They were the same person, always.

I have just lost my best friend Wim in the same terrible way. Cancer isn’t picky, but you would hope - you really would hope - it would leave the most lively alone. The most fearless. The most needed. It doesn’t, of course. It took mum. It took Nelly. It took Sam. It took Wim. It took Annette.

My days at Ogilvy are ending. I keep thinking I wish I could talk to Annette about it. She would have had opinions. Probably some fairly direct words about a few specific tossers. Something kind for me. Or she would have just told me to pull up my big girl pants. Honestly, knowing Annette, probably all of it.

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I have unfashionably been wearing the same designer for thirty-five years. That is not just loyalty.

It started in 1990. Second year at university. A boyfriend - charming, unreliable, artistically inclined - gave me my first Dries Van Noten sweater. Dries wasn’t famous yet. Four years into his brand, pre-Antwerp Six, pre-Emma Thompson and Michelle Obama, pre-everything. The boyfriend didn’t last. The sweater outlasted everything.

What followed was a ritual. Every season. Without exception. Through Paris and New York and London and Cape Town and Dubai and back to Belgium again. The clothes came with me. Much to Pierre’s despair. With my other lover. Or just the amount of boxes.

Six countries, three continents, one wardrobe. When you move that much, when you start afresh in a new city every few years, you hold on to the things that make you recognisable - to others, and to yourself. Dries Van Noten was that for me. I looked the part, always. Because the clothes let me be more completely myself.

There were of course fashion mishaps along the way. That beautiful green dress with a skirt made of hundreds of threads that made a bathroom visit impossible. Colleagues Catherine and Mary to the rescue. That wrap shirt I only put on once as I still for the life of me can’t remember how to put it on. That skirt I adore but truly can’t put my 50something curves in any longer. Much to Pierre’s despair. Or just mine.

Mum encouraged every passion. We had a ritual - a pilgrimage to the Nationalestraat in Antwerp, twice a year. She saved for it. We both did. We had to. It was never just shopping. It was love made tangible. Two women standing in a beautiful room, choosing carefully, treating each other. Ann, who worked there, made it special every time. She became one of my closest friends. That too is Dries Van Noten’s doing.

When mum got sick - lung cancer, fast - I dressed her for the last time in her most beautiful Dries outfit. That she was wrapped in our shared love at the end is what I will always hold.

When Dries Van Noten announced his retirement, I wrote him a letter. From one Belgian ambassador to another. I told him about the boyfriend and the sweater, about mama and the Nationalestraat. About the women I admired most - Annette King, fearless, once in Dries and utterly gorgeous. Liz Taylor. Fiona Gordon. All Dries fans. All distinct. I told him about the lipsticks and parfums I had gifted to colleagues and friends - chosen carefully, always personal, always a little Belgian, always from only me. The gift as signature. I learned that early and never stopped.

I told him what he had given me without ever knowing he was giving it.

I did not expect a reply. I did not need one.

What I did not expect was the New York Times.

In June 2024, Vanessa Friedman published her farewell interview with him. He sat in his Antwerp warehouse, packing up his office. Every once in a while, as he spoke, his eyes got glassy and he blinked and looked away. He talked about the courage to stop at the top. About the letters arriving from all over the world.

He mentioned mine.

A woman, he said, who wrote that her mother saved to buy her one item a year when she was a student. And who attributed something of her later professional confidence - the way people saw her - to the fact that she always looked like herself.

I read it three times. Or more.

Two weeks before I wrote this, I found my daughter Lyllou in several of my Dries pieces. She is fourteen. She stood in the mirror for a long time. She wore them entirely on her own terms. Of course she did.

History repeating. The best kind.

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Some people are happy. Miguel is happiness.

Happy is a state you arrive at and leave. Happiness — the Miguel kind — is a thing that gets into you. On a call. In a meeting. On a dance floor. Before you know it you are smiling at something you were not smiling at five minutes ago, and you cannot quite explain how it happened.

I opened a Teams screen to find nobody there. Just a background. An African camp. A river. The colour of the sky alone told you where this was. I could hear birds. I could see the bush, the corner of a tent, the light on the water. I thought: beautiful photograph. Someone’s holiday. And then Miguel appeared in it. Actually in it. He had insisted on having our call from a safari — somewhere genuinely remote — because apparently an African river is no reason to postpone a meeting. I have rarely been more envious of a man’s life choices.

We are both Africa people. Stories were exchanged. But what I remember most about that call was the happiness of the person on the other side of the screen. The work and the wild in the same morning. For Miguel, I know, the perfect life.

David Ogilvy believed that where people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work.

Miguel didn’t quote this. In 2010 - in the midst of an economic crisis - he left McCann and built an agency around it. Every hour. Happy hour. The name was the philosophy.

He was probably the leader who called me most when the agency had produced something great. Not to report it. To share it. He called the way someone calls when they’ve just seen something extraordinary and cannot wait. He sent posters. He sent rough cuts. He sent case videos. Every time.

Because that is why he was in this business. Not to run an agency. To make great work.

The clearest version of this I saw was in Lisbon. The team had been working on a Christmas campaign and Miguel was so proud of what Nuno and João had done that he wanted to give me the preview. They presented. He sat beside me and leaned in — really leaned in — listening to the story being told as though he were hearing it for the first time.

The team was nervous. Big client. Big room. Slides. A presentation about to get in its own way. I gave them one piece of advice: don’t present. Tell the story. Move the clients to the front, put the slides away, tell them what you told me. Whisper even.

They did. The client was moved. The campaign came to life. Miguel’s emoji-rich whatsapp when it made headlines is something I will not forget.

The proudest I ever saw him, though, was on a rooftop.

Our last regional meeting. I brought the whole EMEA team to Lisbon deliberately. We were going through transformative times, and I wanted them inside an agency that had built success on principles most agencies only put on the wall. Heart. Happiness. Joy in the work.

Miguel presented the story of BAR Ogilvy with the city behind him. He showed us their campaigns — the way they introduced themselves to the world. Always with humour. Never taking themselves too seriously. Always making you smile. Happiness not as personality. As strategy. As the thing that had made them one of the most successful agencies in Portugal.

If I am the dancing queen — and there is another candidate for that title, more about that in another story — he is definitely the dancing king. Since the boat party at Expo 2020, our first post-COVID meeting, shoes off on the water, everyone finally breathing again, and Miguel raising the bar in dance moves in a way none of us saw coming. We crowned him that night. The title has stuck.

In every conversation we ever had, his family appeared somehow. Always. Without fail. Luiza, Joana, Rodrigo, Duarte — I sat at their table one evening and understood immediately where Miguel gets it from. The happiness is not his alone. It is the home it came from.

The highlight of the evening, it turned out, was my phone. The family had never seen their father dance. The videos from Dubai, from Lisbon, from every regional party where Miguel had raised the bar in dance moves - went around that table with increasing volume. He watched them watch him with exactly the expression you would expect. Completely delighted. Not remotely embarrassed.

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When Heps walks into a room, you feel it before you see it.

She is small. The room gets bigger.

The last time I saw her present was at a global Ogilvy Exco meeting, about a year ago. She stood up and gave us India. Not a report. Not a slide deck projecting confidence. A strategy so completely alive - built from knowing exactly where her country is going, where its consumers are moving, what her clients need next - that you didn’t just understand it. You felt it. Vision translated into care. That is a rare thing in a room full of people who present for a living.

Substance. That was it.

Depth that doesn’t just stay depth. Depth that becomes energy. I had lived that before. In India, as it happens.

I went to India for the first time during the Truffles years. Global knowledge manager, New York payroll, ten days of holiday. Except I had negotiated Belgian holidays. Of course I had. An invitation to the Ogilvy Asia Pacific regional meeting in Mumbai meant a trip. So I planned to rent a car and drive myself through Rajasthan. Four weeks. Hotels booked. Very confident.

My Indian colleagues laughed. Warmly. Loudly. Embarrassingly.

They found me Mr Singh. Which was, as it turned out, the greatest Incredible India gift of the entire trip. From that first day on a Rajasthan highway, two lanes that somehow accommodate five by a logic I never fully grasped, but Mr Singh clearly had. I screamed. Genuinely screamed. Multiple times. Mr Singh did not scream. Mr Singh had clearly done this before. Multiple times.

I won’t tell the whole India adventure. From Jaisalmer to Agra, from beautiful desert to desert beauty. It is its own vibrant book. What it filled me with was a feeling I kept trying to name. Because India doesn’t just show you things. It goes all the way in. The temples, the craft, the dust, the colour, the noise and the people. The trucks, the motorcycles, the tuk-tuks, the camel and Mr Singh. Five things. Five lanes. Of course.

Depth that becomes energy. There it was again.

Substance.

And that is Heps.

Hephzibah Pathak – let’s make it formal for a second which she is not - joined Ogilvy India in 1997 and never left. Not because she couldn’t. Because she kept finding more. Nearly three decades later, in January 2024, Executive Chairperson - the first woman to hold that role in 95 years of Ogilvy India. Built from the inside, one relationship, one team, one client at a time. She brought the next generation of women through. Without making it a story about herself.

She is one of the Ogilvy giants. The kind we mean when we talk about what Ogilvy actually is, underneath the work and the wins.

Because what Heps has is the thing I always wanted most for myself. To be made of that many stories. To carry where you come from, what you built, how you built it - all of it visible, all of it present, every time you walk into a room. Depth you can feel before you can explain it.

And then - and this is the part that is hardest to learn - to take all of that depth and put it in motion. To make things happen with it. In all five lanes without ever checking the rear view mirror.

I am fairly certain she has screamed on a few of those highways herself. To make sure she wasn’t pushed off the road. She just does it with considerably more composure than I managed on day one with Mr Singh. Or ever.

Every time we met, we hugged. Deeply. All those stories, wrapping around you at once. Heps just needed it to get through the jet lag. I needed it to do more.

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I have a confession. I once single-handedly blew Jamie McLellan’s IT budget. He has never fully forgiven me. I have never fully apologised. In my defence, the slides were extraordinary.

It started with a presentation.

When I returned from New York to London early in the century - my global knowledge management role done, a new chapter beginning under Philip Greenfield - Jamie was the EMEA Technology Director for Ogilvy. Sharp, warm, and conspicuously unlike every IT stereotype you have ever held. Not the person in the basement behind three screens who emerges quarterly to tell you what you cannot do. Jamie has always been there where the business is happening.

Philip had tasked me with creating OgilvyOne’s digital task force - a mandate to inspire our offices across the region to move into the digital age. New capabilities. New solutions. New ways of thinking about how brands engage with people. These were the days the internet announced itself with a sound like a fax machine having a breakdown. You waited. It screamed. Eventually, it worked.

It needed a centrepiece. So I built one.

I called it Welcome to the All-Ways Consumer. All-Ways, always hyphenated - meaning every way, every channel, every moment a brand could show up differently. It was a speech, a provocation - designed to move employees and clients from the comfort of what advertising had always been toward something richer, more engaging, more two-way. Creative people talking at people. People talking back. God forbid.

I presented it everywhere. It became a signature. Maybe more famous than the Dries Van Noten one.

What made it was Pierre.

Pierre, my exceptionally talented graphic designer husband, built the slides. In Keynote. On a Mac. Keynote had just launched in 2003. Almost nobody had seen a Keynote presentation before. Its transitions felt like small miracles. The cube. The droplet. Slides that moved like they meant it. Pierre applied every gram of his graphic skill to that presentation, and what emerged was unlike anything else. We were all on IBM PCs. IBM was one of our most important clients. None of this was incidental.

And then the requests started.

Senior executives wanted Macs. Not to be difficult. Because they had seen that presentation and wanted their own work to look like that. Because the cube had done something to them. Because Pierre, without knowing it, had raised the bar for everyone.

Jamie noticed. Jamie noticed in the specific way that a CIO notices when his budget starts moving in a direction nobody approved.

He told me, warm despite being genuinely annoyed, that I was eating his IT budget alive. One Keynote presentation at a time. One Mac request at a time. One very expensive cube transition at a time.

We laughed. We laughed a lot.

Also one other particular evening. Late, London, the kind of night that starts as one more drink after a long day and becomes something else entirely. A group of us: Jamie, my boss Paul O’Donnell, Dimitri Maex - now head of the global marketing practice at Accenture - and Amanda Jaskiewicz, an American who had moved to London for Ogilvy.

We danced. Paul O’Donnell danced, which alone was worth the evening.

And somewhere between the music and the late hour, I noticed something. The way Jamie and Amanda kept finding each other in the room. I had seen that happen before. Finding love at work is not unusual. It is Pierre and my story too. But that is for another day.

Jamie and Amanda fell in love. They married. They moved to New York. They built a life and filled it with two daughters. And every time they appear in my feed, I think of that evening. The dancing. Paul’s moves. The moment before they knew.

I saw Jamie recently. He came to London - Jamie McLellan, now Global CIO of WPP Creative - and we met as though no time had passed at all. As warm, as sharp, as entirely himself as he was the day he told me I was ruining his budget.

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