Pop goes the boss

“Hang on, you bought biscuits for the office with MY money?!”

Neil's cheerful response to the biscuit news

That was my boss and Derby Telegraph editor Neil White’s slightly indignant reaction to the fact that the chocolate digestives are on him this afternoon.

He’d slipped me £20 to pick him up a couple of bottles of pop on my lunchtime walk into town (clearly expecting some change!), which of course is blog fodder.

I ended up in Derby’s Eagle Market, at a stall called the Special Offer Shop, which basically turned out to be an Aladdin’s Cave of all kinds of household basics at suspiciously cheap prices - with labels advising customers that sell-by dates were close or biscuits were broken.

Inside the stall an enthusiastic herd of OAPs and the overweight clucked and bustled around the bargains, and when I paid for Neil’s two bottles of Pepsi Max with a £20 the stallholder looked at me incredulously at the sight of so much money.

I also decided that it was about time that Neil, a keen connoisseur of all the sweet stuff that comes into the newsroom, stumped up for this afternoon’s biscuits, so I taxed him a pack of discounted choccie digestives too.

“I’ll have you know I by loads of stuff for this newsroom,” he grumbled when I got back into the office and told him what I’d done. “What about when I go on holiday? I always bring back sweets. And what about my birthday?”

I had to concede that on Neil’s 50th earlier this year, he brought in such a startling amount of confectionery that it actually took us an entire week to get through it all - a feat previously unheard of. At one point we had to invite the advertising team to enter the fray before the baked goods started to go off.

“Can’t believe you’re blogging about my two bottles of pop,” Neil concluded as I snapped his picture.

Well Neil, I’m seven months into a daily blog about shopping, so I’ve got to blog about something!