Digging through some old files at the weekend I found a bunch of Forest-related photographs circa 1999-2002.
This is my favourite. It was taken on board a Eurostar train heading for Paris on No Smoking Day 1999. We were escaping the UK for what was then the unofficial European capital of smoking.
I wasn't on the train because I stayed in London to handle media calls but the photo features two former colleagues – Juliette Torres (standing/smoking) and, seated on the left of the picture, Jenny Starkey, who left Forest the following year to work for Theresa May (and still does!).
Juliette appears in several photos, including the one below that was taken at our old office in Palace Street, Victoria, where smoking was not just allowed, it was almost compulsory.
Other pictures in the collection were taken at Forest events at the Groucho Club in Soho, Little Havana (a nightclub off Leicester Square), Simpson’s-in-the-Strand and Antony Worrall Thompson's restaurant in Notting Hill.
Another supporter, the late great Auberon Waugh also features. He's pictured below at a Forest-sponsored soiree at the Academy Club (which he founded) in Soho.
It sounds posh but the Academy Club was actually a small, dingy room (with a tiny bar) at the top of a rickety flight of stairs in a Dickensian building in Lexington Street, next door to the Literary Review, which Waugh edited.
We had some grand nights that sadly came to an end when Waugh died.
Funnily enough, one of the people I met at the Academy Club was Claire Fox, director of the Academy of Ideas (no relation). Claire went on to become an enormous friend of Forest and can seen (in the red jumper) in the group photo we took following a 'smoker-friendly fry-up' at Simpson's-in-the-Strand on No Smoking Day 2000.
Anyway, there are many more photographs than the ones published here. I'm tempted to do something with them, if only to mark Forest's 40th anniversary in 2019.
