A confession.

Describing Savannah as a friend from law school is a bit of an understatement.

Quite a big understatement, actually.

It is certainly true to say that I met Savannah on the first day of my first week at law school. That much is certainly, verifiably, true.

I still have the notes from that first day when a quirk of surname meant we were forced into the same group for a horrendously patronising treasure hunt the faculty had arranged for us to ‘get to know each other’.

Having barely had the chance to say hello to the people we would share lecture halls and seminar rooms with for the next three years, we were bundled into small groups and turfed out on to the streets to look for clues around the city. Here we all were, away from home for the first time and beginning our lives as proper grown-ups – and they were sending us on a bloody treasure hunt. This was law school? In what turned out to be a foretaste of our entire attitude to our studies, Savannah and I decided to leave the rest of the group to traipse around the city hunting for clues while we spent the afternoon in the pub.

But the treasure hunt wasn’t the reason I wanted to spend the afternoon with Savannah, and the quirk of surname wasn’t the reason we ended up becoming friends. In fact, I’m pretty sure we could have been studying different courses at opposite ends of the city – perhaps even the country – and I’d still have found her. It helped that she was American, blonde and stunningly beautiful.

Those were three of my boxes ticked right there, before she’d even opened her mouth. And when she did, she was easily the most naturally funny girl I’ve ever met. Arguably, in fact, the only naturally funny girl I’d ever met, given that I’d grown up in Kent where girls are taught not to speak with their mouths full, meaning that from the age of thirteen they’re essentially mute. Savannah also had a great line in acerbic put-downs, most of which were aimed at me as we sat that afternoon in the pub, getting to know each other. Before we’d ordered our first drink, I was charmed by her. By the end of pint number one, I really fancied her. By pint number two I was crazy about her. Pretty soon I was looking for any excuse to spend time with her, to the delight of my girlfriend of two years, who, by a quirk of UCAS points, was also starting the same course at the same university as me. Fortunately, spending time with Savannah was easy as we were in every one of the same classes and her university digs were not two hundred yards from mine.

Whenever I was with her, I wanted nothing more than to impress her – just to see her smile or make her laugh. If I’m a bit of a geek today then in those days I was basically an extra from Revenge of the Nerds. I still had my high school haircut, and my high school girlfriend and a dress sense that could best be recreated by replacing a blind man’s entire wardrobe with ill-fitting jumpers. I was far from being a catch, especially to this Californian goddess with her surfer boyfriend. But I did have a secret weapon: I knew I could make people laugh – and so that became the basis of my plan to win her heart. Getting a haircut and losing the jumpers would have helped, too, but that would have to wait until the second year. No sense going overboard. There was just one hitch in my plan – two if you count the fact that I had a girlfriend and she had a boyfriend: there was no way in hell I could tell her about the night job I had in those days, writing dorky books about the Internet. I mean, how could I ever get her to fall for me if she knew I made money by running a website? And then writing books about it? What a geek! Her boyfriend was a surfer, for God’s sake. A surfer who worked in a bar. How the hell was I supposed to compete with that?

Unbelievably, I managed to keep my deep, dark Internet secret from Savannah for almost a year, through a combination of changing the subject and out and out lying, but I knew that in the end, one day, she’d find out the horrible truth.

It was the day of her twenty-first birthday and I was going to have to skip her birthday party to go to London to meet Clare for a progress report on the books. I went round to her house in the afternoon to explain that I had to be in London (an all too common excuse for missing appointments with her) for the evening, and that I was really sorry I wouldn’t make the party, but that I’d try to see her later. I’d made similar excuses a dozen times before and she’d always accepted them with a mixture of resignation and confusion, clearly not wanting to pry into my personal business, if I wasn’t going to tell her what I was up to.
But that day, for some reason, her reaction was different. All of a sudden, her face turned very solemn and concerned; that look girls normally give you when you make a joke about child abduction. I was suddenly very aware that she was staring at me. And that neither of us was talking.

Finally she broke the silence.

‘Um, Paul, can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.’

‘Sure…’

Oh God, here it comes.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘Well, these trips to London, and the strange phone calls you keep leaving the room to take, and the fact that you never turn up to lectures…

…I mean, you know you can tell me anything, right?’ I sighed, took a deep breath, and prepared for the worst. This was the moment I’d been dreading. I could hear her roaring with laughter already. Looking down at my shoes, I told her everything – about the website, the book deal… everything. It was like admitting to your mum that you like dressing up in her clothes while she’s at work. Possibly more embarrassing.

For ten seconds, maybe longer, she stayed silent, still fixing me with her annoyingly beautiful eyes. Eyes which had already started to fill with tears of laughter and pity.

Except, no.

Something was very wrong with this picture.

They weren’t tears of derision – they were just tears. Normal tears. Normal girl tears.

‘Oh, thank God, ‘ she sobbed. ‘I’ve been trying to work out for weeks what it was you were hiding. All my friends have been guessing.’

‘And what did you come up with?’ I asked.

‘We thought you had a gay lover in London who was dying of AIDS.’

‘What?!’

‘Well, it was the only thing I could think of.’

All this time and she’d thought I had a gay lover in London. That’s why she thought I wouldn’t let her meet my ‘girlfriend’ and why I kept running off to London instead of partying with her. That was the only thing she could think of ? And at that exact moment she became the love…

‘Hang on… you run a website… and you’ve written books?! Oh my God, that’s soooo cool, why didn’t you tell me? You have to show me!’

…of my life. All I had to do now was convince her to dump her boyfriend and live happily ever after with me.

Sadly, that particular goal proved only partially successful. After university, while I moved to London to start my career writing about my fellow geeks for cash, Savannah moved to Exeter with her now even longer-term surfer boyfriend to carry on studying law and presumably spend the weekends watching him surf and then nights on the beach and… GAAAAAAAH.

We stayed in touch, on and off, with just the occasional phone call where I’d tell her about my life as a singleton in the big city (I’d split up with my high school girlfriend, and hadn’t yet met Maggie, so I was busy making up for lost time in a huge way, basically sleeping my way around the city. This had become slightly easier since I dumped the jumpers and got my hair cut.) In return, she’d tell me how happy she was with her boyfriend and how they were going to buy a pub together in the country, and run it as a couple. I was deliriously happy for them both, of course, and probably only spent a couple of hours a week typing ’surfing accident statistics’ into Google.

And then one day – almost two years later – I received the best text message of my life.

‘Hey you. I’m moving to London in June. On my own. Want to come house hunting with me?’

Praise Jesus. Praise Buddha. Of course, the fact that she was moving to London on her own didn’t mean she had split up with her boyfriend. And even if it did – obviously it bloody did – it didn’t necessarily mean we’d get together. I mean, she was just stating it as a fact. A piece of news.

Yeah. Right. The angels were singing, the sun was shining. Savannah was coming to London and within weeks we’d be married. No other outcome was conceivable.

‘Sure. Let me know when you’re coming to town and I’ll see if I’m around.’

I am so fucking cool.

As luck – wonderful, wonderful luck – would have it, one of my flatmates was moving out of the shared house I was living in. By July 2004, Savannah and I were sleeping under the same roof. By August, we were sleeping under the same duvet.

Praise Mohammed.

For almost a year I was the happiest man in the world. I was writing for the Guardian, arsing about writing books, editing The Friday Thing and dating the love of my life. Sure, she had basically moved straight from one live-in relationship into another, but that was fine.

We’d work through it.

5.1

We didn’t work through it.

5.2

Not even slightly.

5.3

But fuck it. Those twelve blissful months we were together made me happy enough to make up for a lifetime of miserable comparisons to come. And anyway, we’d got together weeks after she’d come out of a live-in relationship. She only needed some time; I’d get her back in the end. We were meant to be. A matter of time, is all.

Unless of course – a couple of years later – we suddenly found ourselves working together in the same office, in the stressful environment of an Internet start-up. That would be suicide. Madness. Idiocy. It doesn’t matter if she’s brilliant, and talented, and that I’d get to see her every day. Working together would ruin everything.

‘You’re hiring Savannah?’ Sam wasn’t so much asking as despairing.

‘Yep, she’s brilliant with people. She’s just finished launching an independent newspaper for London and wants a new challenge. She’s smart and she’s a million times more organised than Karl and me put together. She’s perfect.’

‘Yes, I know all that. You’ve been saying how brilliant she is for three years. But you know if you work with her, you’ll never get back together, right? I mean ever.’

‘Of course, ‘ I lied.

I’d figure it out somehow.

5.4

Karl was a considerably less dangerous proposition. He and I had also met while I was at university, but under somewhat different circumstances.

In my second year, with my academic workload starting to get a bit heavy, I decided it was time to hire a few more writers to contribute to The Friday Thing . I wrote a short advert for the next issue inviting people who could ‘write good jokes for not very much money’ to email in samples of their work. About two dozen people responded, and Clare, Charlie and I sat down to sift through the hopefuls. By and large the quality was less than inspiring. Dire, you might say.

Most of the people who replied seemed to have misread the ad and were asking us for a lot of money in exchange for some not very good writing. One hopeful even pitched the idea of a fake agony aunt column – always the last refuge of a failed comedy writer. We divided the submissions into four piles -’unfunny’, ‘laughably unfunny’, ’so bad they’re funny’ and just ‘funny’. That last pile was the smallest by a mile but left us with a list of maybe four possible hires, including two particularly good efforts, one from an Italian-based English writer called Graham Pond and another from a chap in Sunderland called Karl Webster. Graham Pond was the best by a nose, having sent a genuinely hilarious piece about Easter that he’d written for an English-language magazine in Bologna. In a close-run vote, we picked Graham for the weekly gig, but we also sent Karl a nice email inviting him to send in more stuff, promising to pay him for anything we used.

A few weeks later we hired a pub on Fleet Street and hosted a party to celebrate the first birthday of The Friday Thing, and we were very excited when Graham said he was going to fly over from Italy to attend. He’d been submitting really great stuff every week and I was keen to put a face to the jokes. He finally arrived about two hours late: tall, in his early thirties and with a slightly grizzled look that was somewhere between Hunter S. Thompson and Tintin.

‘ You must be Paul, ‘ he said, striding over to me and throwing his rucksack at my feet. ‘And these…’ his voice dripping with a writer’s contempt, ‘must be the readers…’

‘ And you must be Graham, ‘ I replied, kicking his bag under the table. I liked him immediately.

‘Actually it’s Karl.’

‘Karl?’

‘Karl Webster. It’s a funny story actually…’

And so it was. It turned out that Karl was so keen to secure the gig with The Friday Thing that he’d sent in six different entries, under six different names. All four writers in our short list had been him, including Graham Pond. It’s hard not to be impressed by that kind of chutzpah. And I was impressed, to the point that when Clare and I set up The Friday Project he was the natural choice to take over the editorship of The Friday Thing and London by London,, and to head up the company’s online arm.

To avoid any weirdness or jealousy, and to underline the fact that we were all in this together, I insisted that Savannah and Karl would each have equal shares to me, and that we’d all have the same salary. Despite the fact that the start-up money had come from my parents and my uncle, we were all risking the same thing: our futures. So it was only fair that we all had an equal say. There are few things more certain to end long-term friendships than arguments over money.

5.5

On the freezing morning of 1 January 2007 we dragged our new landlord out of his hung-over bed to let us into our brand new offices in the converted Battersea Studios in south London. I had arranged to meet Savannah at Victoria Station at noon, but naturally we both arrived late and very hung-over. We always had very different styles of being hung-over: Savannah always managing to look absolutely radiant and full of life, while I always looked like I’d been raped by a hedge.

And so began a new year and the first day of Fridaycities. I’d found the office space on the Internet and it seemed perfect for a start-up with very little money. For a start it was dirt cheap – tenants paid for room in the open-plan space for just £100 per desk per week, which included all bills: telephone, electricity, Internet, meeting room rental – the works. A bargain, we thought. Also, the space was very cool looking, having been created by an extraordinarily camp (but totally straight, he insisted) interior designer called Peter, who had designed every aspect himself.

Peter’s flair for design and order would prove to be, putting it mildly, a mixed blessing. The space was certainly stunning to look at, with expensive designer furniture, fingerprint access and an enormous wooden Buddha greeting guests at the door. But Peter was also just a touch too house proud for comfort. In fact, when it came to rules, he made the guards at Alcatraz look laissez-faire. For a start there was to be no clutter on desks – no personal knickknacks or photos of any kind; no papers left lying around and (on pain of death) absolutely no pot plants. He had, he explained, arranged for fresh flowers to be brought in weekly and that any additional greenery would ruin the ‘look’. But his ultimate bugbear was teaspoons. Peter hated teaspoons. The office had a smoothie machine, a coffee-maker capable of producing five types of hot beverage and a shelf containing at least twenty little silver tins, each with a different type of tea. But nary a spoon with which to stir them.

Instead, Peter had invested in thousands of those stupid single-use wooden splints you get in Starbucks. By going down the disposable route, he explained, there would be less need for washing up and so fewer overheads. He was barking mad, clearly, and on several occasions I thought Savannah was going to physically assault him with one of the wooden stirrers. But the space was cheap and the lure of fingerprint access was simply too great for a geek like me.

As we waited for Peter to arrive with our new keys on that first morning, I examined the gigantic map in the lobby, showing the other offices in the building and who inhabited them. What I discovered was definitely a good omen.

By a strange coincidence, our immediate neighbour in the building was a company called Mind Candy Design, otherwise known as the company Michael Smith had set up to run Perplex City. We would be working ten feet away from Michael – so close in fact that I could look out through the giant windows and see his giant TV and Playstations from my desk. I could smell his success without even opening the door.

Another good sign – literally – was the one that I noticed as we walked up the stairs to our new office. Standing outside the Mind Candy office was a huge vinyl banner promoting Perplex City. There in two-foot-high lettering were the words ‘Perplex City: the puzzle game that is gearing up to become the interactive phenomenon of the year. – Guardian ‘.

Two years on and he was still dining out on that article.

The cheeky bastard.

Chapter Six: ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing at a sausage fest like this?’…