Even in the darkest depths of the UK recession, one basic need continued to drive the most ruthless, cheap, manipulative and cynical companies around - the need to vomit out regular online content with a deceptively chatty, casual, peer-to-peer tone in the hope of giving a toxic commercial brand a friendly human face. You know what I'm talking about, and you'll have seen far too fucking much of it if you spend any time online - banal Buzzfeed bullshit. Valueless, churnalistic crap, doing its best to devalue the written word beyond the point where anybody cares about what anybody else has to say.
And into this career path, like badgers into a pit filled with poisonous spikes, fell the best minds of my generation (that hadn’t planned ahead for a secure financial future and applied for a degree in the sciences).
I was on my third copywriting job after leaving university. After a while, they all blend into one; you show up, you pretend to be excited about colonic irrigation, you pretend to be excited about a massage parlour that’ll later turn out to be owned by a sex offender looking for women to assault, you pretend to be excited about knock-off Chinese smartphones, you lose a little more of your ability to become genuinely excited about anything. Thankfully there’s always the high redundancy turnover to inject a little excitement and stop things from getting too monotonous.
This job was much like the others. The kitchen was equally poorly stocked with good caffeine. The salary was just enough to pay for your commute, utilities, and Friday night stupor-drinking. The writing team was the same assemblage of unwashed 20-somethings, sat in silence typing furiously and listening to the sales team talk complete crap to product suppliers in the hope of giving us a chance to write complete crap for online consumers.
The difference this time around - the only difference that mattered to me - was Suzanne.
To call her feisty, or wilful, or spirited would have been an understatement; she’d have kicked the figurative arses of the heroines from whatever shitty young-adult adventure novels are popular these days, stolen their lunch money and then run away cackling like a lunatic hag. She wanted to write, like I did; she had a black and fucked-up and sarcastic sense of humour, like I did; and she cared about things, which after four years of career failure was much more than I did. She was in a relationship with a younger guy, and lived with him somewhere across London.
She was short and pale with witchy black hair and mad, wide blue eyes, and soon we became firm friends.
At the time, I remember thinking - vaguely, without any serious hope of anything - “I bet she’s kinky.” Almost certainly that was just wishful thinking, because I really did like her a lot.
And, no, I absolutely could not have predicted what happened next.
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