Girl Friday : Caroline and Tom get to work on becoming famous millionaires.

Tom is one of the very few people in London that I can write with. This is amazing in itself, considering both of us are so in love with ourselves and our own supposed brilliance that you'd assume it'd be impossible for either of us to share a project. ‘The Project’ changes depending on how much we’ve had to drink, or how tough our real jobs have been on any given day. Sometimes the project is ‘the movie’, other times it’s ‘the band’ and occasionally, it’s ‘the creative movement that will define our generation’. Whenever we meet up to write we begin with broad, confident strokes: this character feels this way, this joke makes sense here. However, this quickly descends into a repeat of the same conversation.

“You know when we’re famous millionaires?”

“Mmh?”

“We should have swimming pools in the shape of each others faces.”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

The term ‘famous millionaires’ means a lot to us, and is probably the reason why our partnership works at all. Although our styles vary (I’m desperately trying to be Caitlin Moran, he Bret Easton-Ellis) we gloss over the fact that we’re furious about not being famous millionaires already. It’s this fury that keeps us going, and what allows us to say to one another “No, that’s crap. That won’t make us famous millionaires. Scrap it, we’re starting again.”

London schedules being what they are, we don’t get around to writing together as much as we’d like, and so have to piggyback off of other social events to get work done. This is how we end up in Shoreditch, trying to write a script in the middle of a ‘We’re going out of business and need to get rid of all our booze’ pub party.

If you don’t know Shoreditch, it’s probably best summarised in Cork terms as being just like The Crane Lane, if the Crane went on for six miles. It’s taken for granted that everyone who works there is a ‘creative’. As a recruitment consultant, I’m probably the closest thing to a corporate sellout at the party, a fact which Tom is keen to cover up in order to protect his own artistic credo.

“Caroline’s a famous writer.”

It’s useful that at this moment I’m holding a pen and ten pages of dialogue.

 “No I’m not.”

“You’re famous on the internet. And you have a newspaper column.”