Mark

In 1997, or thereabouts, I started a hobby company. About a year later, I found my first proper client and the business ambled along from there. For years, I kept wanting to make that hobby business my main job but working as an IT freelancer with a mortgage and ever-growing family, it seemed more and more unlikely that the opportunity to make the transition would ever present itself; the leap - and the drop - was just too great.

And then, ten years ago, one of my clients for whom I'd been doing a little bit of work, asked if I would be able to take on a more sizeable project. To be honest, I wasn't sure I could but it seemed daft to turn the work down outright, so I agreed to a two day meeting with her and her business development manager to see if the project was viable.

Thus, sometime in the summer of 2004, I drove down to my client's house to sit around a dining room table with her and a man introduced to me as Mark. It was immediately clear that he didn't want to be there and that he thought the meeting was a waste of time. He needed a proper IT system and he had flown over from Turkey to have a meeting with someone his boss had met in the playground.

Well, I guess my pride jumped to the fore and I made every effort to impress him. Sure, he was grudgingly accepting of my track record but then, as the day went on, it became clearer and clearer that we could work together and that we were both brimming with ideas for the project at hand. At the end of that first day, I offered him a lift back to his hotel and accepted his offer of a quick drink in the bar.

And so it was that the second day of our two day meeting largely consisted of us fighting our hangovers and trying to put on a good show for his boss and my client. We'd spent the evening before talking about the project and our myriad ideas, whilst steadily knocking back the pints. It was both auspicious and prescient of the years to come.

In 2005, I spent several weeks in Turkey with Mark. Each day I was there, he'd pick me up and we'd drive out in his truck, stopping every so often at a café in whatever village we were passing through. Mark's basic Turkish would order us coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, and the local lager, Efes, from the (very) early evening onwards. Occasionally, we'd have meals at night with other people from the company, who would berate us for talking about work but it's no exaggeration to say that we were consumed by what we were doing. It wasn't just work.

That was nine years ago. Mark moved on from that company, which, perhaps not coincidentally, went into a slow spiral after he left, but he and I have remained fast friends. We've helped each other out through bad times and wholeheartedly enjoyed one another's successes. Hand on my heart, I can say that I have had more arguments with Mark than everyone else I've ever known added together, but it's never jeopardised our friendship. In fact, it gives us a kind of freedom.

I mention all of this because I was hoping to stay with Mark tonight as I have a meeting about ten miles away from his house tomorrow. Unfortunately, it transpires that he's away on business while I'm down this way. No problem, I told him, thinking I'd find a hotel nearby, but Mark just told me where to find the spare key, apologised that there was nothing in the fridge, and told me to help myself to the wine. He's that kind of guy and I'm glad he's my good friend. Cheers, Mark!