5 hours ago
3
The spring after my A-levels was not going the way I planned. I was 19, hadn’t got the required grades for any of my university choices and hadn’t saved for a gap year. My friends were off enjoying their new lives and I was stuck at home in Essex with my disappointed parents, doing occasional temp work.
Then I read Join Me by the writer and comedian Danny Wallace. I’d enjoyed another book, co-written by him, Are You Dave Gorman?. I found this joyous and silly project, about grownups stumbling their way through their own lives, comforting when I had no direction. So when a friend recommended Join Me, I thought it would be a giggle too; I didn’t realise it would change my life.
The book was more or less about how Wallace inadvertently started a “positivity cult” after posting an ad in a London newspaper that simply said “Join me”. Soon, letters started pouring in. He decided to use these people for good by rallying them to commit random acts of kindness each week. It was the mid-2000s and I spent a lot of time on internet forums. Some people started to talk about the group. The concept appealed, and I duly joined in.
Forum members organised regular real-life Join Me meets, where they would hang out in the pub for most of the day before doing random acts of kindness, such as giving a present to a stranger. I’d been to a couple and, in June 2004, took the train to London for a meet-up on Soho’s Golden Square.
I was always apprehensive about meeting a bunch of strangers I had only spoken to online. One of the first people to approach me was an unassuming, bespectacled, kind-looking young man wearing an awful green jacket. He offered me a homemade Join Me badge – Badge-It! machines were very popular at the time – and we didn’t speak again. We continued chatting on the forum, though, and I ran into him at meets in Brighton and Edinburgh.
Then a few months later, after a night out, I drunkenly started a new thread on the forum, posting that I thought he was quite fit. It was pretty cringe. His reply was something along the lines of: “Erm, thank you?” In the sober light of day we both ignored it.
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Then on Good Friday 2005, I went to a meet in Nottingham, where he lived. It was the first time we’d met in person since my post, and as we moved from the pub to a club, he yelled out my name, shouted: “I like you, you’re my favourite person!” and ran up to hold my hand. We kissed – and it was the start of the rest of my life.
We texted, and I travelled back to Nottingham and went to a pub quiz with him, then a bowling date, where we had a proper, more sober kiss. After a month of dating, I moved in; five years later we got married.
During that time, I did my resits and got better grades, but I’d met so many people from Join Me who had taken different paths that I realised I didn’t need university at all. I got a job on the local council and made my life in Nottinghamshire with him.
We’ve been married 15 years now. We have a beautiful house, an assortment of cats, fish, sea monkeys and ants, and an amazing 12-year-old son who is the best person I’ve ever met. We still have a tattered copy of Join Me on our bookshelf, and I know of at least 20 human beings who exist because their parents met in that forum.
I am so grateful to Danny Wallace for those silly projects, and particularly how they brought this amazing, kind, funny – and, yes, still quite fit – man into my life.
