Chapter 1

Honestly, I never meant to get rich. I know there are lots of people out there who live their lives consumed by the need for the luxury cars, the designer clothes, the house big enough to see on an OS map. Not me, though. I rented a flat, rode a bike, worked just enough to feed myself and pay (most of) the bills and mostly just played with my computers; music mainly, some graphics and animation and a bit of coding on the side.

It was the last bit that caused all the trouble, obviously. Well, that and Carla. Most of the paid work I then did was in short term project management; which kind of involved me going into small organisations, mainly charities, and co-ordinating "change processes" of one form or another. I'd reassign resources and juggle people's roles to achieve a more efficient or more effective work pattern. Which required a lot of data on people's strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes and all the sort of things that conventional project management software just didn't account for. Ensure that a truckload of concrete gets on site in time to lay the foundations, MS Project will cope. Maximise Ellie's job satisfaction - and hence her productivity - well, no.

So I wrote some stuff myself, based on a metaphor of actors and roles. Called it CastList, used it myself for a while then chucked it out into cyberland to see if anyone else was interested. On a GPL - free to use, free to adapt, free to distribute, no payment required. Like I said, profit not the motive.

And there things sat for quite a while. A couple of guys in Germany got in contact with some revised code they'd written which made everything a lot more efficient, a national charity here in the UK let me know that they'd installed a Linux box just to run the thing, even paid me to set it up for them. But otherwise, life went on.

Until, as things do, things changed. First was the discovery that one of the bills I'd been a bit remiss on paying was my council tax and that apparently I was about £3k in arrears on the refuse collection and park keeping account. Second, the realisation that the charity world, suffering a bit in the latest economic downturn, seemed temporarily able to live without my services. The combination of events was unpleasant; indeed I began to think about looking for a proper job for the first time in some years. Even started to dust down the old CV. Which was about the time I got an e-mail from Carla.

Like quite a few Brits I know, I've never been able to take Californians all that seriously. This is only partly based on our generally pervasive anti-Americanism and probably more to do with, in no particular order, Hollywood, permatans and all the weird new age stuff. Oh, and wacky choices of Governor probably don't help. Carla, of course, was Californian.

She was also, it appeared from her e-mail and a quick look at her (highly corporate) website, a management consultant of the power dressing and maximal business clichés variety. She certainly didn't seem like a woman you could imagine idling away an afternoon with a pint; probably be far too busy with her plans for world domination for that sort of thing. And she did seem to have what I thought of as a typically American attitude to money, in that she didn't seem to think a problem existed that it couldn't solve.

In this case, her problem seemed to be that she'd read about CastList in some blog and felt it would be useful in her work. Unfortunately, all her work was done under Windoze and my little creation ran solely under GNU/Linux. Her solution, inevitably: Instruct me to port the thing. And I do mean instruct. That first e-mail was so peremptory that my initial reaction was imply to ignore it, file her in the "arrogant arseholes" section of the contacts file and get on with my life. Then I remembered that I was broke and currently not working so I thought I'd jerk her chain a bit by pointing out that CastList used a whole load of libraries that just weren't available in the MS world so that porting it wouldn't just involve recompiling the code into an exe file (or whatever the Seattle-ites use these days). Or in other words, a whole load of work which I had absolutely no interest in doing, even if I had access to the tools to do it. In the end, my reply was actually quite polite, not least because as I work from home my address is quite easy to get hold of on the web and - well, Americans ... guns ... you know...

Needless to say, this approach did not deter Carla. After a knee jerk response simply offering me large quantities of money (not quite tempting enough) we settled down into some sort of dialogue about the programme itself and the ideas behind it. It turned out that the anonymous blogger had got quite a lot of his/her facts wrong in the "review" so we spent quite a lot of time at cross purposes. Nonetheless, I began to develop a sneaking admiration for the woman and her ability to grasp the concepts and see the possibilities quickly and intuitively. She even suggested some extensions and improvements that I very quickly added to the programme, though she still didn't seem to be able to understand that I would be, as she saw it, giving these away. Apparently the fruits of her wisdom normally came in at about $200 a word and she was a bit nonplussed about helping out for free, especially as I could never convince her just to download a copy of Linux and see if she liked the bloody thing in reality.

Which is where things might well have remained. While we were discussing the programme my work picked up enough to see off the bailiffs and generally life began to look a bit rosier. I even began to get quite a lot of feedback about the now enhanced CastList, enough, in fact, that the in-box began to accumulate a lot of unread items, so much so that I almost missed a further message from Carla: Coming to London to see PCW, it said, do you fancy meeting up while I'm over? Also listed some flight numbers and hotels - very expensive hotels, I noted - and some free "slots" in her schedule. Well, OK, I thought...

A month or so later

I figured that it was probably only polite to drag myself out to the airport, though I didn't mention my intention of doing so to Carla herself - I think I felt it would be a nice surprise or something. Certainly, as I didn't actually have a car it wasn't exactly clear what the utility of doing this would be, but I thought that she'd probably have a limo or something organised and I might even be able to blag a lift. On the other hand, I thought I might try to introduce her to the concept of public transport: A lot of ingrained prejudices told me that that might be quite educational for a Californian.

Now, being sane and reasonable, I hate airports with a passion. Partly its the sheer futility of the places - where are all these people going? Why do they need to? What's wrong with here, for gods sake? - partly its the soulless architecture, partly its the blokes with big guns lurking around every corner. I don't like guns, whether the blokes holding them are supposed to be the good guys or not. And I really don't like the fact that said blokes with guns appear to have a stereotype of a bad guy which looks remarkably like me.

And so I was having my bag searched for the third time when the arrival of Carla's flight was announced. This was a bit unfortunate, as I - running late as ever - hadn't really thought through my next steps. I knew what flight she was arriving on, knew what she looked like from the photo on her website (thirty something woman with big hair and an expensive suit, basically) and thought I'd kind of wing it from there. Face it, either you trust to luck or you don't, and improvisation was one of the few things I felt I was good at. Sadly, the goon now contemplating actually dismantling my laptop on the terminal floor didn't seem to see the importance of my being around the arrivals hall at that point in time, and seemed less than impressed that I was apparently meeting someone who wasn't expecting me to be there and whose cellphone number I didn't even know. Like I said, I hate airports.

I hated this one even more by the time I'd wrested myself from the arms of Security and legged it the length of the terminal to arrivals, not least because the new trainers I was wearing (have to make an effort, you know) didn't really take kindly to my attempt to stop suddenly on a newly polished floor. No-one was actually hurt, though, and the couple I managed to skittle over were really quite nice about it. After they'd calmed down a bit, anyway.

Quite a lot of people seem to need to fly from San Francisco to London, given the mob which began to emerge from Arrivals; I was lucky that no other flights arrived simultaneously but I was still having problems checking out all the faces in the crowd. So, however, were a few of the professional greeters - guys from the limo companies, corporate hosts and such like. In fact, by the time most of the passengers had come through, with the rush slowing to a trickle, the stragglers most likely having had some interaction with customs en route, there were just three of us waiting, me and two guys in what looked very expensive suits. I'd noticed that they were holding a sign for a "Ms Bronstein" but now noticed the corporate logo: PCW - wasn't that the bunch Carla was over here to see?

Well, whatever. By now, one of them was on his mobile, calling someone or the other, the other checking his watch repetitively and with a look of some annoyance. Another flight began to come through into the terminal and I began to think I'd wasted my journey in coming down here. The suits seemed to think so, too, as they stashed the sign under a well clad arm and turned to leave the building. Well, what the hell, I thought, might as well get a coffee before going to get the train home.

I was still wincing at the price of caffeine in these places when I noticed a woman coming out of the arrivals gate entirely on her own, the flow of passengers having temporarily dried up. I'm not sure why I noticed her: she was fairly nondescript, dressed in t-shirt, jeans and trainers, a small rucsac and a laptop bag over her shoulder, hair tied back in a pony tail. On the other hand there was something subtly furtive about her actions like she was actually trying to avoid someone -in itself unusual in the setting - and so maybe it was all my earlier interactions with the goons that made me sensitive to "odd" behaviour. She also, I noticed, appeared to be staring straight back at me. So I looked away, embarrassed, and went back to the coffee.

A couple of seconds later she was sitting directly opposite me, a strange but slightly shy half smile on her face. Then coughed slightly, laughed and said,

"I may be about to make myself look like a complete dickhead, but if I mentioned the phrase CastList to you, would you think about something other than the theatre, by any chance?"

I must have looked a bit startled, perhaps even a tad non nonplussed, cos she laughed again and continued, "I suspect that you're Dave the Linux enthusiast and all round annoying lefty, and I also suspect that you might be rather sweetly looking for me. I'm Carla Davis, by the way, Bronstein for business purposes"

I stammered some sort of greeting, something about her not looking remotely corporate or like her web photo (that got another laugh) and also explained that she'd missed her reception committee. This time, a sigh...

"They always pull that shit; I tell them I can find their bloody offices all on my own, no need to meet me at the airport, but still they do. And then its, oh, you must come out for dinner and I end up being bored shitless for the night as well as just the actual meetings they're paying me for. So I hide. Childish, really, but it works. If they haven't gone and staked out the hotel as well, of course." She brightened, "Still its nice to see you here ... I wondered if you'd come up with a good old English romantic gesture, and you have..."

My turn to laugh. "Well, its a long time since anyone called me a romantic, and the gesture is more quixotic than anything - I don't have a car so you're no better off in terms of getting back into the city. However, I could at least buy you a coffee, given where we're sitting..."

I did so, came back to the table to find her on the phone, cancelling a hotel booking, making another, credit card in hand. She smiled, looked happy, relaxed and perhaps a little bit pleased with herself. I wondered about the business sense of a corporate consultant taking such evident pleasure in annoying her clients, but mainly I just enjoyed watching her, confounded by the fact that she was just so different from anything I'd imagined - the quick wit and intelligence were only too apparent, but there was a laid back, casual aspect to her behaviour that I could never have suspected from her professional persona. She was also, I began to realise, quite extraordinarily attractive in a make up free, almost hippy-chic sort of way. I was really, really glad I'd made this trip.

We chatted a bit over the coffee and then on the train back into town - her failed marriage (hence the twin names), her years in big corporates in the states, her decision to freelance; my generally chaotic relationships, failure to engage with the adult world of finance and employment, my own petty freelancing. Time, as they say, flew.

Arriving in Paddington we actually managed to find a taxi to take us to her hotel - the Savoy, incidentally (because "it was close enough to walk to meetings, far enough to be discreet") - and she invited me in for a quick drink after she'd checked in. One good thing about flash hotels is that staff tend to accept anyone who can pay the bill and so no-one batted an eye lid as two - umm - casually dressed people occupied a very expensive table in a very expensive room, ordering eye wateringly expensive drinks - single malt for me, Russian vodka for her - and proceeded to remain, talking, for an hour or two without further bothering the bar staff. And we talked about everything and anything - politics, cultural assumptions and prejudices, the hassles of air travel and the absurdities of employment. Strangely, the one thing that wasn't mentioned was CastList, the only reason for us being in contact in the first place. Even more strangely, I felt quite relieved about that, like it would have brought the conversation to an altogether more mundane level.

Eventually, even I noticed that Carla was beginning to fade a bit, so I suggested that she might want to get some rest, what with her having been flying all day and with early morning meetings to get to. With just the faintest hesitation (or was that my imagination?) she nodded at that, but then quickly asked if I was free the next evening and whether we could go out to dinner. To which, of course I agreed, even if privately I was wondering how on earth I could afford to go to the sort of place she was likely to suggest. And then, after a quick hug and the slightest of pecks on the cheek, she was heading for her room and a shower, and I was standing on the pavement, facing the Stygian nightmare that is the underground in summer. And feeling really rather content with life.