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All back to school with the website that’s made class reunions
the hottest social event of the season
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Things you never expected your long-lost schoolmates to be doing:
- Getting on with it.
- Having kids.
- Being nice.
- Being normal.
- Being scientists working in Silicon Valley, having completed
a PhD entitled ’Magneto-optics of Laterally Confined
2-Dimensional Electron Gases'.
It wasn't like destiny had it all worked out in advance for my
friend Will Stallard, but to watch, back in 1985, this bright but
awkward teenager's performance in the 100m race – he always
came last – it was never really likely that he'd go on play
for Man Utd or anything.
But read back his entry on school reunion website friendsreunited.co.uk,
('…went on to study Physics at Imperial College… now
living in California and enjoying the sunshine') and then observe
the beaming adult beneath the West Coast sky in the picture, and
not even 6,000 miles and 16 years can account for the difference
between memory and actuality. California, electron gases, Imperial
coll… how did *that* happen?
Close to three million people have probably experienced similar
I-can’t-believe-it timewarp memory-slap since visiting Friendsreunited,
a website which has spent 2001 bending the laws of time to dump
the past right on your desktop in ways that would even stump Will
Stallard.
Friendsreunited.co.uk was a internet start-up that never set out
to make money, but has nevertheless made loads servicing Britain
with its first retroactive yearbook-cum-scholastic Yellow Pages.
No-one expected it to be the runaway success of viral non-marketing
that it’s become, but since it went live in July 2000, three
million people have logged on - many paying the optional fiver
for access to their contemporaries’ email addresses - with
carefully-balanced resumés of their post-school life, amping
up achievement and playing down shortcomings. Or just taking the
piss a lot.
In the last year, several people have got married though FR.CO.UK
contact. One man has been reunited with his cat, Mr Paws, kidnapped
13 years ago by a friend. Should you care to, you can log on and
discover what schoolfriends of Posh Spice, Sol Campbell, Richard
Bacon, Dave Hill from Slade, Scott from 5, Debbie Magee, Jarvis
Cocker, The Levellers and Alan Titchmarsh have to say about their ‘famous’ colleagues.
You can also find Anna Friel’s innermost reminiscences (‘I
remember we were all hooked on Kyle MacLachlan and Twin Peaks at
the time, and now I've snogged him on screen!’ to be exact).
Recently, FR.co.uk attracted the pipe-chomping ire of school unions
who demanded the removal of libellous allegations concerning their
staff, in a similar controversy that almost did for the net's last
must-click destination, popbitch.com.
Like ultra-naff London nightclubs schooldisco.com, FR.CO.UK it
taps into an appetite for short-term nostalgia at a time when the
future never seem less sure and the present tuned to satisfying
desires instantaneously, but gravely lacking in substance. On one
day in November alone, FR.co.uk attracted 6.9million hits. When
it comes to surfing the Zeitgeist, FR.co.uk crashed over the British
shoreline like an irresistible hang-ten radical wave freak of lunch-hour
net distraction, 'dude'.
Everything about FR.co.uk screams ‘notdot.com.’ If
the faded signages of expired e-commerce are the net’s high
street, and the porn world its back-alleys, then FRC is its curtain-twitching
suburbia, a zone which runs on curiosity, one-upmanship and gossip.
Fittingly, FR.co.uk began in High Barnet, where the Northern line
peters out of London into the Hertfordshire and 'urban' becomes ‘leafy’ in
a matter of yards. Steve and Julie Pankhurst’s detached house
doesn’t look much like the thrusting hub of net enterprise,
neither do these ultra-normal married thirtysomethings and full-time
web-grandees ride microscooters.
Instead, they usher you in, put the kettle on and mooch upstairs
to where a pair of laptops busily manage Britain’s most popular
website from among Steve’s record collection in the spare
room.
When they met, Julie and Steve were database programmers. While
Julie was pregnant, she began wondering what her friends from Primary
school were doing: this is a school, bear in mind that’s ‘literally
100 yards up there road. I’m still in Barnet,‘ Julie
trills. ’Sad!’
Then they had a brilliant idea: copy American school reunion site
classmates.com. ‘We’d come across it and thought, ‘Ah,
it’s been done.’ So We thought, ‘we should, do
this’.’
So they did it. Steve wrote the programme in a fortnight. Slowly,
people joined up and was soon the site began attracting around
20,000 hits per day. Then, around May 2001, Steve explains, ‘it
went vooom! It hit a point when anybody going to it would recognise
a name - that was the key. Before you might have gone there and
not seen anything and then gone away.‘
Consequently FR.co.uk became a business instead of a hobby. ‘This
was during the dot.com boom. Millions were being put into crap
ideas. Our approach was to spend no money. We didn’t know
whether people would pay for it. We since found out they would…’
The site is growing beyond its current 25-35-year-old demographic.
When you consider that its content is provided by users and that
school-leavers are a renewable resource AND that they intend to
expand and franchise the site, by now, you’ll probably be
doing the math: £5 X loads of subscribers - low overheads
(hosting, advertising, telephone support) = £££s
for Steve and Julie. www.Bonanza.co.uk!
‘We aren’t not millionaires,’ grins Steve. ‘I
know what percentage of subscribers have paid. But I don’t
tell anyone.’
Its front-end may be as lavishly-appointed and corporate as the
average chippy, (its only graphic picture is a pic of Steve’s
mum and dad), but FR.co.uk is a the triumph of localised interest
operating on a global scale, of people-applied computing over marketing-driven
driven corporate greed. Still, its appeal lies deeper than its
nominal ‘reuniting’ function. It’s a crucial
feature of the site is that volunteering personal info is optional,
not obligatory. Reflected in the ratio of paying to non-paying
subscribers may well be the number of users in search of genuine
contact and news of old friends, and those just wanting the voyeuristic
frisson available in the combination of mundane and bizarre that
FR.co.uk hosts. Because forget Hollyoaks: no truer depiction
exists of young British adulthood no than FR.co.uk. For every ‘now
living in Sunderland with husband Jim, working as a waste management
officer. Pregnant… very happy!’ there’s a ‘Hi!
Finished my sentence for armed robbery, made a new life in upholstery
with my fifth wife, Gertrude, operated briefly for Mossad, and
won the Nobel Peace Prize for my work on botulism. Still in touch
with Gizmo, Lance and Bender!!!’
Like the site’s Osama Bin Laden and Prince Wills entries,
that was made up. But you get the picture.
It’s perhaps an upshot of the Faustian pact we’ve
struck with comfy nostalgia that we’re now as contactable
to our past through the net as we are with the present. With FR.co.uk,
you get the history belling up for a pint. And to be frank, most
people are saying ‘cheers!’
‘There have been loads of reunions,’ says Steve, so
lauded for his invention he’s now regularly invited to reunions
of schools he never even went to. ‘Thousands. Everyone I
know has been to a reunion.’
‘Apart from me,’ tuts Julie. ‘And I set the
site up.’
WARNING: the value of friendships from the past can go up as well
as down. Encountering friends in person is, of course, an entirely
different proposition to doing so online. Currently, school reunions
may well be the hottest engagement of winter social circuit, but
Britain's mass encounter with it school days is exacting a considerable
toll on its sanity.
On a Thursday night in South London, Greenwich’s Time bar
is hosting the first reunion of Bexley Technical College, a single-sex
school several miles away. Stroll up the stairs, and there’s
a buffet, a man playing piano, DJ on his way over, several knots
of geezers with lager and shirts, a pin-the-name on-the-teacher
photo gallery in the corner, and, by 9.30pm, a roomful of women
in their mid-twenties with facial expressions that registering
mild embarrassment at the same time as raging curiosity as they
appraise the older, discernibly saggier, though probably happier
incarnation of their youth.
It’s an impressive turnout – of one class, 28 of 30
are here. To some, it’s torture; to others, a joy. To most,
however, it’s still an excellent opportunity for a piss-up.
Vivian, a bank worker, ‘just came tonight to see how everyone
looks,’ she says, scrutinising roughly 150 women scrutinising
each other. ’It’s a really weird feeling!’
‘I’ve had emails from people I haven’t seen
for ten years,’ adds her mate Zoe, who works for the police. ‘It’s
really great to go on the website because you don’t have
to see them.’
In the event that 'friends' actually get round to doing any 'reuniting',
they make extremely cautious entreaties to one another. Conversations
are ptractically couched UN-level diplomacy, but you can almost
see the mental subtitling that runs underneath, conversations typically
commencing thus:
'Hi... er! [I forgot your name!] Great to see you! [I haven't
missed you at all!]. Your look well [you've put on weight]… Oh,
I never see them anymore [who?]… I'd love to meet you for
a drink [my husband/wife/partner/mother/parole officer will be
furious]' etc.
Largely, the Tex girls have done well for themselves, and though
few people are doing what they expected to do as ‘grown ups’ (as
if…), there’s also the feeling that it doesn’t
really matter; that if this is what all the hopes, memories and
expectations recorded on FR.co.uk have come to, then, really, that’s
okay.
However, two principal topics of conversation emerge: firstly,
an update of one’s position on the playground’s eternal
geek-to-cool index. ‘I was never cool at school,’ Jo
Gibbs, 28, agonises, as of the college’s cool faction are
about to pile over for an impromptu teasing. ‘I do look at
the website and you do compare yourself to what everybody else
is doing. I’m doing completely worse! Everybody seems to
be completely happy doing what they’re doing, settled and
stuff. there always seem to be someone cooler than you are in life.’
Sadly, yes. Bt Jo’s self-esteem issues notwithstanding,
there’s a more serious topic afoot. To wit: snogging.
‘We’ve been sending each other photos,’ beams
Toni, 28, from Welling, who’s hoping to see a boy she used
to play kiss-chase with at school. ‘He’s got his own
landscape gardening business now!’
Although ‘friendsreunited,andpossiblymore.co.uk’ doesn’t
have so snappy a ring to it, the site and evenings like these are
probably doing more to realise long-held affections, lusts and
fantasies than they’re given credit for. The unspoken truth
is that like some kind of informal late-developer Dating Agency,
it can act for those who WLTM the person they never got round to
snogging in fifth form. Which is, obviously, both good, and bad
news.
‘My husband has been emailed by his first real, proper girlfriend,’ notes
mother-of-four Nadine. ‘It was okay for me. He also got an
email from some shag form Ibiza. I thought, “oh”.’
‘Personally,’ observes Helen 28, ‘I have theory
that friendsreunited could end a few marriages. The potential is
there. Definitely.’
Undoubtedly, it takes psychic preparation to endure as bittersweet
an ordeal as this. But the extreme ambivalence with which arrived
eventually disappears into the bottom of a glass, the evening mutates
into an 18-30 disco with people you’ve known for ages to,
and the past suddenly seems like a fun place to be. By 11.30, one
girls flings her arms around someone she’s ignored on the
commuter train platform for years. Big news: the school’s
coolest girl is observed to be ’quite normal’. This
may not be closure on all the emotions that have plugged time and
festered since those present left school exactly, but there exudes
a general atmosphere of ‘phew…’
How much love is there in his room right now? Quite a lot, actually
- apart from in this corner, where Tanya and Jane, stuck to the
bar like chewing gum as midnight approaches and now even less inclined
towards any reuniting than when they arrived.
‘I don’t like being false,’ sulks Tanya, all
petulant. ‘Going to hug someone you hated at school. It’s
wrong innit? I know everyone who was bitchy to me and I’m
not going to speak to them.‘
‘I’m gutted that people I wanted to bitch off aren’t
here tonight,’ Jane tersely adds. ‘I would really loved
to have gone for them. They’re only here to see how much
weigh people have put on and how many wrinkles they got.
Sounds terrible! Why did you come?
‘Same reason!’
Scan the bar at 11.30pm and as 150 or so Bexley Tech alumni eventually
divest themselves of the extreme ambivalence they carried in tonight
like an extra handbag, the Time Bar mutates into something approaching
an 18-30 disco. One girl flings her arms around someone she’s
ignored on the commuter train platform for years. Whether or not
it will ever happen again, half the gathered resolve to see
each other again very soon. Latest news: the school’s ‘coolest
girl’ is observed to be ‘quite normal’. Viewed
from a certain angle – through the bottom of a glass, possibly – the
past suddenly seem like a fun place to be. There might not exactly
be closure on all the emotions that have bubbled away since those
present left school, but a collective feeling of ‘phew’ is
being exuded nonetheless.
The past: You wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s
a nice place to visit. Make sure you leave your baggage behind
if you do
© Kevin Braddock 2001
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