It was June 1997, politics had been renewed, the world was full of hope and the idea was born in my workplace that everyone should have a ceremonial lunch on Friday 13th. Well, not everyone – only 13 people. This was fine, because realistically 13 is the maximum number of people you are going to like in any office. Originally, it was male-only, but then I went wild – I think I threatened to take the lunch to a tribunal – and after that women were included.
A few points of clarification. This was Fleet Street in the luxurious 90s (and not the Guardian). The world, especially the newspaper world, was swimming in money. It was not unusual to have to pay contributors with something other than money, because the fee for a single article would tip them into a new tax band. I distinctly remember an editor ducking into a side office to buy two grand’s worth of antiquarian books for some writer called Barry. It could have been Barry Norman, or Barry Humphries, or some completely different Barry, and it may have been three grand, because the other thing about the era was that we were all at lunch constantly, so after noon the details got a bit hazy and all the Barrys merged into one.
What is the point of having a lunch club when it’s a given that, every day, you will have lunch for about four hours, like a French person, except without the fine food, the repartee or the elegance? We were like otters launching a wild-swim meet.
If you are not superstitious, you have probably never counted the Friday 13ths in any given year, but there aren’t many – usually two, sometimes one, never none. If there is one in February, there is almost always one in March, but this is vanishingly rare, thank God, because it is possible in middle age to have the tail end of a month-long lunch hangover during the next lunch.
It went pretty well for a year or so. Numbers thinned a bit, as people started to get fired or discover ambition. It transpired over time that some of the club’s members didn’t even work at the paper. As the world got more serious – around 2003, I reckon – they were increasingly required to do their jobs, even on a Friday. That was fine, though, as 13 is an unwieldy number and I’d heard that joke about the Last Supper enough times (Jesus phones the restaurant and says: “Can I have a table for 26?” and the waiter goes: “But there are only 13 of you,” and he replies: “Yes, but we all want to sit on the same side”).
Then, for a run of years, really bad things started to coincide with the lunch: smoking was banned indoors, someone’s border terrier had a seizure, one friend’s dad died, unexpectedly, suddenly. There is no good time to receive news like that, but a really bad time is after six pints. We started to wonder whether Friday 13th genuinely was bad luck, or whether it was just a numbers game; that if you get enough people round enough tables for enough years, events will surely follow. But I stuck with it, long after I left the paper.
The 2019 lunch was the day after the general election that gave us Boris Johnson. I was heartsick, in mourning for the UK of yore, the country that didn’t do incredibly stupid things that would have awful, irreparable consequences. Everyone else was very Old Fleet Street, which is to say you don’t bother yourself with politics because alignments are unprofessional (unlike drinking for 12 hours straight, which is what professionals do). In 2020, it was in March, 10 days before the start of the lockdown that we confidently assured each other would never, ever happen.
Because these Fridays fall aseasonally, there is never any extraneous rhythm to distinguish them from the rest of the year, no cherry blossom or early dark or carollers. Instead, they merge to give the warping sensation of a continuous lunch that goes on for a quarter of a century and keeps everybody within it in a state of perpetual youth, except the ones who have died.
I recommend it, in other words. Although I wouldn’t want to do it again before … let me check my diary … October.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
