Dina

I've just learned that my old friend Dina Rabinovitch, one of the most inspiring and fun, and incidentally most practical, people I've ever met, whose youngest daughter was little with mine, and who helped me through the worst time in my life when my marriage was breaking up and I was fighting for my children, and who has spent three years writing and campaigning about breast cancer - who kept writing and speaking and campaigning even after she was too sick to do it, and who did more even sick than most people ever do - died last night.

It's a shock. How can it be a shock?

I only had an email from her the other day.

Please go to her website. Buy her book. And read it: it's a good read. Give money to help build a new cancer trials unit at Mount Vernon. Read more about Dina in today's Guardian. Read her last column for the Guardian, published only a week or so ago.

And if you're reading this and you knew her, let's take this time to remember her before she knew she would ever have this relationship with this awful disease. I remember her young and hopeful, and so pretty, writing wonderful short stories. She had the most beautiful, clear voice, I loved listening in our writing workshop when she read her things out. I remember when she met Anthony, and telling wonderful stories about her life, always telling the stories - "listen, this happened to me," and it always went, unspoken: "so it's happened to other people too." (Except maybe not the story about how she met the love of her life - that's unusual.) Raising her children. Laughing. Shopping for shoes.

I remember once, I'd read in the paper a study that said hair dye could cause bladder cancer, & I was flipping out a little bit, saying maybe I should stop colouring my hair, what would happen over a lifetime of getting your roots done, etc etc. Dina told me not to worry about it, just keep dying my hair. She quipped - and it wasn't even really a quip because she meant it - "What do they expect us to do? Go grey??"

We laughed. That little remark made me laugh for years after, it was so funny.

Until. See, how little did we know.

But I still think she would say we should get our roots done. You can't not live - and that's what she was saying, and what she always said, and what she did.

I'm so sad. And I'm so happy I knew her.