Clio’s note suggested that, after a lifetime of activism, actually killing herself was the only way a woman, especially an older woman, would actually be listened to in this public arena of jeering and opprobrium that exists now instead of civil discourse. It’s manifestly not true – one has only to look at the ages of female MPs, mostly Clio’s peers, or the happily increasing number of female political journalists making good and salient points about our current political crisis on a daily basis – but that anybody could come to feel that, and actually go forward with their action, suggests a serious crisis in the ways we communicate with each other these days. It’s one of the main reasons why I feel that, in this case, the causes Clio claimed for her suicide should be examined. We need to be looking at this.

Then there were the cynics who scoffed at her even in death. To them, I can only say that the person who pulled an injured stranger out of a tangle of bodies and chaos and protected her for five hours is exactly the person who would think to lay down herself as a final protest against what she described as ‘a country sleepwalking into fascism’. No, of course you shouldn’t kill yourself over Brexit, or the treatment of asylum seekers. Stay alive and keep fighting if it means that much to you. But Clio felt things more intensely and keenly than the rest of us seem to; and that intensity motivated her actions. She managed to hold on to her moral code while all around were losing theirs; never filtered anything through a layer of irony in order to block life out.

We used to talk a lot about ‘the movement’ as student revolutionaries. A single body of people marching with one aim. I’m not sure there can be such a thing any more; the causes that anger the left seem to be so diverse they create rifts rather than solidarity. It’s difficult to imagine a united left-wing movement defeating something like the poll tax, which Clio always referred to as ‘the cause that made me’, these days. But then perhaps, as a middle-class, commuter-belt soi-disant yummy mummy, I’m just not hearing its songs.

In Genoa last year my children skipped along the beachfront Corso Italia. It’s a very beautiful street and they were fascinated by its fairy-tale pavement mosaics, leaned over the railings to gaze at the azure sea below. It was so far removed from that dusty scene of overturned cars, gassed air and broken glass I dimly remembered from my youth that it seemed I must have dreamed that second image. But then, I had the luxury of being able to tell myself that.