‘It’s OK. Come on now, little darlin. It’s OK. Come on now.’

I leaned against the sunny yellow wall, caught my breath, let this woman give me sips of water from a bottle.

‘Hey there. You OK now? Can you tell me your name? Sta bene? Come ti chiami?’

I held on to her and smiled up at her and I never wanted to let her go again.

As you’ve all probably guessed now, that was my first proper meeting with Clio Campbell, when she saw a young girl about to fall under the feet of a state-sponsored riot and pulled me out, got me to safety. That yellow alleyway we had hidden ourselves in would later become a site for kettling, a procedure used on the Iraq War demonstrators two years later by a clearly impressed UK Home Office, but one which we weren’t familiar with at the time. I was ready to collapse, but had to stay on my feet as more and more bodies were hounded into our space – to sit would have been to be crushed. This tall Scottish stranger held me up for three hours, fed me water and kept me conscious and talking, muttering jokes and funny commentary, when she could have been attending to her own needs. I think you really learn the truth about people’s characters in these sorts of extreme situations. And this was someone I didn’t want to let out of my life.

Clio Campbell was, for a time, one of my closest friends, despite our twelve-year age difference. I watched as the aftermath of Genoa (we crushed souls up the alleyway escaped relatively lightly) and its implications set her alight, burning for truth; I watched as the aftermath of the Iraq War demonstrations squashed her into a depressed apathy, only to rise again and again. She got involved with land rights movements in the Scottish Highlands; led a campaign against corrupt undercover cops; I was eventually pulled into a life of baby sensory classes and school postcode lotteries while she kept on doggedly fighting for what she believed in – always justice, always for the oppressed. Those paths intersected less and less; as I grew further away from the person I’d been at twenty-one, there was something almost childlike about Clio that allowed her to keep believing.