I thought Michele would be around for ever. Being totally herself: grumpy, hilarious, blindsiding us with kindness and always with a surprise up her sleeve. Only a week ago, she had been arguing for pole dancers to perform in care homes if that is what people want. “We have our own minds and we like to make them up.”
She knew her own mind, and she knew what getting old meant, having looked after her elderly mother for many years. She talked about ageing, but she seemed ageless.
I knew Michele mostly through her work but when I did see her she would inevitably have a tale of such magnificent “inappropriateness” it would be hysterical. A moment with a vet, a sick dog lying between them; a loud sweary dispute with Rosemary in the post office queue over biscuits/vegetarians/ex-husbands. The woman was funny in her bones.
She observed every detail and, thus, could write of intimate things, of embarrassments, of pain and loveliness, and turn it all on a sixpence. God I will miss this – the splattering of genius in the mix; her sublime sense of the absurd.
Although she was hilarious enough that a single line could crack you up for days – “Our own lone tortoise only has rather morose, noiseless sex with a small towel on the kitchen floor” – she was also, to me, a deeply serious writer. When she wrote about what it is like to be a single parent caring for a teenager (in the Treasure column), or about looking after an old person, or setting herself free at 62, she packed a punch.
As she got older, the writing became more direct, razor-sharp and angry. This was not a lecture about socialism but on decency. If bonobos and children can learn to share, why not overpaid vice-chancellors, she asked recently. When she wrote about the flaws in the education system, you felt her experience as a teacher. She had a real life. There was nothing fake. The readers knew that. When she told us that life was hard and unfair for so many, we cared because she did. She wanted to change things.
Michele could make you laugh precisely because she was unafraid to go to the places where it hurts: to death, to pain, to indignity. She loved a bodily function, and she could lacerate any taboo. She was a writer of fantastic economy, saying a lot with few words. It is no surprise to me that she could play several instruments: there is a musicality in the best comic writing, and she had it.
There was nowhere Michele would not go: constipation, tortoise sex, how capitalism really works, how we might live the last part of our lives. How we could all live better. She was a clever woman. Always curious. So very alive, so full of mischief and wisdom and politics and stories. She was just bloody wonderful.
