Dawn Foster was the best of us. If there is a generation of left-wing journalists and writers whose careers flourished from the magnificent protests of 2011, she was the funniest, the bluntest and the most consistently right of all of us.
The night after her death was announced last week, I lay in that space between wakefulness and sleep where all you can see is your thoughts, and processed memories. I thought about the times her writing taught me things, times she made me laugh, times she told me off for mansplaining, and that night, not long after we first met, that we got drunk in Michael Crick’s garden (she was his lodger). Times – particularly around Grenfell – that her journalism moved me. Times I was jealous of her.
We weren’t particularly close. It’s a mark of how many people thought she was great that she probably had a few hundred friends and comrades who, like me, were always delighted to sneak away from some left-wing conference or other to grab a quick drink with her, or who enjoyed an occasional silly exchange on Twitter. But it’s her close friends who will be grieving most this week, along with everyone who yearned for a better media, and a better world.
