As Andy said, Gill was little sister to twin elder brothers. I don’t remember her having
to break up too many fights when we were young but she did occasionally draw the
short straw as smallest of three.

We grew up together here in Beaconsfield. Gill was only two years younger than us,
but it seems to make a bigger difference at that age. We went to the same primary
school before Gill went to an all-girls high school, and when she graduated from UCL
with her degree in psychology, two years behind us in a sense, I was already living
abroad in China and India, while Andy was in Germany. Gill had her own adventures
overseas in her 20s, so it wasn’t until our early 30s when we had both settled in
London that we saw each other more frequently.

I distinctly recall thinking, after meeting her London friends for the first time, I think
it was at a pub in Bloomsbury, what an impossibly glamourous group of people they
were. And perhaps she thought the same when she met my friends at our flat in
Elephant & Castle for various birthdays and other occasions – she didn’t mention it.
But what my friends did often say to me after they met her was, your sister’s very
pretty. And it hadn’t occurred to me at all, but of course it was true.
On reflection I think the fact I could only ever see Gill as a little sister was a narrow
lens through which to know her as a person as an adult. So I’ll be listening to others
that are speaking later for their experiences of her life. Others for whom she was
daughter, or a wife, or a best friend.

Indeed, what I mourn the most about her death at such a young age is the lost
chance to know Gill in other roles she could have played in our family, roles that we
would have wanted for her: maybe as a mother, or as an auntie. And it’s that loss,
that loss for her, that I feel most acutely today.