Bainbridge had no airs about her; she enjoyed nothing more than having a drink or three at her local pub with a friend, or bumming smokes from a young interviewer while explaining how she was trying to quit by puffing on her foul cabbage-leaf cigarettes. For her, being a writer was simply about the end product, not the person behind it.

Life is a routine, one day after another, while the big events take place as though in another galaxy, and yet briefly, intimately, they sometimes touch us, gently nudging us like one billiard ball tapping another before rolling away and vanishing into a distant pocket.

As Proust wrote upon hearing of the writer John Ruskin’s death: 'I am shown how paltry a thing death is when I see how vigorously this dead man lives.'