My most precious possession is the birthday card my partner Nigel gave me as he was dying. I keep it close by my bedside, and blow a kiss to it every morning.
Nigel gave me the card, with a message inside, on the afternoon of May 20, 2020: a glorious spring day.
That was the sunny evening of the Downing Street garden party where mask-free guests mingled from 6pm to share bottles of ‘bring your own’ wine.
The tables, no doubt, were being set up for that illicit soiree when Nigel and I met in the lobby of a private north London hospital where he was being treated.
Sue Reid, pictured with her partner Nigel at home in West London. As he lay dying in a north London hospital, there was a party in the garden at Number 10
The Covid rules were draconian: both of us were masked to the hilt, and I even donned an old pair of large purple sunglasses to avoid catching the virus through my eyes or passing it to Nigel.
Now the memory of that dreadfully sad day seems even more cruel.
How angry it has made me to think of myself and Nigel – who used to play tennis with Boris Johnson and considered himself a fan of the Prime Minister – were taken for fools by the Government.
Every painful memory of the birthday visit has come flooding back to me with renewed agony as more details emerge of how those who ran the country during the pandemic, and imposed its wretched rules on the rest of us, were so ready to flout them themselves.
What I would have given to spend that last birthday with Nigel in a spacious London garden, sipping a glass of fine wine and laughing without a care in the world – as he always made me feel.
Special permission had been granted for my birthday visit because Nigel had persuaded the hospital’s most senior administrator personally.
How angry it has made me to think of myself and Nigel – who used to play tennis with Boris Johnson and considered himself a fan of the Prime Minister – were taken for fools by the Government
His case was an emergency: intravenous antibiotics were being pumped into his 6ft4in body to battle sepsis. It was thought he’d become infected through his chemo port during four months of gruelling medical treatment.
I was so excited to see him – but he was clearly a weakened soul.
I had brought a small picnic to try to make it an occasion, but the ever-polite Nigel struggled to touch it. He had lost stones in weight: his trousers were falling off, his face was sunken, his skin so pale. As I looked into his brown eyes, I was terrified at his deterioration.
But I didn’t want to frighten him by saying that out loud.
At one stage, my gaze wandered over Nigel’s head, as he sat forlornly in a chair in the lobby. A delivery man walked in from the road outside and waited with a parcel outside the lift a few feet from us. He wasn’t wearing a mask – and I was so enraged I took a photo of him on my phone. I also took a snap of an unmasked hospital patient
