I speak today, with great trepidation, from the largest constituency here: Becky’s friends. To bastardise Whitman; she contained multitudes. I knew her for longer than many, but by no means all; but her profound gift of friendship makes us anyway all equal – the careful and affectionate objects of her warmth, her humour and her wry, generous, analytic fascination.

In many ways, Becky taught me what friendship was, because she so quickly drew out those parts of me that proved my most comfortable self.

When I met her, in the first week of university, she seemed impossibly worldly. She had a swagger, all gap-toothed smile and cockatoo plume of beautiful bright-red hair. She wrote poems, and put on plays, and sang improvised songs about the trauma of leaving NW3. She purported to sleep with men and women, which seemed to me at the time both greedy and inspired. After Camden, she implied, Oxford was chocolate-box, jigsaw puzzle education. Sometimes her early claims were preposterous – not to know any Tories, and to have never been South of the River – but they were always in character and played for laughs.

But Becky’s particular genius for friendship matched this freewheeling energy with a vulnerability and self-honesty that was as infectious as it was rare. How many of us felt that Becky knew us better than our family, friends, even lovers? In part, that’s because she allowed us to know her as deeply and as fearlessly as she knew herself, even if that meant, at times, pulling us over those faultlines that periodically ravaged the cities of her brilliant mind. There was nothing to be afraid of in a friendship with Becky, and everything to explore.

We concocted many dreams together. A farm in the Tuscan hills – La Casa Rondone Occidentale - that would house for the summers our turkey-baster children; a letterpress publishing house printing poetry monographs one at a time in our retirement; bohemian hotels in India long before the Best Marigold. It was for others of you to realize with Becky more practical and useful ambitions – businesses, operas, books, articles, conferences, charities, homes. I was always so proud of what she achieved with TLC, the precision and lightness of her own writing, and the service she performed to the worlds of creativity, self-expression and literature. Friendship, for Becky, was always fertile collaboration.

And often it was just uninhibited, glorious, passionate, belly-creasing fun. I love that so many of the photographs circulating since her death have her laughing out loud, abandoned to pleasure but still in charge; my favourite epithet from the many valedictions is ‘noisy’. And there was an earthy, even bawdy quality to Becky’s particular noise. At the risk of oversharing, I can say I still know more about Becky’s menstrual cycle than any other woman’s on the planet; and how deeply I will miss hugging Becky without a bra, a treat she insisted on granting with self-serving regularity. Some of the last words I heard Becky speak over Easter were ‘I’m sorry I can’t orchestrate any more’. She composed such a rich, warm, enveloping, deeply human soundtrack for us all.

I will miss Becky more profoundly than I can say for all of these things and more. We will all miss her, and it is not fair she is not here. I thank her, her extraordinary family, her glorious partner Cosis, and all of you, who I feel I know in particular and in general, for sharing her with me. Never again will I experience a friendship so total – in its history, its depths and heights, its argument, its tactile pleasures, its long ecstasies of harmless self-indulgence – and never will I try. Becky’s shoes are too hard to fill. I will leave those scuffed, empty slippers in the hallway and nod to them every day for the rest of my life. I am a traveller, as I said to her a few weeks ago, and I wish I could have taken this last journey with her all the way to its opaque and final destination; we’ll all come along later, we agreed, one way or another. Send us postcards Becky, if you’re not already too busy with your fabulous new friends.