“He was just so excessively Scottish, which was an unexpected treat, and polite...but terribly firm. `Unfortunately the Inland Revenue does not recognise the state of dying, sir,' he said. I felt like asking him if I should come back when I'm dead...He was exactly the sort of person it might be quite fun to haunt. Then he came over all sympathetic, but still wouldn't give an inch. `I'm afraid we still need that tax return, as I'm sure you'll understand, sir.' Actually that sort of stuff's the easy bit... Some of the rest is difficult. You'll know all about my new friend giardia? Giardia lamblia?”
He said it again in comic-waiter Italian, launched into an instantly surreal menu explaining riff that had me laughing out loud, and then said quietly, “But it's awful. I mean quite the worst thing about dying, so far at least. Basically, it's nappies from here on in...”
We chatted for a few minutes more, then he said goodbye. Three weeks after our phone call his funeral, in a little church on the remote Solway coast, was a strange reunion for a raffish Edinburgh student set from the mid 1960s: by then—it was 20 years on—almost uniformly respectable. Unused to funerals for people our age, we sang the hymns and listened to a cautiously worded tribute, then decanted into the churchyard in light rain for what the order of service called the interment, in a grave with a lovely view of the sea.
HIV had caught him early, when death was still routine. With better luck, or even with bad luck later on, he would of course still be alive today: amusing and amiable and probably still working and paying his taxes, one of the fortunate tens of thousands in the developed world now saved by highly active antiretroviral therapy from what he himself called at the time rather a shitty death.
Another 20 years on, many millions of people—many of them in sub-Saharan Africa—are dying shitty deaths like his, though with the important difference that they are now preventable.
I write this in Edinburgh, where last Saturday 200 000 people turned out in a polite and probably futile pre-G8 attempt to influence the thinking of “eight rich guys on a five star golf course.” Among other things, those marching innocents believed that something useful—based on tax dollars and drugs that could easily be far cheaper—might still be done to prevent such deaths. I am not so optimistic.