A year ago today I spent the morning cutting down the big, blousy roses in the front garden. They were gorgeous in a vase. It’s a weird, mundane task to remember but it was the last thing I did before I got the call that my best friend had died suddenly at just 35.
I won’t have those roses in the house again.

Agnes was the absolute love of my life. She was beautiful, vastly intelligent and one of the funniest people I have ever met. I’m supposed to say she was also the kindest person in the world but something that bland would be doing her a disfavour: she was of course but she was also gloriously, waspishly bitchy in a way that would make you howl with laughter. I keep a mental list of people she disliked just to make sure I can turn my nose up at them for her. She was one of those people you just want to be around. Obviously you have to say nice things about people when they die – you look like a bit of a prick slagging off the dead – but anyone who spent even a minute with her can tell you how truly brilliant she was.

I feel very lucky to have had 12 years of her. I would do anything for another 12, more than anything for another 50. I want to go to her wedding. I want to meet her children and watch them grow up and tell them heavily edited stories about her. I want to sit in her new garden in the sunshine and drink too much fizz and talk about everything, hear all the best gossip, hysterically laughing and bitching about boys. I want to give her one of our rare hugs. I want to smell her perfume. I want to hear her say “love you, pal”, the only time she wasn’t Very British.

Grief is very selfish.

Agnes was just fundamentally a good person. I’d have never said this to her face, she’d have been horrified even if secretly she’d love it. When she heard a stranger crying in the loos (never ever “toilet”, she’d visibly shudder) she offered her comfort and read her a poem. So perfectly Agnes. Since her death I have thought of one line a lot:

When one of her friends needed her, even if we thought we didn’t, she was there. She sent flowers on special occasions or just because, a text when you needed it most. She always knew exactly what to say. She offered unlimited compassion and succour, even when she needed it too. I think she loved being needed, and she was and is. I need her desperately.

I miss the glee she got from getting into fights with Americans on Twitter for using the word ‘fag’, she made smoking look cool. We’d send picture after picture of dead fish when the other person was upset – a stupid joke that morphed into unspoken code. Her Halloween costume was a This Is What A Feminist Looks Like t-shirt, and she made everyone furious at a Star Trek party by earnestly asking them about Star Wars because it made her laugh. She was still outraged by the girl who stole her flute in year nine. She loved Uno and playing with her could quickly become loud and violent and I’m sure she made up half the rules. Her End of the Affair impression was legendary. She hated things with no legs so ordered snails in French restaurants to assert her dominance and once went out with a man for six months simply because he sounded like Ted Hughes. She was always the smartest person in the room but watched the whole of Transporter waiting for Optimus Prime to turn up. She told the best stories. She loved poetry. She had the most fabulous voice.

She got her job at The Lady (“we once had a letter in very proper handwriting calling a duchess a cunt”) after chasing the editor down the street to ask for an internship. At Chatham House she edited The World Today, making it a better magazine by knowing exactly what she wanted and making it happen, and started their podcast (which we insisted on calling Chatty House) – I was in awe of how well she interviewed people and how knowledgeable she was. Really they should have had her running the BBC. She was an artist whose drawing of her dog Henry was made into little badges for us to wear at her funeral.

I want to tell you every single thing about her but I can hear her trademark sigh in my ear.

She was beautiful and funny, compassionate and wonderful. She was just everything. She brought so much to so many people’s lives. Missing her is like a bruise I can’t stop pressing.

It’s incredibly hard to write about loss without being horrendously twee. Because God, is it all so twee. But I am trying to be more Agnes in her absence. To be nicer to strangers, to be kind when someone is sad. To put the effort in with friends, though I feel hideously guilty because I want to go back in time and put more in for her. To be a bit nicer to myself. I want her to be proud of me. Or, not quite proud: I want to know that if I met her tomorrow we’d still be friends.

On friends, Agnes has accidentally left me a legacy of them and I’m so grateful for the people in her life who are now in mine. I think we all started trying to fill the cracks and gaps her death left in everyone in the weeks after and I don’t know what I would have done without them. I still don’t know what to do without her.

There is a C.S. Lewis quote: ‘No one ever told me grief felt so like fear.’ A world without her is scary because it doesn’t make sense. I think about her every day and a year on I don’t know if it is getting easier or if I am just getting used to missing her in the same way you get used to background noise or a garish painting you hate. I wish I could tell her just how much I loved her and all the myriad of reasons why.

If I had she’d probably have said “are you coming onto me, mate?” and lit a fag.

Raise a glass today to Agnes Mary Frimston. She always arrived late but she left the party too early.

Love you, pal.