Jilly sparkled like pink Champagne

OUR DEAR friend Jilly Cooper really should still be with us all this weekend. Her sudden and completely unexpected death last Sunday was the result, not of some deadly illness or bodily failure, but that great curse of age a fall.

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Falls are the treacherous twists of fate that stalk the elderly. So many otherwise fit, healthy, mentally alert septuagenarians and octogenarians (Jilly was 88, fit as a fiddle and sharp as a scalpel) are undone by them. To lose Jilly to such a capricious happenstance is very hard for all those who adored her.

The Queen (Camilla) knew her for decades and led the shocked tributes hours after the bad news broke. "A wonderfully witty and compassionate friend," she said, pointing out how "on form" Jilly was, right to the last.

"It was a particular pleasure to see her just a few weeks ago at my Queen's Reading Room Festival where she was, as ever, the star of the show... may her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs."