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My best friend





LiveJournal, the Russian-hosted blog site, that I used to use when I lived in Moscow has been reminding me of what I have posted in the past. Today, it cast this into my email inbox: my best friend, mentor, and who I continue to miss deeply. 

"Ann, pictured here on her last holiday in Barbados, and difficult to imagine that she had only six months to live.

She was the founder, and I the first employee, of the Prison Phoenix Trust: twenty-one this year. She was, for the five years I knew her, my closest friend and the person whose confidence in me drew me out and restored me to life, after a difficult transition into my twenties.

She was an extraordinary person who had originally wanted to be a dancer, and she carried herself as one throughout life. Born in India to a father in the Indian Civil Service during the Raj, she had become the only permanent European student of Uday Shankar, the great Indian choreographer, by dint of persuasion and charm. It was an exploration cut short by jaundice that left her with the diagnosis of a weak heart. But he taught her, she said, 'to be creative' and many of his students went on to achievement in diverse fields whose first impetus they ascribed to him.

Her legacy - beyond a thriving family - is Prison Phoenix. A quixotic venture at the outset: marrying yoga (and meditation) and prison but one that grew, and deepened, into a deeply valued service to thousands of inmates (and prison staff) and that has touched and changed lives including the people who have worked for and with it. (https://www.theppt.org.uk/ thriving, now on its fifth director, and thirty-three years old)

For a person so perceptive, and embodied, she could have startling moments of disassociation. My favorite was her driving in Ireland, with her sister as a passenger. Turning a corner, they were confronted with a herd of cattle, the car glanced off one and came to a juddering halt. 'Well,' exclaimed her sister, 'that was a narrow escape' 'But I thought you were driving,' came Ann's disconcerting reply"!

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