I cannot remember.

I have searched my memory and gone through newspapers from the early 1980s to see if there might be a headline I recognise, that could help me to fix a specific date. At certain times in my life I have kept detailed and seriously intended diaries, but they have not been able to help me either. I cannot find a moment that I can point to with any degree of certainty and say: this is when I realised that something momentous was happening. A new epidemic illness had put mankind under threat. Nor do I recall any conversations with friends about the illness, definitely not before 1985 or 1986.

Perhaps it was the sight of the actor Rock Hudson on a stretcher in Paris. I remember that distinctly. There were photographs on the front pages of all the main newspapers. It was immediately clear that the man who – not least together with Doris Day – had made so many films over so many years in which he had played a husband in an idealised and hence dishonest American marriage, was in fact homosexual. What had he been thinking of as he wandered around in his striped pyjamas, always immaculately ironed, Doris Day at his side, also smiling non-stop and fussing around?

Now he was dying, not at all old. His last journey to Paris in a chartered aeroplane was reminiscent of the handicapped faithful who tried to recover their health by going on a pilgrimage to a shrine of the Madonna. A last desperate attempt to keep death at bay by trying a new form of treatment that was said to be available in France.

I remember reading that he slept twenty-three hours a day. The one hour he was awake he devoted to telling stories about his life. I shuddered.

That news photograph of Rock Hudson is among my earliest intimations of Aids. At that time we had not yet been exposed to the mass of pictures and documentation. All the photographs from Africa, with anonymous men and women, emaciated bodies, sunken eyes, people without hope, without strength.