The varied career of my friend Sue Adamson, who has taken her own life at the age of 52, included working for the fine-china companies Wedgwood and Villeroy & Boch, and as a childminder. More recently she worked as a school dinner lady, in Waitrose supermarket and as a volunteer in her local Mind charity shop.
Sue was born in Alnwick, and grew up nearby in Rothbury, a market town in Northumberland, the only child of Fred and Isabella Slassor, who ran a general store. Sue went to Queen Margaret’s, a boarding school for girls in North Yorkshire, and later, after the death of her father, attended sixth form at Central Newcastle high school, which is where I met her. Another friend describes her arrival at the school as like a breath of fresh air; she was friendly to everyone, cutting through all the cliques. After A-levels, Sue read politics at Newcastle University, staying up all night for the election results in 1983 and crying when her heroine Shirley Williams lost her seat in Crosby – yet somehow breezing through her final exam the next day.
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