Wednesday 11th March 2026, 10.25am (day 5,312)
This was just seen in passing this morning: my walk to work is so familiar after more than twenty years that even minor alterations are easy to notice. At some point in the last couple of weeks this has appeared in a window near the Old Quadrangle. Information searching reveals that this is a new ‘Infected Blood Inquiry Memorial’, which will be officially dedicated in a couple of weeks’ time.
The inquiry into how more than 30,000 people in the UK were given blood infected with HIV or hepatitis prior to 1996 (3,000 of them have subsequently died) reported its findings in 2024. Amongst the recommendations in the report were that “there should be a memorial”. As it is declared, so it shall be — so here is that memorial. I get the point: as you can see here and there, these specimen bottles are each filled with a little scroll of paper, with handwritten inscriptions — and that one little kiss, which makes the photo, I guess. But a memorial like, say, your average Cenotaph, this is not: and it doesn’t help that it’s inside a building that will only be open some of the time. (This is not a criticism of the University of Manchester by the way.)
This would all be of only passing interest were it not that one of my friends is represented in here. When I first moved to Yorkshire in 1991 I got to know Dave Chamberlain, of Low Row in Swaledale, who was a haemophiliac and was infected with HIV thanks to infected Factor 8. Dave was one of the people who was very friendly to me, a new ‘offcumdun’ arrival into the community, and did not have to be — it is because of these people I remained in Yorkshire and never went back down South. When I heard he had died, in the late 2000s sometime, I was very upset. Whatever ‘compensation’ this inquiry determined was just, imposing this two decades after his death, and nearly 35 years after the fact of his avoidable infection, seems more of a cynical and meaningless gesture rather than any acknowledgement of true culpability. Sticking a bunch of little bottles in a window in a university building, one that is off the main road and which passers-by don’t have a lot of reason to notice, is probably much the same.
Being 42 