I really can't believe he's gone. We were at school together, we were up at Oxford together (where we must have seen one another almost every day), and when our lives headed in different directions we'd still meet up in London to chat in coffee shops, trawl the secondhand bookshops, and finish off with a theatre trip. Even in recent years, when I'd moved to the frozen wastes of the far north, we were still in regular e-mail contact - a glance in the "Robert" folder flashes up hundreds of mails back and forth. And this from a man who prided himself on his technophobia - quite right too!

I was his trivial side - no interest in politics, no understanding of economics (fair's fair, he didn't exactly have my passion for Bach or mediaeval social history) - but when it came to The Avengers or Dr Who we could debate for hours. Who's going to buy me Dr Who DVDs for Christmas now? And how strange it will be not to trawl through the new authors I've discovered in the course of the year to decide which ones he might like. (He reckoned I got it right most of the time.) Even my wife Liz got sucked in when she and Robert discovered a mutual passion for The Archers.

His last e-mail to me, responding to a question on how his latest scan had gone, ended "Many thanks for thinking of me". At the time it provoked me to a wry smile; in the 50 years I had known him he had never considered himself important enough to take people caring about him for granted. But he was important, and I've been thinking of him a great deal since I heard about his death. He was one of the people who put more into the pot than he ever took out. There are few enough of them around.