He would tell me that all the best people treat their bodies like bins (and all the worst like temples)I’d never been starstruck by anyone before I met Rod. I think I loved his language of insults the most: luckily, he issued forth a stream of them like a Middlesbrough Shakespeare. He was passionately on the side of wronged people, wronged animals, wronged communities – a fighter for the forgotten, traduced and misrepresented like no other. On the night before he died, his best friend Jez told me he was making all the nurses laugh. I will miss Rod painfully, as a friend both to me and to this troubled country which he loved so much.