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Neil described himself as a Raspberry Ripple. If you don’t know, that’s rhyming slang for a cripple. Of course, decent people don’t use terms like that any more. They talk about someone having mobility issues or being less mobile. Not Neil. He was a cripple, a Raspberry Ripple.

Those same decent people might also say that Neil was incontinent. He described it differently. He said that he filled his pants on a regular basis.

At school, Neil was told that he was an imbecile. So here are a few things that I remember about that imbecile.

He was astonishingly well-read. Fiction of all genres, history, politics, joke books about farts, he read them all.

Perhaps because he read so widely, he was also very knowledgeable on a great variety of subjects. If you wanted to know about The Third Law of Thermodynamics or who won the FA Cup in 1929, Neil was the person to ask.

He kept his books in a red shoulder bag. Unfortunately, the knowledge that he gained from those books wasn’t matched by an ability to keep track of the bag in which he kept them. He regularly forgot where he’d put it, and a search had to be organised to find it.

A good place to start the search for that bag would be a café. Neil was the doyen of Sheffield’s café society. If he – or his bag – wasn’t in Costa Coffee, you could always try Café Nero or Hygge. It wouldn’t take long to find one or both, though not necessarily in the same place. He was also a distinguished member of the gang of reprobates and ne’er-do-wells who regularly meet for lunch on Fridays in the Moor Market.

In addition to being an avid reader, Neil was also a frequent cinemagoer. As someone who rarely visits the cinema, I was often mystified by his references to current stars of the silver screen, so he would show me a picture on his phone. They tended to be pretty young women, often blonde.

As a devout atheist I can’t say to you that Neil is probably “up there” now organising a writing group on this cloud, an art group on that cloud and using inappropriate language to the Heavenly Host. But, of course, I could be wrong.

SeaBee