I was going to write something on Facebook, but Nick was a blogger and so this belongs here.

I heard this afternoon that my dear friend Nick Booth died yesterday after a fall at the weekend. It’s not right. It shouldn’t be like this. We ought to have been celebrating his 60th birthday next month. We should have continued to intermittently tramp around bits of South Birmingham together as we got older and older. We should have sat in odd cafés and nattered and sniggered and laughed our socks off at our respective ridiculousness.

Nick got me, in a way that few people truly do. Maybe it was being Brummie boys of a certain age. Maybe it was our shared love of seeing people do things for themselves and each other in community. Or maybe it was just because he listened better than anyone else I know. As a natural-born journalist, he listened and he didn’t forget.

At first it was the power of podcasting that drew us together. I have David Wilcox and Simon Baddeley to thank for separately suggesting we might have common interests, but it would have been hard for us to avoid each other in those early days. We were both most at home in loose, unconference-y spaces and we connected through our dark but gleeful, sixth-form humour with a dash of self-deprecation.

I think Nick’s most generous gift to the world was Social Media Surgeries – they had just the right balance of ease and informality together with a desire to get shit done and really help people who were helping others and embodied the Podnosh company values of “Think, Make Things Better and Give a Fuck!”

We attended the G20 in 2009 together, swooning under the Obama-fever but mostly just wandering around laughing at how bonkers it all was and we were for even being there.

I also had the privilege of working directly with Nick (and the late John Popham) on the Nominet Trust’s “Our Digital Planet” project – luring people into portakabins and generally being “the ice-cream man of the internet”.

But mostly we enjoyed the ambient awareness of each other’s lives that came with blogging and being on Twitter. When we were fortunate enough to be in the same neck of the woods, we got to hang out and snigger at things it would be inappropriate to list here, even if one of us hadn’t just died. I had a look through our various private messages and there’s not much in there except lots of “I love you”.

I did love him and I already miss him desperately.