I shared a house on campus with Frank in Bristol in 1990-91. The rest of us were all postgrads, but he was more mature than the rest of us put together, and paid reduced rent for taking on the responsibility of deputy warden. The film RoboCop had been released a couple of years before, so was inevitable that he earned the soubriquet RoboWarden. I remember walking into a house party with him one Saturday night. It was a scene straight out of a movie: the music stopped, conversation died and everyone turned to look at us. “Carry on,” he said. “I’m not here officially, I’m here to enjoy myself.”

As a deputy warden, he was entrusted with a skeleton key which fitted every door in the student village. With great power comes great (ir)responsibility: one cold February night he and another housemate used it to sneak into my girlfriend’s house and snowball us as we lay in bed.

He taught me to punt in the summer of ’95 when he was living in Rose Cottage. I had an interview nearby early one morning, so he offered me a bed for the night. I’d had a hot drive over in my Morris Minor, so before dinner we swam in the river, and jumped off the piers of the bridge. We made the day for a horde of Japanese tourists. Their countless photographs might give him immortality of a sort.
Frank was serious when he needed to be, and commanded authority from a young age. His political opponents – of which there were one or two in Bristol – would have to admit that he was even-handed, never lost his cool and never went below the belt, even when pushed. He’d always end a heated discussion on good terms. I admired him hugely for those qualities.

Not everyone ever got to see the thoroughly mischievous and fun side of him, and that’s a shame. It might have been me who pointed out that he had a laugh like Muttley the cartoon dog, and I can still hear him laughing at the pranks we played on our housemates. Somewhere up in heaven there’s an angel with a wicked laugh. You earned those wings, Frank, but were given them too soon. Sleep well, dear friend.