I am not that interested in League football, as you'll know, but I have been haunted by the story about the millionaire businessman Phillip Carter and his teenage son, killed when their helicopter crashed on the way back from Chelsea's Champions League semi-final defeat in Liverpool on Tuesday. An honorary vice-chairman of Chelsea, Mr Carter's death in his privately-owned Twin Squirrel helicopter has horrible echoes for me. As pointed out in the newspapers, in 1996 another of Chelsea's vice-chairmen, Matthew Harding, and four other men were killed as they returned from a Coca-Cola Cup tie at Bolton Wanderers, again in a Twin Squirrel helicopter. One of these four men was John Bauldie.

I worked with John Bauldie at Q magazine, and was proud to do so. I'll never forget the horrible shock we all felt that morning when the news came through. We spent the rest of the day toasting his memory in the pub, unable to work. Bauldini, as we affectionately called him, the self-styled office grouch and Dylan fan extraordinaire who hated it when techno music went on the office stereo, was such a beloved fixture of that relatively small staff, and to lose him in such a pointless accident - albeit one loaded with portent, as his love for Bolton almost touched his love of Bob, and we reckoned that he would have at least have had the time of his life with his high-flying pal, Matthew Harding - really tore the guts out of us.

To think that it all happened over ten years ago. I always said then that you'd never get me up in a helicopter and now another one takes a handful of lives. I'm sure statistically it's safer than crossing the road, but when a colleague and friend is taken by one, statistics don't count. I have been thinking fondly of John these past two days, at any rate. As editor, I offered him a staff position at the magazine, but he politely turned it down, even though he knew that doing so would make his long-held freelance position in the production department untenable. He had no interest in being subsumed by the staff, preferring his independence. He also had two houses, one for his Dylan memorabilia. What a tremendous chap he was. He was only 47. At the time, that seemed old. He was certainly the previous Q generation made flesh, while all around he was surrounded by noisy 30-year-olds. ("Something's coming through on the fax," he would drily state whenever some modern dance music was played.) We respected him of course, but it was always fun when he dished out our complimentary copies of his glossy Dylan fanzine the Telegraph, to repeat the traditional joke, "Who's on the cover, John?"

RIP