A toast to the Guardian's Simon Ricketts, a Twitter folk hero

When the Guardian journalist died recently, it triggered a torrent of grief on social media. People felt they knew him, even if they hadn't met. Ian Martin understands why

We lost someone special when the journalist and writer Simon Ricketts died just over four months ago. He was a 24-carat mensch. A living antidote to cruelty and heartlessness. An astonishing comet of kindness blazing across social media's dark night skies, indiscriminately brightening the lives of everyone. His wasn't the first high-profile death at our end of Twitter, but it was the hardest.

"Our end" - you know the end I mean. The older end. The flexitarian, smartarse, squabbling, umbrage-taking, performatively progressive end. The rainbow end. The herbivore lunch with an Armagnac at the end.