I first spoke to Alan Coren in 1971. He rang me to say I had won Punch's student journalist competition and that he was the deputy editor, Alan Coren. I stupidly said: "Isn't it pronounced caw-ren?" and he sounded a bit startled, but kindly put me right.

Coren was far and away the funniest man in the magazine, or indeed any other magazine. At the time the prize was a lunch at the Punch table, but it still had its bar on women, about which he was terribly embarrassed; he took me to lunch alone instead, and that was far, far better.

In the years that followed (the bar being hastily removed) I had plenty of lunches at that table when he presided over it, memorably on the occasion when the new-fledged Duchess of York came and arrived so late that all of us - writers, cartoonists, editor - were rather too drunk for protocol. He never minded my bringing a new baby along in a basket and dumping it under the office table during lunch, and would say reassuringly as I fussed: "They do grow up, you know." I wrote plenty of pieces for him and he was a marvellous editor, tough and demanding, appreciative of good stuff but never afraid to turn you down flat ("Nah - not funny - nah, doesnt work"). He would always put his finger on what was wrong. If you did make him laugh properly, and he liked the piece, he would be right on the phone telling you so. He made you want to please him, which is half the battle of being an editor. Plenty of us owe a lot to him - he built us . . .

We always kept in touch through his time on The Listener (which he proved just as brilliant at editing) and in his long final freelance years. The joy of Alan as a writer was exactly the same as the joy of him as a person: he was massively erudite, able to parody anything from TS Eliot to Ernest Hemingway, and rooted deep in a particular kind of Englishness. He covered the waterfront, and belonged to no constricting tribe. His working-class roots, his wartime childhood, Oxford erudition, love of domesticity and Fleet Street savvy all came together in an explosion of what was, in the best sense, pure fun. He laughed easily, explosively, but intelligently; didn't mind which way a joke was cutting as long as it was a good joke.

And he was a kind man, a good friend, not afraid of tough emotions or people who might cry. There was nothing of the professional funnyman's brittleness about him, none of the edgy uncaring cool which some others in his trade deploy to keep the world at bay. When I had a bad time, years ago, and fell out with this very newspaper and found I was blocked and panicked and broke and could not write at all for months, he spotted it, took me out to lunch and told me some amazingly smutty stories and made me know, for certain, that everything would be all right. When our son died last year Alan - himself fresh out of hospital after a serious illness and prolonged coma - rang up in a weak but affectionate voice to mourn with me, and asked me to tea once he was better, to regale me with alarming stories about having leeches put on his wound.

He didn't need to do that - I wasn't family, hadn't seen him for over a year. But he did. He would be embarrassed to hear me say so, but he was a deep-down good kind man as well as having one of the finest comedic visions of his generation. It is hard to express how much I shall miss him.

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