Very sad to hear of Graham’s passing. We were good friends from a young age and as Pete Emery has written, had many good times. A few remembrances:
At Westcliff High School, Graham started a magazine called ‘The Eclogue’ which just about eluded staff censorship for its short life. He invited me to contribute, I offered a poem, and with great tact he suggested that I was more of a prose man and would I like another go?
As a teenager I went with Graham and his family to France, partly because Graham had told his parents that I spoke reasonable French. If his Dad didn’t know what hyperbole meant at the start of the holiday, he certainly did by the end. And Graham ended the evenings pretty well-oiled, standing on tables, shouting to us and passers-by alike.
Later I was living in Manchester when Graham, who was on the Mirror Training Scheme, came up for work experience and stayed with me for a few weeks. When I told him a policeman had come round to interview me about a traffic incident and had to sit on the only piece of furniture in the flat, Graham said it sounded like something out of a Beckett play, and mused about its comedic potential. At the end of his first day of work, he walked into my flat, opened an envelope and sprayed fivers into the room, saying that he had been told to investigate Manchester’s nightclub scene and let’s start tonight. He renamed my local takeaway, the ‘Hasty Tasty’, the Hasty Nasty. He gossiped about local politicians’ private preferences, swearing me to secrecy. 
We lost contact, but after some years he knocked on our front door, said he couldn’t stay but please take this bottle of wine as a token from me. The bottle was a full-bodied red called Fat Bastard.
Cheers to Graham: full-bodied, ebullient, funny, acute, a great friend in our formative years.