The vision I have is this: denim jacket, black wool hat, big eyes, big smiley mouth. For me, at first anyway, he was a kind of benevolent background presence, the foreground – for two weekends early last spring – being The Frames, the band I was scarpering around the country trying to interview. Mic Christopher, the lovely bloke with the hat and the eyes and the grin, was opening for them.

I didn’t know Mic long, but sometimes – especially in the weird hothouse situation of travelling with a touring band – it doesn’t take long to work out when someone is an extraordinary individual. Mic was. He was utterly devoid of pretense or hardness, that casual everyday measure of bullshit most of us sadly employ in order to elbow through life: he operated on a quite uncommon level that seemed to be based in untrammelled delight with the world, straight dealing, and not a small amount of kindness. He was, I would learn, a great finder of adventure in the everyday, a gift and talent that most of us lose as we get older; as well as the sort of person who made you calmer when you were around him, who seemed to have a reassuring stillness at his core. Most of all, he was an exceedingly generous soul, but in an odd, invisible way: the extent to which he gently, near-imperceptibly took care of his friends – and The Frames’ frontperson in particular – took me two weekends even to notice.

One morning, over tea and toast, when there was no-one else around, having been deeply impressed by this, I bashfully told Mic how struck I was by how he looked after his mates, by all his near-invisible kindnesses. He equally bashfully laughed, cracked a joke, grinned at me, and changed the subject.

In this life, you mostly find guardian-angel behaviour in people who want to assist a great talent if they cannot be one themselves, who throw themselves body and soul into being a mirror, if they can’t be a lamp. The fact that Mic was gifted in his own right, then, makes his generous nature that much more impressive: unlike many talented people, he didn’t buy into that false, neurotic way of thinking wherein too much energy spent looking after other people ‘drains’ you, as if it is possible, through excessive involvement in other people’s welfare, to somehow run out of your own spirit. If anything, Mic appeared to live for it, and to feed it back into his own art.

St Christopher, I learned last week, is the patron saint of the traveller, which to my mind fits Mic perfectly, as he was so animated, never seemed to be sitting entirely still, even when he was. As we sat last Easter Sunday afternoon in the front bar of Cleere’s in Kilkenny, the Sunday Times spread out on our table, Mic had, I remember, the distinct air of a man who was about to take off for the next amazing destination, as if our pub table was in the waiting room of an airport or bus station, tickets for all of us safe in his pocket, invisible bags packed at his feet.

I learned last week, as well, that Mic’s namesake was famous – so the tale goes – for, funnily enough, ferrying fellow travellers across a river, unmindful of peril or fatigue, taking enjoyment and satisfaction from making others’ journeys a bit smoother. I’m devastated that the world has lost someone who – in addition to being so inspiring, gifted and vital – answers to that description as much as Mic did.