The funeral of Tim Stevens takes place today.

For younger fans, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the football fanzine culture started up, Arsenal had four fanzines. The Gooner, 1-0 Up, 2-1 Down, Echo Echo and An Imperfect Match, otherwise known as AIM.

Tim Stevens was a wayward genius who wrote most of the content in AIM. He worked for the BBC for a while and told me how one issue was produced in its entirety on the BBC photocopying machine, before being loaded into a hired van at the BBC centre! A wonderful and worthwhile abuse of the licence payers’ money!

He was based in Paris for a while and continued to produce the fanzine, urging George Graham to buy a PSG player called David Ginola.

With its haphazard distribution and irregular releases, it’s fair to say Tim never made much money from the fanzine, although professionally, he had a good job, so it was never an issue. Eventually, time pressures meant he had to call it a day on AIM after over 30 issues had been produced between 1988 and 1994.

I used to bump into him about twice a season on matchdays and it was always a pleasure to stop for a few minutes and have a chat about our mutual interests – he liked a lot of the same kind of music from the 1980s.

Recently though, his health deteriorated dramatically, so much so that the last time I saw him, he was in a wheelchair. He had brought his two boys along to see a game, but wasn’t well enough to go in himself, and with his wife, met the boys outside afterwards. Even though he was in a bad way, he was still making jokes, referring to the bad old days that his sons were fortunate enough not to have witnessed.

Our thoughts at The Gooner go out to Tim’s wife Alice and the children. A unique and special man has been lost from the Gooner brotherhood, a supporter whose passing will be mourned by all those that encountered him.