Look at this man.

Is he not a prince among men?

Actually, he'd doubtless argue that he was, rather, a magnificent Queen among men. He really was.

Following an illness, Maurice Huggett, owner of the Phoenix Theatre Bar, Charing Cross Road, and true Soho legend, has died.

I'm sure some of you will be acquainted with the Phoenix / AKA Shuttleworths; a hive of hangovers, teeming with sozzled actors, out-of-work soap stars, comedians, musicians, writers and assorted hacks, tumbling over one another in a delirious heap, as opposed to engaging in anything so cynical as 'networking'. Mostly because, after a night in the Phoenix, you'd be hard-pressed to remember anybody's name.

Yet this remarkably warm and welcoming dive is about as far removed from The Groucho, or the rarefied environs of Soho House as it's possible to get. Probably 'cos it's actually free to get in before 8pm, leading to an interesting mix of regular punters and faces. I remember the night Jack White and his new best buddy Jude Law popped down, while everyone studiously ignored them - no mean feat, as the place was, typically, rammed to the rafters.

For a while in my life, all roads led inexorably to The Feen. I've met and made so many friends here, and commenced pleasantries with - and broken up with - a couple of girlfriends too. Also held my 40th birthday party here. Ugh.

Some sample memories: an hilariously awful blind date with a novelist in 1999; watching a completely off-his-gourd Simon Munnery falling *upstairs* into the street; ordering a mescal, with worm inside, tearing the worm in half, in the process squirting the contents of its innards in my face, and accidentally dropping my half in the ashtray. Then going to the gents and thoroughly washing it under the tap, before bringing it back to the table to eat it properly again. It's that kind of place.

Through it all, Maurice reigned supreme (or like a Supreme), dancing, pouting and gliding around the hubbub in a vast and never-ending collection of legendary waistcoats to a piped soundtrack of Fiddler on the Roof, offering advice, comfort, support, and an inexhaustible supply of friendship and queenly asides. In Quentin Crisp's phrase, "one of the stately homos of England."

Even if you'd not been back for years, the minute you walked in again he would tightly embrace you (and more than likely effect a cheeky grope) like the Prodigal Boozer you were.

Old-school Soho, or the received version of it, is long dead. But there were (and still are) a few characters around who acted as conduits for its naughty, scurrilous - and fiercely libertine spirit. I'm really going to miss him.

Maurice Huggett, 1945-2011. R.I.P. There is not a waistcoat large enough to wrap around your heart.