On New Year's Day this year I woke up to the news that Dave Hodgson had lost his battle with metastatic melanoma. I'd never met Dave, he was a friend of my boyfriend at the time and living in Dubai, but we talked regularly on Twitter, mostly late at night about baseball and bucketlists.

  I won't pretend it was easy when Dave would casually mention the fact that he was dying, it wasn't, and I never quite knew what to say, but Dave, more than anybody else, had accepted the fact that he was dying, and there were things he wanted to do before he did.

One of those things was to go and watch a baseball game in America, which we spent weeks enthusing about. He did just that, at Wrigley Field, while undergoing treatment in Chicago, as well as a whole host of other things, some he'd always wanted to do and some he didn't realise he wanted to do until he knew he was running out of time.

Dave was a very special man who had a profound impact on the lives of the people who loved him and knew him, and on the lives of many with whom he had only the briefest of contact. If Dave taught me anything, it's that you have to grab hold of opportunities when you can, do the things you want to do and make sure the people who you love know just how much.

It is because of Dave that I went and watched a game at Fenway Park this summer. It is because of Dave that I stood on top of the highest point on the Eastern seaboard. It is because of Dave that I have learnt to cherish every moment with the people who really matter, because life really is too short.