Tuesday 12th January 2016

Robert Nevil WhatsApp-ed but I’d already heard. Ronnie Ronnie, Eddie Sedgewick, Angus Willis and Fergus Strachan – for them it was bad. Ronnie Ronnie, growing up in Reading with the now famous window-dresser and columnist, subsumed David Bowie almost completely.  He was David Bowie. David Bowie was a life-saver in 70s Reading. Ronnie Ronnie and the window dresser flew up and away. They went to London and had hair and make-up and filmy almost frocks. Later of course they met David Bowie and found him charming and modest. Apparently he wasn’t sure how his own name should be pronounced. He wasn’t very sure who he was but that was more of a plus point. He was kind of floaty and amorphous. Of course I can sing some of his tunes but I don’t know their names. There’s one where Ground Control are trying to get through. Another is awfully well-known – a charming not exactly sentimental song. Attempts were made yesterday to play it on cathedral organs up and down the country.

Last night I was bidden to the Warehouse for a duck supper (cooked by Angus Willis, world food figure) before we took Eight Hateful Men by Quentin Tarantino – which was incredibly epic and important, by the way. I wasn’t bored once, but Angus was. Angus was in mourning for David Bowie and his own teenage years. ‘You’re not a real fan,’ he snapped at Fergus. ‘If you were, you’d know all the albums. You’re just a jonnie-come-lately…. you only took up with David Bowie last week…’ Angus sounded this theme all the way to the cinema, even after the duck dinner with baked beetroot and greens. Angus sawed up the duck whole with a bread knife (top tip for you direct from a world figure in food). Of course Charlie Hurling and Archie Brahms – their love was forged in a crucible of David Bowie mu. But for Anthony Mottram and myself at Barrowborough from 1970 – well, we didn’t take pop music. Unfortunately we had no need of David Bowie, although his whispy ethereal mu filtered through. In the case of me, Adrian Edge, I was already fully formed as one who would do as he pleased – although in agony – from the earliest years. The Gay Parents could do nothing with me. There was the terrible incident when New Zealand lamb and not English was served one Easter with the result that I was lodged on the swing in the garden throughout the luncheon. As for Anthony Mottram, at prep he lit on Herman Hesse as the greatest author and Stravinsky was his composer. We were already self-marked out as not as others. So David Bowie passed us by, sadly, although his passing now is strange and sad, one can see, and he was a thoroughly good thing.