Please spare us the sob signalling over David Bowie

By 9am this morning, I’d turned down two offers from two newspapers to write about the freshly-dead David Bowie. I told both plainly what I felt: ‘I haven’t been a fan since I was a teenager, when I worshipped him, and I don’t want to add to the chorus of people with nothing to say, but who’ll say it anyway, for a fee.’

However, humour is always the exception to the rule. By 10am I’d posted this (totally true) status on Facebook: ‘To illustrate how odd my voice is (accent and speed) I just spent five minutes waking up my husband Dan and telling him that David Bowie had died. I told him that people were weeping in the streets, and that it was like the Queen Mother dying all over again. Dan listened silently, then replied “It’s nice – but still, all that fuss about Dane Bowers!’’ Within an hour, more than a hundred people had liked my amusing post, and I considered my work to be done.