MY best friend at school had a sister three years older than us. It’s her fault really.


It’s her fault that I felt a sadness that seemed so bizarre early on Monday morning.


It’s her fault that I spent most of the rest of Monday (it was my day off this week) dusting down old vinyl records and, in some odd way, saying farewell to my youth.


Why? Because in 1979, when I was 13, my best mate’s sister lent me her copy of an album called Lodger.


It was the first David Bowie album I’d listened to properly. And I was hooked.


I’ve been a music fan since as long as I can remember, but I started buying records (as I still call them!) seriously when I was 11.


I gravitated naturally to the likes of The Jam, The Clash, XTC and Elvis Costello, but also raided my parents’ record collection to discover the delights of The Beatles, The Small Faces, Scott Walker and Love.


Marc Bolan was the first pop star I remember seeing on TV, and T Rex became an enduring passion. And though I was aware of Bowie in the early 70s, I’d always dismissed him as, well, a bit weird.


But by the time I was 16, and after much scrimping and saving of pocket money, I owned pretty much everything he had recorded to date; including the pre-fame 60s albums on which he sang about laughing gnomes and being five in an Anthony Newley voice.


And I’ve carried on buying Bowie’s music in the decades that followed – from the groundbreaking classics like Hunky Dory and Diamond Dogs to the truly terrible stuff like Tonight and Black Tie White Noise – right up until last weekend when I shelled out for his new album, Blackstar.


I suspect that, like a lot of his fans, I’d been thrilled by his unexpected return to recording – and return to form – in 2013 when The Next Day was released.


Blackstar is even better and, to me, seemed like he was saying hello to the world again with the kind of daring, innovative work that had so defined his recording career.


Now we know he was really saying goodbye.


When my mobile phone pinged just after 7am on Monday with the news that Bowie was dead, I couldn’t quite take it in at first.


I can’t pretend that what I felt in the hours that followed was grief. 


In my view, that is something reserved for the loss of family and friends; and our first thoughts should, of course, be for Bowie’s nearest and dearest.


Nevertheless, what I felt was a rather odd sadness. I guess – as someone approaching his 50th  birthday this year – it had something to do with lost youth, and the soundtrack to that youth.


There were many of his fans affected in different ways by Bowie’s death, and there were many more people totally unaffected by it and who wondered why so much airtime and newsprint was being expended marking his passing.


Neither position is right or wrong. How people feel is a matter for them alone.
For me, it is just such a shame that someone who was still so creative and still had so much to give has been taken far too early.


But he leaves a musical legacy that will be discovered and enjoyed by generations to come.