When I was younger, I wanted to be something. I don’t mean that I wanted to be famous, or important. I didn’t want to be the boss of something or to accrue titanic wealth (though I sometimes wonder whether I underestimated the appeal of titanic wealth…).
What I mean is that I wanted to belong to something: to be a punk, or a mod, or a new romantic. I wanted to be part of a movement. I wanted to be special.
But I never was. I was too young to be a punk, too scared of mods to be a mod and never remotely creative or bold enough to be a New Romantic. To be honest, I was just too conformist, too ordinary, too normal. I was happy being, well, a pretty conventional north London teenager who was also a scout.
Someone like David Bowie, whose death we’re mourning today, seemed to me the epitome of the sort of individualism I thought I was looking for. Here was a man with the imaginative power and flatout chutzpah to conceive of himself as an alien being called Ziggy Stardust. For heaven’s sake, here was a man whose eyes were two different colours.
But, looking back, I actually think that Bowie was the exact opposite of what I wanted to be. I wanted to part of a movement. He was determined to be out on his own. I wanted to be the same. He wanted to be different. I wanted to be identifiable. He wanted to be unique.
The bible teaches us that we are all unique. Each of us is ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’, each of us is loved, each of us is given particular gifts, each of us is absolutely and only ourselves. We are God’s creative masterpiece, every single one of us different, everyone who ever lived perfect and perfectly themselves.
If, in the end, I’m perfectly honest, as a teenager I slightly disapproved of David Bowie. He was too outlandish, too far removed from anything I thought I could be comfortable with. But I was wrong. He knew the joy, the power, the value of difference. He celebrated it. He refused to be part of something. He was only ever himself.
I reckon that if Bowie was a hero (and he was, for much more than one day) it was in that. He showed us, he showed me, how extraordinary, how amazing, how liberating it might be just to be yourself.
At 7am, the Pause for Thought producer, Jonathan, rang to tell me that we really needed to say something about David Bowie. This was my typically solipsistic response.