Loving the alien

Not for the first time, I seem to be out of step with what the news media tell me I am feeling. Here on LJ my f-list is full of personal reactions to the death of David Bowie, of explainations why he was important to the writer personally, and that's fine. But I'm beginning to twitch at the wall-to-wall coverage: when the Guardian has a full-page photo on the front page, plus a pull-out supplement with another full-page photo on the front (in addition to a double-page obituary and any number of opinion pieces); when the presenter of the Tosay programme (Radio 4 at its most conservative) feels obliged to preface an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury by asking what Bowie had meant to him* - well, I begin to think that the state funeral can't be far behind. It's not that I don't think he deserves it, it just feels inappropriate, a category error.

There's more, but beyond this point I just write things and delete them. So I will stop here, and get back to writing a long-overdue post about Peter Dickinson.

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*To be fair to Justin Welby, he managed a perfectly sensible answer about having listened to a lot of Bowie in the seventies. If this had anything to do with his ending up in a job which requires him to wear very elaborate frocks for much of the time, he didn't say so.