I really wasn’t in the mood, but I was going to have to make myself do it. I peeled myself out of my warm chair and headed upstairs. If I was going to have a lodger living with me, the room needed to be ready. I wasn’t keen on decorating, especially painting, probably because it wasn’t one of my strong points and I didn’t have much confidence in my own ability. I wanted to be good at it. I had the patience and took a lot of pride in my work; but because I wasn't that good at it, it meant I was slow at getting anything done. That's what frustrated me and probably what caused me to avoid it as much as possible.

I switched on my old paint spattered radio cassette player. There was an old David Bowie tape in the cassette deck. I’d purchased the tape at a village fete one Saturday in 1991. I’d loaded the tape in to the right-hand side of the twin cassette deck as soon as I’d got home that afternoon and played it through — as I was quite keen to hear it and also wanted to see if the tape worked properly. The tape had been sitting in the cassette deck ever since. I really liked David Bowie come to mention it. I’d always liked the style of his Seventies music and when he made the change to an Eighties style, I found I really liked that too. In fact, I really liked the Eighties as a whole. I can’t say that I was really part of the scene, but I did admire it from afar. David Bowie fascinated me. Maybe it was due to his...