Suzanne Harrington: David Bowie died five years ago - culturally, we are all his widows

"It took some time to join the Bowie dots. When a friend snuck me her big sister’s old copy of Hunky Dory, I had no idea, as I wore the vinyl thin on the record player in my room, what a bibbity boppity hat might be"

A pre-glam David Bowie jams at a party thrown by publicist and future nightclub impresario and DJ Rodney Bingenheimer at lawyer Paul Figen's house in January 1971, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Five years ago yesterday morning – a grey, grimly cold day - I was standing in the kitchen, staring in disbelief at the words coming out of the radio. Water spontaneously leaking out of my eyes, spilling onto the countertop. David Bowie had left.

I have never - before or since - wept at the death of someone I don’t know. I mean, why would you? But that January morning, I couldn’t stop. I felt like Alice, drowning in her own tears, finally experiencing a glimmer of understanding for all those mad people who had cried over Princess Diana. Except it wasn’t out of sentimentality or a sense of tragedy or a misplaced release of repressed emotion, the way men cry at the football but not at funerals: it felt bigger than that.