At last, Monday is to be my Holly day

It was loud, twangy, thumping and above all irreverent to everything that had gone before.

From the hiccupping Holly ‘sob’ at the end of a line to those crisp snare shots in the last verse, it was utterly magnificent.

And much to the horror of my bewildered schoolteacher father, I was well and truly hooked.

A generation later, my youngest daughter feels the same. And that’s why we’ll be heading for Malvern Theatres on Bank Holiday Monday to see Buddy, claimed by many to be the world’s most successful rock ‘n’ roll musical.

So let’s not speculate – like untold numbers of people have down the years – about what might have been had his plane not crashed into that Iowa field.

Instead, we’ll enjoy the legacy that the Texas-born songster bequeathed to the world… one that would guarantee his immortality in our hearts.

ÅTALKING of Buddy Holly, I bumped into Mike ‘Mr Worcester’ Grundy at Hallow Road tip one day this summer and exchanged a few pleasantries near the skip marked ‘green waste.’ Some people ‘do lunch’ and quaff chablis but the real movers and shakers of the world chat on the tarmac over brimming bin liners.

Oh yes... style’s the name of the game.

I had earlier noticed what appeared to be a full drum kit in one of the containers and had commented to another tip customer about the wastefulness of modern society. Surely there was a budding musician, youth club or school that could have benefited from such unwanted items?

Anyway, it was then that I saw Mike and – having just sorted my Buddy Holly tickets – it suddenly occurred to me how cub reporter Grundy had written about Holly’s visit to Worcester back in the 1950s.

And later, reflecting on the relative austerity of those days, I imagined how a young lad back then might have coveted that drum kit rather than discarded it on the corporation tip.

It’s strange how relatively small occurrences are so often linked by slender threads of coincidence.