Two separate emails received Friday gave news of two separate old friends being diagnosed with lung cancer. Two friends. Lung cancer. I was keen to get a copy of “Stranger Comes To Town” to Paul Evans, maybe the world’s leading collector of Bloomsbury Press (mostly Virginia Woolf) literature. I called the hospice late Friday afternoon; he’d been taken there a couple of days earlier. Asked if he would be able to hear it if it arrived by post Monday. Perhaps better if you brought it tomorrow, the nurse told me. It was heavy news.

It weighed and hinted at imminent death. I left at dawn for Worthing and the nurse said, “Paul is dying.” His mother, Hazel, was happy to allow me a brief visit. I slipped the CD under Paul’s clenched right hand. Said hi Paul, it’s Steve. Stranger comes to town, eh. Your Brighton Dome tickets will be waiting for you in June. The nurse says she will bring in a CD player today and you can hear the new songs. Paul was struggling against mighty pain and the mighty drugs that quell its affects, in that state which nobody fully alive fully understands. His doctor, a mid-30s woman, had seen me outside the room and asked, can I help? No, no, I said, why? You look like you wanted to ask me something. No, no. Well, nothing medical. Philosophical, maybe. But then you wouldn’t be able to answer that, would you? No, she said. No-one really can. They told me the CD was played constantly for the rest of the day, until the moment my poor friend passed away. And Margie Mercer, and her 27-year-old son Jackson, are at vigil beside Bob, lying with a tumour close to his breathing pipes, too close to operate on. Bob was the EMI managing director who came to see me and Alan Parsons at Abbey Road one November evening in 1974, heard the first play of a mix of Make Me Smile and said, Number One. Bob is my good friend. He is one of the wittiest, wisest, funniest and most generous of men. He is a very popular guy. In the music business and the film industry, Bob Mercer is a legend. He’s the kind of friend you’d like to keep all to yourself, knowing all the time that there are so many of you, friends of this special guy, that you’ll only ever get your own small piece of him. We’ve lived thousands of miles apart for many years and do not see each other anywhere near often enough. We were there on the day of the birth of our respective sons. His boy Jackson is doing well in the music industry and his fab wife Margie is as gentle and loving a woman as any. And her tender updates on Bob’s state on-line are touching and beautifully crafted. And she will not be feeling alone out there. Reading the letters of support, you can almost feel the love.

I will sing eight songs with Barry and James on Billy Sloan’s Radio Clyde show on Sunday night (May 2). I will sing Make Me Smile for Bob. Number one. All the way with you, Bob. And I will sing All Men Are Hungry in memory of Paul Evans. I will sing This Old Man for my dad in Spain and The Last Time I Saw You for my own peace of mind. The leaping of my ransomed heart.