Where were you when you heard about the death of Lou Reed? I was in the Iberian sunshine at the Gibunco Gibraltar International Literary Festival and was amazed at how much hoo-hah there was about his demise on BBC News 24. Heaven knows what will happen when Bob Dylan croaks.

The Beeb was still at it when I got home. A moment of huge hilarity for the nation came on Tuesday with Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today, in which the Bishop of Norwich spoke of Reed’s “spirituality”. Private Eye’s vicar, the Rev J.C. Flannel, could not have bettered it.

Presumably included amid the torrent of BBC hyperbole and reminiscence, though I never heard it, was the fact that Reed’s first big hit, Walk on the Wild Side, escaped a ban by Radio 1 because bosses did not understand its lyrics. Oral sex, as alluded to in the phrase ‘giving head’, concerning Candy Darling, one of the real-life figures mentioned in the song, was not a subject aired on the Beeb in 1973.

Another of the song’s characters, indeed the first to be name-checked, is gender-bender Holly Woodlawn: Holly came from Miami F.L.A./ Hitch-hiked her way across the USA./ Plucked her eyebrows on the way/ Shaved her legs and then he was a she.

Woodlawn, the star of Andy Warhol’s Trash, was at the 1978 Oxford Film Festival. I spent an amusing hour or two with her/him, in the unlikely company of Citizen Kane star Joseph Cotten, at a party in Trinity College. I have always regretted not taking up his lively offer of a “night on the town”. Perhaps a little too wild side for me . . .