Sally-Part 13. HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOSH GROBAN !

THIS MAN IS COSTING ME A FORTUNE ! TAKEN AT MANCHESTER 2011. YOU CAN'T SEE SHIRLEY AS SHE HAD ALREADY BEEN TRAMPLED UNDERFOOT BY THE MARAUDING MOB OF FANS !

It wouldn't be right for me to carry on my tale without mentioning that today the 27th of February is a very special day.

 It is Josh Groban's birthday!

 What? Why? Who? I hear through the ether. Well several years ago on the tiny Hebridean island of Colonsay Shirley tuned into the fledgling TV channel Classic FM and saw a young American man with an amazing voice singing a beautiful song and was hooked for ever.

 Josh was essentially discovered by David Foster, appeared in a geeky role on Ali Mcbeal, sung with Celine Dion, standing in for Andrea Bocelli at a rehearsal and has risen to the highest ranks of international recognition, selling 30 odd million or so albums to date, touring to packed houses everywhere and yet if I mention his name here, few people know of  him.

Well my house is covered in pictures of him! And his are the eyes piercing your soul when you turn Shirley's laptop on!

 Our box room has become a shrine to all things Josh; with framed tour programmes, album covers and shelves of Josh soft toys. Each outfit Shirley wore to the concerts has been mounted and labeled in a frame just like famous football shirts and on a central table you will see the birthday cake she baked for him today and which we will sit around at tea time singing "Happy birthday to you", wearing Shirleys own hand-knitted Josh jumpers which she refuses to sell on the internet to other Grobanite nutters despite their begging entreaties !

'Tis he who has captured Shirley's undivided attention for all these years by which I mean fandom of an order I thought possible only of an adolescent Beatles fan, which she was..

But I'm not to be thought of as jealous because I've been to seven of his concerts including the amazing second night of Chess at The Albert Hall in London and although the only man in the auditorium and there mainly to carry Shirley's spare shoes, anti- thigh-rub gel, water, spare water, plastic bag with a wet flannel wrapped inside another wet flannel, wrapped inside another wet flannel, anti-cough medicine in case she got an unexpected cough during the show, autograph pen and book, spare autograph pen and book, spare spare shoes, seat raising cushion selection and for her to be able to sit on my shoulders round at the stage door in the hope of a fleeting glance, I thoroughly enjoyed watching him perform, singing, playing the piano and drums brilliantly, chatting effortlessly to the audience between numbers and together with a fantastic set of musicians giving a master class for two solid hours. I also sing and play the guitar but my wife won't even accompany me to a pub session and so has never heard people cheer me, applauding loudly and women, much younger and lighter than Josh's fans, quietly asking if they could buy me a drink. So jealousy does not come into it.

The truth is that his fans are generally of a senior age group and noticably much larger than the average sized woman 'up top' to the extent that if I see such an enormously norked woman walking towards us, I'll say "Grobanite?" to Shirley and get a good kicking.

I  don't think that Windows could log the hours Shirley has spent reading over the millions of reviews of each of Josh's hundreds of concerts that Shirley has read and each time she calls me in to listen to a report I am as captivated as she is by the minutiae of a life watched through an electron-microscope.

Yeh! Right!

And do you know that Shirley (and I really) sent him a note about how wonderful he was, written on one of my own watercolours which we thought he would enjoy and I must have sent it to the wrong address as he hasn't written back to thank us yet.Perhaps I didn't enclose my address!