THE year began with my father's farewell, aged 82 and expected after pneumonia closed off dementia's long descent. Two days later, David Bowie's star suddenly fizzled out. Such influences they had been in their differing ways.

Death has seldom been out of my thoughts ever since, not morbidly so, but every contemplation of mortality reinforced by the Grim Reaper appearing to be in mad rush to go on holiday.

Only the other day, Michael Pennington's mentally and physically ravaged King Lear, soon bound for York's Grand Opera House, had made me confront death again. So too did Monday's play at Leeds City Varieties, New Dawn Fades, with its story of Joy Division's Ian Curtis taking his fixation with dying young to its inevitable tightened-rope conclusion.

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Michael Pennington as King Lear. Picture: Marc Brenner

Thursday in the Arts Diary was supposed to be all about a final curtain of a different kind, the final Yorkshire blows of folk big band Bellowhead on a valedictory lap of honour that had brought the rumbustious 11-piece to a sold-out City Hall in frontman Jon Boden's adopted home city of Sheffield.

The "death notice" had been announced 11 months ago, allowing for two goodbye tours, in the autumn and spring. What's more, this was a long goodbye, for which you could prepare with a That's All Folks! tagline and bring out a live double CD and DVD from last November's roaring gigs.

It is the sudden exits that hit you differently, however. Bowie, Alan Rickman, Victoria Wood, and only a day later came one of those moments that cuts out everything around you; the Sheffield-bound conversation in the car, the radio chatter on Five Live. Prince had died, superseding The Queen's 90th birthday as the headline story of April 21 2016. Prince? Dead? What?

"Some say a man ain't happy unless a man truly dies," Prince had sung on Sign O The Times, back when he, and the rest of the world, was trying to make sense of "a big disease with a little name", and now that lyric resonated anew.

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Prince, June 7 1958 - April 21 2016

Bellowhead's last Yorkshire hurrah was still a thing of joy and sadness, Jon Boden's brazen glam silver waistcoat still sparkled, and guitarist Benji Kirkpatrick made a pronunciation joke of the new album being called Bellowhead Live, "not Bellowhead live, because we won't be after this tour". They go at their moment of choosing, so that's not all folks, because these musicians will reconfigure in myriad formations, as folk players do.

Thoughts inevitably returned to Prince on the journey homewards. Come morning, it was appropriate, as it is always on such occasions, to greet the dawn with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks with its reviving refrain of "To be born again, to be born again." That evening York Theatre Royal would reopen after 403 days: a re-birth, a new beginning in the cycle of life, the cycle of the creative world.