Treats on my 67th birthday on Tuesday of last week included a train trip to Stratford-upon-Avon for the first night of the RSC’s The Merry Wives of Windsor with a well-padded David Troughton on fabulous form as the luckless-in-love Sir John Falstaff.

With me on the journey went my battered Pan paperback copy of Lost Empires, J.B. Priestley’s marvellous 1965 novel about the dying days of music hall. Bert Coules’s 1994 radio version was being broadcast over three days on Radio 4 Extra, and I thought I would read the bits I was necessarily missing on Tuesday, though of course I could only imagine the fruity tones of Tom Baker in the role of the magician Ganga Dun.

The rumbustious tone of the new Merry Wives would, I think, have appealed to Priestley who was himself considered a markedly Falstaffian character.

He certainly seemed so to the Oxford writer Iris Murdoch, with whom he worked on a stage version of her 1961 novel A Severed Head: “I always think of him as expressed by his own essay on Sir John.”

His friend Dulcie Gray, the actress, began her short biography of him (Sutton Publishing, 2000) with references to the fat knight.

“Light on his feet both physically and in conversation, he had many of the attributes of Falstaff – gusto, patriotism, a delight in good living, and in spite of a face like ‘a glowering pudding’ (his description) considerable success with other men’s wives.”

One of these was the actress Peggy Ashcroft, wife of the distinguished-publisher-to-be Rupert Hart-Davis, with whom he fell passionately in love in 1930, probably while she was appearing in Hassan by James Elroy Flecker at Oxford’s New Theatre and he was writing a book (I’ll Tell You Everything) at a friend’s house in the Cotswolds.

Dame Peggy (as she became) was to address the congregation in Westminster Abbey in 1984 at the memorial service that followed the death of J.B. Priestley OM – that honour, in the gift of The Queen, being the only one he would accept, though lots were offered. She read the essay, Whatever Happened to Falstaff? previously alluded to.

What would happen to Sir John on the Stratford stage was unknown to me last Tuesday when, with time to kill before curtain-up, I went to the town’s Oxfam bookshop, always a rich source of finds.

My haul included Michael Coveney’s 2015 biography of Dame Maggie Smith, Essex girl by birth but schooled and tutored for the stage in Oxford, and the diaries of the playwright Peter Nichols, now resident in the city in a North Oxford penthouse he bought from old friends of mine.

There was also the intriguingly titled – I would say off-puttingly titled – The Vodi, a novel by John Braine, the author, as the cover proclaimed, of Room at the Top.

Braine was born, as was Priestley, in Bradford and was a great admirer of the older man of whom he wrote, exactly 40 years ago, a well-received biography.

In The Vodi, as I read on the back cover, Braine was portraying in his second book, “a very different character” from the success seeker Joe Lampton of Room at the Top. This was a man who found “an even sweeter and more deadly seduction – the love of failure”.

Intriguingly, this shift in subject matter finds a parallel in the career of Priestley. After the massive success of The Good Companions – his picaresque account of theatre life which he began writing while living in Church Hanborough, Oxfordshire – he abruptly changed gear with Angel Pavement, an introverted study of the demise of a small business.

“This was the despair of those,” Dulcie Gray wrote, “who wished for his own good – or for theirs – to pigeonhole him.”

To digress, for a moment, it seems strange to me that the fact of Priestley’s residence in Church Hanborough from 1926 to May 1928 – at College House, later The Barn House, with his second wife Jane Wyndham-Lewis – is not better known locally.

At a dinner at The Randolph Hotel a couple of years ago, I sat next to the novelist Dame Penelope Lively, who lived in the village for many years, and was surprised to discover that she was completely unaware of its link with an earlier literary luminary.

Sensing The Vodi’s blurb to be one of those that, irritatingly, reveal too much of the plot, I read no more than the first few lines (sensibly, as I found later).

Instead, opening the book, with its gaily coloured plastic-bound dustjacket, I found that here was a first edition. It says something for Braine’s popularity that Oxfam had priced it at only £1.99.

In fact, The Vodi – the title referring to menacing figures of the hero’s childhood fantasies – proved, on my weekend reading, to be a superb novel, recalling so much of the half-forgotten landscape of my 1950s childhood.

The price tag was the more surprising since, as my Oxfam shop inspection revealed, the book bore the library plate of its first owner, none other than J.B. Priestley.

The year of its publication, 1959, was when the writer moved into Kissing Tree House, in Alveston, near Stratford, with his third wife Jacquetta Hawkes. The book thus became one of the first acquisitions for their new library, in which they are pictured above.

Becoming its new owner meant that I received a welcome present on my birthday, August 14. It was on this date in 1984 that Priestley died.

WHAT will they do when Bob Dylan pops his clogs? This is the question I ask every time a popular performer dies and a media-fest of mourning follows wholly disproportionate to the status of that individual.

Thus it was last week with the passing of Aretha Franklin. She was a brilliant singer, sure enough, with powerful significance in the wider context of the American civil rights movement. But was she really deserving of so much airtime and the acres of newsprint?

That the BBC was taking its usual OTT approach to celebrity death was evident when I switched on Radio 4 at 5.57pm on Thursday for the weather forecast and instead found Ms Franklin romping through one of her hits.

How dare the increasingly off-the-wall PM programme muck about with traditional timings in this way.

Franklin’s death led the six o’clock news that followed, properly so, but not surely at such inordinate length.

Friday’s newspapers were full of it, with two I read, The Times and the Daily Telegraph, carrying news stories, long obituaries and the verdicts of their rock writers.

It was noticeable that both Neil McCormick (Telegraph) and Will Hodgkinson (Times) confined their ‘top five’ of her career to a narrow window between 1967, with Respect, and 1972 (Young, Gifted and Black).

Both papers’ obituaries noted that Respect’s writer, Otis Redding, said it was a song “that a girl took away from me”. I beg to differ, just as I do over Björn Ulvaeus’s recent ‘gifting’ of Fernando to Cher, on usual ‘can belto’ form in her copycat version.

I heard Redding singing Respect live not long before his early death and think his a better performance.

Ms Franklin jealously guarded her ‘Queen of Soul’ title and was furious when Beyoncé bestowed it on Tina Turner at the 2008 Grammys.

As one lucky enough to have seen Turner live – at Oxford’s New Theatre in February 1984 – I do not think Beyoncé was wrong.

Tina is truly The Best.