The first record I ever bought was Wham’s Last Christmas. I’d saved my pocket money, and headed for WH Smith in the Pentagon Centre in Chatham on my way home from school, clutching my pennies.

I still remember being handed that small circle of vinyl in a blue bag, and worrying that I’d break it in the melee on the bus before I managed to get it home.

But get it home I did, and played it over and over again until I drove my mum and dad mad, and they insisted I borrowed my dad’s headphones if I wanted to listen to it any more.

I was already a huge Wham fan by then. I’d had their albums bought for me for birthdays and Christmas and my bedroom wall was plastered with a few Wham posters – but mostly of gorgeous George. I adored him.

When I left home for journalism college, the posters didn’t come with me but I couldn’t have been happier when I discovered a girl in my class was not only a huge Wham fan but shared my guilty pleasure of Kylie Minogue, too.

Obviously everyone else was into far cooler bands than we were, but we didn’t care, and we could often be found heading into college in her car, singing Club Tropicana and Shocked By The Power at the top of our voices.

So when George announced a concert at Wembley Arena, we could barely contain ourselves and had to get our hands on some tickets. There was one problem. How to buy them?

These days, internet access on your mobile phone makes things easy. This was back in the day when mobiles were for City workers, not for poor students like us.

I don’t even remember if we had a college computer with internet connection and even if we did, it was probably only one or two and they would have been tied up for things like lessons (I know, ridiculous).

Your only option was to find a free landline and keep ringing until you got through to someone in the box office.

So that’s what we did. We snuck into a spare newsroom classroom knowing it had a phone and kept dialling until the engaged tone changed to a ring.

Some time later, fingers sore from redialling and half an hour late for our shorthand lesson (thankfully she was an understanding teacher and we weren’t bottom of the class so were cut some slack that day), we had our tickets.

It was a brilliant concert and my only regret is that we didn’t have one brainwave earlier because we came so close to interviewing George. We contacted his press office just before the concert, telling them what huge fans we were and what a big deal it would be for us if we could bolster our journalism portfolios with an interview, no matter how short.

We expected a flat no in reply, but instead they said they were really sorry but his schedule had been finalised and, had we contacted them a few weeks earlier, it might have been possible.

Of course, they may just have been fobbing us off but I like to think that he might have just made five minutes for us.

Both of us bought T-shirts at that concert and I held onto mine for years.

On hearing of his death, she sent me a photo of her wearing hers. Can I find mine now? Of course not.

I fear I finally decided to give it to a charity box last year, but my loss was the Kent Air Ambulance’s gain.

In the meantime, I’ve been working my way back through those old CDs, cassettes and LPs and singing at the top of my voice.