I saw my first wife just the other night. It was the first time I’d seen her in 50 years. She looked pretty much the same as she had looked 50 years ago. Her face still resembled the face of Brigitte Bardot. When I first met her – back in the old smokestack days of long guitar solos and crushed velvet trousers – I thought that she looked just like Brigitte Bardot; however, the photographic evidence doesn’t exactly validate my perception. But, back then, I tended to view the world through Brigitte Bardot spectacles.
In addition to my wife being a Brigitte Bardot look-a-like she was brilliant and crazy and a communist. Because of her looks – her blonde hair and mascara-big eyes and her mini dresses – a lot of people thought that she was a bit of a bimbo. That was a big mistake. After a few minutes in her company their bimbo concept unravelled and they were left picking up the pieces of a million broken synapses. The synapses didn’t know what had hit them; many flew off, in desperation, straight into the dynamic concepts of Sigmund Freud. All their ego-defence mechanisms were in overdrive.
By the time my first wife was 24 she’d written a book on language-use and social class. Her beauty and brilliance meant that I was clearly punching above my weight. My wife wasn’t going to hang around with me for long; that much was obvious: She left me one wintry night in London; I’d just had my wisdom teeth removed. (I don’t think there was any causal connection.) We were attending a reception at the London Institute of Education and because of the teeth (or lack of them) I could not eat anything. Perhaps a glass or two of wine made the rupture – the break-up – easier for both of us. I took a taxi home – and that was that.
She was carrying a heavy leather bag when I met her again after all those years. I never thought to ask her what was in the bag – but I still wanted to carry it and take the weight from her shoulders.
We went into a café to catch up on what had been going on between 1974 and 2024. A woman approached us – a woman wearing a distinctive ring; it had a central ruby cut into a special and very distinct oblong shape. The ruby was set amongst some clear but tiny diamonds. The woman passed by. I asked my wife what the shape of the ruby was and the identity of the ring. She answered: ‘It’s a synthetic a priori ring.’ I smiled: she’d lost none of her brilliance. I started to feel an intense longing to discover, to understand, more of what had been going on for her during those 50 years. But we kept things light.
After a while, I asked her about where she was going on holiday and she was really pleased to tell me that she was going south to the warm seas so as to do some diving. She said that under the sea (where she was going to be diving) lay the home of the old long-ago bumper cars – the dodgems – and you could see them far below on the sea-bed – orange and pink and shiny yellow – with chrome bumpers – and if you listened you could hear the sound of the old fairground music. She told me that the fairground music came from huge barrel organs that were painted in strong garish happy colours. The barrel organs floated on the surface of the sea and were washed here and there by the waves so you never knew how well you were going to hear the sounds – the melodies – coming from them. She said that it was just like seeing the Lonely Hearts’ Club Band playing their songs on the curving chemistry of a super eight cine film.
I had never asked myself before about where old dodgems go to die. Now I know.
Go Ask Alice 