OK a chapter from the more scurrilous period of my life.
Approximately 1989-1990. Place - the Netherlands (exact location I will, for discretion's sake, keep to myself).
She was blonde, very (very!) attractive, 31-32 years old and sexy as .... well you know what I am getting at. Promiscuous, highly intelligent, totally lost in a world that had no direction. I wanted to make it permanent, she found that funny. How? Where? Come on! And what would she do with her little black book and all her other boyfriends? And she smoked, heavily, and she knew that I wanted her to stop!
If she is still alive, and I would not be certain of that, she will be 54 in August this year. Women like her could never be 54, middle age simply would not suit them!
We could do two things amazingly well together. The one is probably the major reason why I remember her even now, no further details necessary (and no further analysis required, but check the word "scurrilous" at the top if you want a clue!). The other was talk and analyse ....
Like minds? Maybe.
The comment always remains with me: "you aren't handsome, but you have a great mind" .... The putdown in the first part hurts a bit still (my wife now would not agree with her on that, maybe ageing suits me - then again ....). The second bit appeals though.
It has to be remembered that it is not always useful. A late, long-time friend of mine had two Masters degrees. Another good friend in the 1980s had a doctorate in Chemistry from Cambridge at the age of 22.
When either of them had the chance to enter a polling booth and make the enormously restricted choice that you get in elections in the UK (or which load of mediocre petty nationalist Europhobes do you prefer?), they could have exactly the same impact as (and no more than) someone who had left school after eleven years and could not read and write - and you wonder how the educational system could let that happen, but anyway ....
But her comment upon this was interesting. On the "beware hubris" basis. Or "you prefer the company of intelligent people, but that in itself is a sort of snobbery".
I always have to bear this in mind, even if at times when it is enormously frustrating. When I watch anything to do with the sheer nonsense coming from the US Republican Party primaries and realise that it is the same old stupid garbage (from all of them, apart from Doctor Paul on foreign policy) that caused all the problems in the first place, that it does not work, that it will never work .... Or when a British politico opens his mouth on Europe, looks round at the deflated UK economy, takes out a coin or note from his utterly imploded currency and will never admit that 33 years of mistaken domestic policy by both major Europhobic parties might have something to do with something (and yes, I do know that they have also got problems in Greece, and Portugal and Italy and Spain).
Or then there was the day in 2003, at the time of the start of the Iraq War. I was on a train between Rüdesheim and Frankfurt. An American university professor, travelling in Europe, was trying to get some sceptical Germans to understand how it worked:
"I am tired of making apologies for Bush", he remarked, "but you have to accept that in a democracy people have the right even to elect a complete idiot to power!".
Not sure what my girlfriend in the Netherlands would have made of that, but I can still envisage that glowing smile, her blonde unruly mass of hair waving from side to side, and me trying to dodge the cigarette smoke as she exhaled. Or some amazingly wonderful intimate moments together for which words are insufficient, and anyway are best not described in detail for fairly obvious reasons, but let us say simply that the likes of Rick Santorum would never have approved (oh, did I mention that she was also a (lapsed!!!!) Roman Catholic?).
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