Suppose we'd dated when we were both seventeen?

Our hypothetical disco-date, when we were both seventeen

The venue would have been the Locarno, the city centre disco in Bristol close to the harbour and the Council House - Clare couldn't actually have made it as she was living in Liverpool with her family at that time, but she was 'just seventeen'.

This is the summer of 1968.

The scene you see above - ChatGPT's best reconstruction - is pretty much as my memory tells it: the boys in their somewhat stuffy outfits (there was a male dress code - no jeans); the girls all revelling in their sixties freedoms. 

And when I actually met Clare, when she and I were twenty six, I do recall her somewhat uninhibited dancing style - there was not much self-consciousness there. In this, as in so many other areas, I was and am the polar opposite. *

Clare at sixteen (AI generated)

In Clare's case we don't have many teen pictures so GPT-5.6 Sol Extra High (to give its fully illustrious title) had to do some deblurring from ancient family pictures and some de-aging from ten years on. The resulting image above seems not wholly out of line

Nigel at eighteen (sadly, this is reality)

In my case we have this brooding portrait from 1969 when I was 18. Vanity has lost the glasses, which were by then a necessity. Blues, Progressive Rock and Theoretical Physics were my top attractors, at least intellectually.

And then there was the Locarno, where I also sought to follow Feynman's example.

Yes, I think the psychology of the top picture is spot-on: there is some magic trying to get out... but neither party seems to have really noticed; the boundaries of the subconscious are not too porous as a teen. It's better that we waited another nine years to meet.

---

* Clare would say indignantly that she would never have worn a dress like that: she'd have worn jeans.

And she's right: Clare would take no prisoners, would make no concessions to female convention, would not dress to impress and would laugh at the idea of 'attracting boys'.

And that often works too - more often than you'd think.

But it's my post, so I'll just let it be the way I'd have wanted it...

---