I chanced across the end of the film Logan’s Run on TV and suddenly I realised why I am 39 (for nearly a whole week longer) and have never been married. It’s nothing to do with the theme of that film (which is of course that once you get to 30 you are killed by the state – not a bad idea, it’s a shame the film never had the impact on our culture that it intended): I am in love with Jenny Agutter.
There. Now that I have finally said it I feel so liberated. This isn’t like my childish infatuations with the lifeguard at my swimming pool or the woman off the M&S adverts. I see now that they were but fripperies in which I tried to escape the potential hazards of a genuine relationship by cosseting myself in the safe environs of a ludicrous fantasy. But my feelings for Jenny Agutter are real and true and I see now that I have always had them. She is the woman that I want to marry.
The problem is – and here is the tragedy of my life – is that I am in love with the Jenny Agutter of the mid 1970s to the early 1980s (up to an including the Jenny Agutter in the shower in American Werewolf in London which became a bit fuzzy on my tape of the film for some reason. I am not in love with the Jenny Agutter of now -I’m not sick – she’s all old now. But I deeply love (in a spiritual way)and want to marry the Jenny Agutter who I was watching swimming naked in a pool with Michael York this afternoon.
She is perfect. No woman can match up to her and I have loved her all my life, but only the her of say pre-1985.
But alas cruel fate dictated that she should be born 15 years before me (in Taunton in Somerset, tantalisingly close to where I would be living when I first rewound and rewound the tape of her in the shower) and hit this peak of physical perfection when I was in primary school and of little or no use to her. I am that most cursed of creatures, the man who has fallen in love across the unbridgeable chasm of time. I believe there is just one special person out there for all of us, but what if that person is anachronistic to us? It could be worse.
I may have fallen in love with an image in an old photo or a woman in an oil painting from the sixteenth century and then I wouldn’t even be able to see a living breathing incarnation of the object of my desire, but in a sense the proximity to the woman that I genuinely love makes the fact that we are parted by a decade or so all the more painful. If only my parents had had me when they were 15 I would have had a chance, but now I fear I can only watch and re-watch my videos of Jenny (or certain specific sections) and imagine what might have been.
I did see Jenny Agutter in real life once. It would have been in about 1992 when I was working at Broadcasting House and she was in the infamous BBC canteen having lunch at the same time as me. Even then, some ten years outside of the time period where she would have been my love she was breathtakingly beautiful and as I passed her table and gazed upon her (and this is true I promise) I literally went weak at the knees. I do not believe this has happened to me before or since with any other person, but my love for the 22-30 year old Jenny Agutter was so strong that even the 39 year old Jenny Agutter could practically make me faint (and we all know that when someone reaches 39 they are sexually repellent and should be killed to protect themselves from frustration and others from disgust – Logan’s Run was right in all but the actual age limit, that film was ahead of its time. One day people will listen to its message).
I should have realised that my knees were trying to tell me that this was the only woman I would truly love and here we had been brought together at an age where we could actually get together and whilst people might give us weird looks and judge us, the 24 year old me and the 39 year old Jenny might have had a few happy years together, before her looks had completely gone and I’d done a Ralph Fiennes.
I hope that the time machine is invented in my lifetime, because I will be heading back to the glorious summer of 1976, not to see the swarms of ladybirds that would descend upon you back then or myself playing hopscotch in the playground of Cheddar First School, wearing my shorts, but to the set of Logan’s Run to declare my infinite love (for the next 15 years) to the young Jenny Agutter. Ironically by that time I will be an old man myself and Jenny will probably not want anything to do with me. And insist that I am killed.
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