Whenever the word Louise came into my mind I replaced it with a brick wall. After a few hours of this my mind was nothing but brick walls. Worse, my left hand was swelling up, I don’t think it was getting enough blood being strapped to the chair leg. There was no sign of the gentleman. I signalled to a guard and whispered my problem. He returned with a fellow guard and together they picked up my chair and carried me sedan style down the British Library Reading Room. It is a tribute to the scholarly temperament that nobody looked up.

In the supervisor’s office I tried to explain.

‘You a Communist?’ he said.

‘No I’m a floating voter.’

He had me cut loose and charged me for Wilful Damage To Reading Room Chair. I tried to make him amend that to ‘accidental damage’ but he wouldn’t. Then he filed his report very solemnly and told me I’d have to hand over my ticket.

‘I can’t hand over my ticket. It’s my livelihood.’

‘Should a thought a that before you handcuffed yourself to Library Property.’

I gave him my ticket and got an appeal form. Could I fall any lower?

The answer was yes. I spent the whole night prowling outside Louise’s house like a private dick. I watched the lights going off at some windows, on at others. Was she in his bed? What did that have to do with me? I ran a schizophrenic dialogue with myself through the hours of darkness and into the small hours, so called because the heart shrivels up to the size of a pea and there is no hope left in it.

By morning I was home shivering and wretched. I welcomed the shivering since I hoped it might portend a fever. If I were delirious for a few days her leaving me might hurt less. With luck I might even die. ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ Shakespeare was wrong, I was living proof of that.

‘You ought to be dead proof,’ I said to myself. ‘If you’re living proof he was right.’

I sat down to make a will leaving everything to Louise. Was I in sound mind and body? I took my temperature. No. I peered at my head in the mirror. No. Better go to bed close the curtains and get out the gin bottle.

That was how Louise found me at 6 o’clock on the evening of the third day. She’d been telephoning since noon but I had been too sodden to notice.

‘They’ve taken my ticket away,’ I said when I saw her.

I burst into tears and lay blubbering in her arms. There was nothing she could do except give me a bath and a sleeping draught. In my sinking haze I heard her say, ‘I will never let you go.’

No-one knows what forces draw two people together. There are plenty of theories; astrology, chemistry, mutual need, biological drive. Magazines and manuals worldwide will tell you how to pick the perfect partner. Dating agencies stress the science of their approach although having a computer does not make one a scientist. The old music of romance is played out in modern digital ways. Why leave yourself to chance when you could leave yourself to science? Shortly the pseudo-lab coat approach of dating by details will make way for a genuine experiment whose results, however unusual, will remain controllable. Or so they say. (See splitting the atom, gene therapy, in vitro fertilisation, cross hormone cultures, even the humble cathode ray for similar statements.) Never mind. Virtual Reality is on its way.