Ringo and I

In mid-July a friend lent me a flat in London for a week. He said the flat was in Chelsea, near Duke of York Square. He mentioned nearby supermarkets, bookshops and restaurants, and spoke of the doorman. "Oh, and by the way," he added, "it seems that Ringo Starr has a flat in the same building." "Who?" I asked. "Ringo Starr," he repeated, "the drummer of the Beatles." He went on talking, but I heard no more.

I am not a starry-eyed obssessive, though once I met Johan Cruyff in the street and then spent a week talking like him. But Ringo Starr is Ringo Starr. I was born, excuse me, in the rock decade, and the Beatles are to rock what Cruyff is to soccer. True, Ringo has always been considered the least talented of the Beatles. I am not about to discuss that; I will say only that, though my arrogance is diabolical and my vanity insufferable, I know that I am not worthy to kiss the ground trod by even the humblest of the Beatles.

So you will readily understand that, when I learned I was about to live in a building where Ringo Starr has a flat, I decided to write an article titled Ringo and I - a Kafkaesque, conjectural article. Kafkaesque because, as I knew I was very unlikely to see Ringo, it would be an article in which Ringo was conspicuous by his absence, just as in The Castle , the castle is glaringly absent, and in The Trial , the trial. The article would be all about my schemes to see Ringo - keeping watch in the hallway, bribing the doorman to tell me what flat he lives in, etc. Conjectural, because the other half of the article would be all conjecture: what would I do if I met him in the elevator, for example? Whistle Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da while gazing at the ceiling? Go through the motions of drumming, while making appropriate noises with the mouth? Block his path of escape? Faint?

When I arrived in London I had not yet written the article, but I already had it down pat in my head. That afternoon, after taking possession of the flat, I wanted to answer my emails and, as my friend had told me there was no WiFi in flat but that there was a connection in the hall of the building, I went down to the hall with my iPad and started writing. I had been at it a while when, just as I raised my head from the iPad, I saw him - it was him: small, thin, with sunglasses, leaving the elevator and slipping out the back door of the building, preceded by a woman. When I recovered (partially), I understood that if I hadn't known he had a flat there, or hadn't spent a week thinking of the article I was going to write, I might not have even recognized him. I immediately wrote an sms to my friend, where I swore on my mother's grave that I had just seen Ringo. He immediately wrote back: "You're a lying scoundrel. I haven't seen him in all these years, and you sight him right off."

Still stunned by the apparition of Ringo, I realized that I had just created a problem for myself, in that I could no longer write Ringo and I - at least, not the way I had planned to write it, simply because I had actually seen Ringo. On the other hand, if I wrote Ringo and I , telling that I had seen Ringo, half the people would not believe me and the other half would hate me for having seen Ringo. The other possibility was to keep quiet, and pretend I had never seen Ringo. Could I do it? Would I be capable of keeping this terrible secret all my life? Then I thought: and what if that guy was not Ringo after all? But it was: the next day the newspapers said he had been in London to receive the Icon award from Mojo magazine. So Ringo Starr had spoiled my article on Ringo Starr. Since then I have been wondering what to do about it. At last I fell back on my diabolical arrogance and insufferable vanity, and said what the hell, when I decide to write an article on Ringo Starr nobody is going to spoil it, not even Ringo Starr. So here you have it.