Brigitte Bardot , John Lennon

Even the most happily married men are allowed some peccadillos.

I’m allowed to swear in front of the children, for example, but only if we’re watching football: sports-related language is forgiven. (This is a new rule that has come in since my daughter turned 21.) It’s OK for me to be cuddled by gorgeous young women, provided that they are famous for being sexy (Leilani, Nell, Jodie, Jordan) and provided I insist afterwards to Hanna that she’s much sexier than any of them. Which is no hardship, because she is, and it guarantees that I get another cuddle from Hanna.

And it’s OK for me to have an impossible crush on one (maximum limit) screen goddess. I may sigh helplessly when she appears on television, I may treat myself to late-night DVD viewings of her classic movies, I may cite her in interviews as the only woman on earth who could tempt me to infidelity.

It goes without saying that I never expect to meet this goddess, that I couldn’t imagine she would know me from Adam, and that it’s unthinkable that her first reaction would be to grab me and kiss me full on the lips.(I’m not talking about Sophia Loren, by the way. I met her in the early Seventies, and she was unspeakably beautiful, and I refuse to say whether she kissed me.)

I was not thinking about screen sirens this week, as I sat in a conference hall in Geneva, listening to the endless debates of the Red Cross and Red Crescent delegates, when I heard Shipi, my brother-in-law, hiss my name. I turned, and he was beckoning frantically at me: “Get out of there! Wake up! Come on!”
My first thought was that a bomb was about to go off — but Shipi would surely have alerted security. Alarms would be ringing. Then I decided there must be some nightmare news breaking, something that I had to see on CNN, and my blood ran cold. Another twin towers? I glanced around the room, but everyone else was calm — no pagers, no text messages.

My fears turned to my family, but one look at Shipi’s face reassured me. He was very excited about something, and it didn’t look like bad news. “You’ve got to see who’s in the lobby,” he whispered. We hurried down the corridor, with Shipi refusing to spill the secret, and my jaw dropped: there, holding court for a scrum of photographers, was my goddess — BB.

I’ve been rehearsing this moment since 1961. Reaching out to clasp her hand in both of mine, I said in the throatiest voice I could muster: “Brigitte Bardot, je suis Uri Geller.”

What happened next might possibly be the best shock of my life. If God had chosen any moment during the next few days to strike me down with a blast of lightning, I really couldn’t have complained: I was halfway to heaven anyhow. Miss Bardot threw her arms around my neck, gasped “Oh my God!” and hugged me to her bosom. I almost fainted.
Perhaps I looked ready to pass out, because she pushed my chin up, cupped my face and
pressed her lips to mine so fiercely that my eyes popped. This was the kiss of life like it has never been given before.

You might think this is a typical Sixties-child fantasy, but I’ve got the photos to proved it. Shipi was snapping away like a papparazzo, and in the last frame Bardot’s shocking pink lipstick is smeared all over my silly grin.

We talked about her charity work, and she explained she was in Geneva to promote a campaign against seal culling. She commented on my coat, and I was quick to show her that it was fake fur. That delighted her. The strangest synchronicity was that I’d never worn it before, though I
bought it in New York more than a decade ago — I’d just plucked it from the wardrobe before I got on the plane, hoping that someone would ask me why I was wearing fur if I was a veggie. I never dreamed that ‘someone’ would be the most famous veggie on the planet.

Brigitte looks stunning. She has a mature face, and has wisely stayed away from plastic surgery — no doctor in the world could create a face so real and so beautiful. Her eyes are her most attractive feature, but frankly every inch of her is wonderful. I have to admit I have great taste in goddesses.

On the 25th anniversary of the murder of my friend John Lennon, I was delighted to join a tribute at the Virgin Megastore in Tottenham Court Road.
The stone egg which John gave me, and whch he believed had been given to him by aliens, was on display in a cabinet, and we listened to his timeless music.
I was deeply touched that, after months of working to bring Israelis and Palestinians together in a humanitarian effort,
the soundtrack of the times should be John’s ‘Imagine’: “Imagine there’s no countries... it isn’t hard to do.”