Dr Ophelia Hart fell in love with all things eastern back in the Summer of Love, when she made love to a guru to the sound of a sitar. Well, he wasn’t a really a guru. And they’d gone no further than petting. And the sitar was on a George Harrison record.

They met at a party. The Party! The one where she drank her first glass of wine. Being teetotal wasn’t cool amongst the crowd there. So one glass of wine seemed reasonable. Given how much everyone else was drinking or smoking.

It didn’t take long before she was tipsy and wondering whether to have another glass. It could give her courage to go up and talk to the tall bearded stranger who so fascinated her. Ophelia had been looking at him all night. But he was surrounded by all these girls and boys and she felt completely invisible to him.

That’s when somebody put George Harrison on. And partly because of the wine, and partly because of the atmosphere, she stopped being shy and started dancing to the record.

She couldn’t believe her luck when the tall bearded stranger left his friends and come over to join her. And better still he told her she was beautiful.

His name was Dylan. He’d recently been on retreat in India and he was currently hanging out at art school, doing something “cool. “They went out for six months and he leant her books on theosophy and the western occult tradition.

After just a few weeks of living together she discovered he was broke. But that didn’t seem to matter to him and he convinced her not to get hung up on money or material possessions anymore. Didn’t she know Capitalism sucked!

Being part of the “in crowd” they got invited to parties and when they weren’t partying they slept under the stars.

She supported them by doing a few modelling jobs. And although her feminist friends disapproved of a woman taking off her clothes “to be ogled at by men,” he noted with approval how liberated she was becoming under his influence. She was no longer the shy girl that he’d met.

She was happy, free and in love.

She gave up time, money, her body, and meat but in return she had his love.

The first warning she had something was wrong was when she caught him stuffing his face with bacon at an open-air music festival. Dylan blamed it on the catering muttering “Even vegetarians can lapse when hungry,” but there were some stony silences, on the brightly painted bus, on the way back from the festival.

That was only the beginning. Soon she became ever more suspicious of Dylan. Was he really called Dylan? And just how did he get to India? When according to her friends he didn’t even have a passport.
The relationship ended when she caught him cheating on her with two of her girlfriends. She was too jealous by nature to be into free love. By this time she had had enough of his lies and like the Beatles was growing disillusioned with Gurus.

So she ran home to her parents and after a few weeks of anguish bounced back and turned her life around.

And while she never got over her first love, the sigh she remembered him with would not have flattered Dylan.

He’d promised to take her to India. He’d taken his name from a folk singer. He was nothing but a fraud. A phoney. He’d even stolen from another culture: one that still fascinated her.

Since his exile the Doctor had developed a passion for various primitive and often dangerous forms of transport. He loved fast cars, motorbikes, and hovercrafts. The Doctor liked nothing better than whizzing through the beautiful English countryside in his vintage roadster Bessie, attracting amazed looks from his fellow motorists, whom he rapidly left behind. But one thing half-spoiled his pleasure “If only Bessie could fly.”

If only she could slip the bonds of gravity and hover in the sky.

The Doctor had once rather reluctantly attended a performance of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with his companion Jo Grant. Much to his surprise (and to Jo’s relief) he found himself immensely enjoying the film, so much so, he was soon happily singing all the songs in the film, while driving Bessie - his companion Jo Grant joining in the chorus with a rousing:

“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We love you. Chitty Chitty Bessie. Chitty Chitty Bessie. We love you.”

When Jo asked the Doctor what he most liked about the film. He simply pointed to the sky.

So when the Doctor read about the amazing levitation experiments being conducted at the Pyschophysics Institute in London; he knew he had to meet Dr Ophelia Hart.

Ophelia had inherited a first class brain from her scientist parents and did well academically. Not long after leaving University she started working in physics labs — but seeing no future for herself in physics she made the switch to psychology. And after contributing a short autobiographical article to Science News was invited by that publication to finally visit India.

The magazine wanted a piece on the so-called miracles of a modern day saint.

The Swami produced the most amazing phenomena — “turning rocks into diamonds,” “getting sticks to bear fruit in half an hour,” — but when Ophelia insisted on testing him “under controlled conditions,” the swami got angry. He was even angrier still when his “assistant” confessed to her that “it had all been a fraud.”

Her love of India and Holy Men remained, but some of the scepticism she had acquired from her time with Dylan transferred to various men and women who often turned out no better than him.

“A flying car! What a wonderful idea, Doctor”
“I knew you’d understand me, Ophelia”
“But it would be difficult for us to manage the feat”.
“Well, you’re the one that got a frog to levitate? I was most impressed by those pictures in Nature.”
“Ah but that was all thanks to molecular magnetism. We induced diamagnetism in frogs, ,hazelnuts, water droplets. There’s some interesting science behind those pics.”
“May I suggest something much more interesting will happen, if you’d only abandon that line of research and concentrate on the neutralisation of gravity instead.”
“You mean anti-gravity! But that’s impossible, Doctor!”

Although she was disappointed to discover further deception in India and at home, Ophelia did catch glimpses of genuine spirituality She even took up mediation and finally got round to re-reading her old books on Theosophy. Although she found them distasteful, they were so full of tall stories, they inspired her to seek out “something real” in the sacred texts of Buddhism.

Contemplating the alleged levitation of mystics Ophelia wondered if there could be “levitation without meditation.”

“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! Why of course I’ve read Ian Fleming’s one and only children’s story. But that’s just wonderful, Doctor. You see, I was also inspired by a book and a film.”

And that’s when Ophelia really became interested in the Doctor and the challenge he set her. He was the first person since Chakra who truly understood her and shared her dreams.
She now had someone to talk to about them instead of having to converse with a memory that had no reality outside her head.

Just a memory? Surely Chakra was more than that? She was a pattern of information that had become part of Ophelia’s own Self Model. Ophelia had been forever changed by her love for Chakra and part of her would remain Chakra forever.

Maybe it wasn’t so foolish to keep talking to her dead lover after all.

If only I could fly to you, Chakra. Rise into the air like the mysterious nanny with the magic umbrella and walk upon the clouds. We could dance upon the roofs of London together. If Chitty Chitty Bang Bang met Mary Poppins what a wonderful match that would be.