“She’s a manifester, if there ever was one,” he says. “First-rate manifester. Madonna makes things happen. Put Madonna up against any twenty-three-year-old, she’ll outwork them, outdance them, outperform them. The woman is broad.”

“And, of course, here you go: I still love her,” he says. He takes a breath, drives through a red light. If no one is ahead of him, Guy Ritchie does not typically stop. “But she’s retarded, too.”

It’s rocky getting a divorce, innit? I say.

“You can’t tell someone when they’re getting divorced that their pain is an illusion,” he says. “I’m ***CENSORED*** telling you, I feel it, I’ve been through that. You have, too. No one can say you don’t feel that.” He drives on, talking more. “That’s the illusion of the illusion. The biggest fundamental is, you need a little ignorance.” We glance along the top of Hyde Park and out of the blue Ritchie says: “My second line is less simple than the first. It hangs some people up.”