Peter Sarstedt famously asked “Where do you go to, my lovely, when you’re alone in your bed?” The simple answer to this question is that his lovely is not going anywhere. She is in bed, quite possibly asleep. Why, then, would the singer – whose first wife was a dentist – pose the query in the first place?

We can posit several solutions to this conundrum, and it is well worth doing so, for reasons which ought to be obvious – and obvious not only to the spouses of dentists, but to the general population also.

One theory, propounded by veteran Sarstedtist Loopy Tinhat, is that the question mark ought to appear after “my lovely”, and that “when you’re alone in your bed” is a new, separate sentence, the beginning of a rumination quite distinct from the opening query. In this reading, Sarstedt is about to make certain observations regarding his lovely in her bed, but he is interrupted before he is able to complete the sentence. Tinhat suggests the singer spoke from the dentist’s chair, when his wife was about to perform a tooth extraction, and told him to “open wide” just as he uttered the word “bed”.

Tinhat’s theory won broad support among the my lovely community until it was comprehensively demolished by researcher Lars Welk. Using dental records, slowed-down tape recordings, and a fiercely forensic brain, Welk demonstrated beyond sensible argument that Tinhat had no idea what he was talking about.

More persuasive, perhaps, is the argument laid out over several coruscating paragraphs by Ned Cakeboy in a paper published in The Journal Of Dental Hygiene & Sarstedt Studies, Vol XXIV No. 11. Pointing out that, just as doctors get sick and require the ministrations of other doctors, so dentists call on other dentists to faff about with their teeth when necessary. He goes on to claim that the bed in which my lovely is alone is a hospital bed, on wheels or casters. She is about to undergo particularly complex dental treatment, and has been wheeled, in her bed, from her ward to a dental operating theatre. Peter Sarstedt, paying a visit to his dentist lovely born of uxoriousness, armed probably with a bouquet of flowers, arrives at the dental hospital to discover that she is not, as he supposed, in her ward. Where did she go to?, he wonders.

I said there were several possible solutions to account for the singer asking such a seemingly stupid question, and I have tackled two of them. That is quite enough for the time being. In any case, these matters become decidedly more baffling when we consider that Sarstedt’s second wife was not a dentist.