Most of us, on discovering that we had accidentally married Jeremy Clarkson for a few years in our early twenties, would be happy to draw a veil over it. Leave it out of the autobiography, if you know what I mean. accidents, as Clarkson demonstrates all the time, do happen.  But who can really know the desperation that others feel? alex Hall, the first Mrs Petrolhead, had two failed marriages and was a single mother of two teenage sons. The company that she had set up to sell bar snacks - called The Big O - to pubs was struggling. She had even been rejected on Dragons' Den, for goodness' sake.  We can only imagine that times were so hard that Mrs Hall felt angry because nobody knew that she had been the first wife of the Top Gear presenter and bestselling author, who, after they divorced, went on to become a household name worth millions of pounds. and not only that, but she engaged the publicist Max Clifford to claim that she and Clarkson had an affair after he had remarried.  It is important for legal reasons to pause here and note that although Clarkson yesterday lifted the injunction on Mrs Hall, allowing her to make her claims in public, he has denied her allegations. Not that Clarkson himself will be reading this: he has said that he is spending the week filming in a nuclear submarine. Proving that there is no crisis - climate change, or otherwise - that he cannot run away from in a boy's toy.  allegations of affairs, however false, are, of course, upsetting for Clarkson's wife and children, but I'm not sure if they really damage the reputation of the man himself. He cultivates the image of one so red-blooded that he injects raw steak into a vein for breakfast and follows it with a shot of diesel chaser. He has made a fortune trading in being a naughty boy. If it would stick a finger up to the politically correct brigade, he gives the impression that he would party the night away with a baboon, perhaps the one that his mate a. a. Gill shot dead for a stunt.  No, what is interesting is the question that this raises about the power of first love. Let's set a little test - purely hypothetical, let me emphasise yet again: if your husband or wife had to have an affair, would you rather it was with (a) someone new or (b) with their first big love? It's got to be (a), hasn't it? Because, by the way, this is only a small refinement of another one that you can all play at home: if your partner had to have an affair, would you rather it was with (a) a prostitute or (b) someone they were emotionally involved with? More difficult this one, but I think that we would mostly plump for (a) again.  affairs with random totty are immature. affairs with first loves put the adult into adultery. They move the tawdry into territory that is dark, complicated and fascinating. The former could, perhaps, be explained away by physical urges, the latter, well, it speaks of an inner life that can't be explained away. Never go back, they say, but we all understand the human compulsion when people can't seem to help thems