on a Greer day...

I wanted to write something about the interview with Salman Rushdie in last week's Telegraph, where he says "we are all living under a fatwa now." I hadn't thought of it that way, but I guess he's right. But now I have no inspiration to say anything about the subject. Maybe I'm just tired.

Anyway, more space was given to Rushdie's domestic bliss with his "fourth and last" wife, the impossibly beautiful, embarrassingly young (why is no one embarrassed?) and oh-so-in-love-with-him (isn't it wonderful) Padma Lakshmi. He says, "she's an astonishingly talented young woman who is just coming into her own." He sounds more like her dad, if you ask me. But then, no one did: unlike Salman, I'm probably a little too old to be interesting!

I did like the part where he so refreshingly said, and I paraphrase but probably only slightly: "I'm saying something people don't usually say about Germaine Greer: she's completely mad."

Of course that has been her charm all these years, but one mustn't take anything she says literally. (Would it have bothered him when she was a leggy 32-year-old? In May 1971 Greer appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine, with the cover line: "Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like".) I just wish she'd say something about Rushdie's alleged reputation for being some kind of Nicky Haslam-style party animal. He was at such pains to deny that he knows how to dance at all that it kind of got me thinking...