Scritti Politti

Nobody could call the Italian president handsome. Nobody would call him anything other than average-looking, and at 74 he should be grateful for even that civility. So how come, according to snowballing reports of his private life last week, he's regularly surrounded by pretty girls performing the age-old rite of prancing about in skimpy undies? And is this proof of his superior intelligence, or of his vast fortune?

Rosemary, I shall try to put this gently: the latter would seem to be the case. At least one of those pretty girls, moreover, would seem to have been too young to do what she allegedly was being paid to do.

Rosemary McLeod is the author of A girl like I (Dunedin : J. McIndoe, 1976) a comic novel about the adventures of a sexually naïve young woman.