I scanned the seating area outside and took a table in the shade next to the one occupied by two bedraggled bints gossiping about Big Brother. Desperate to drown-out their tittering I turned the volume on my Ipod up, took a big gulp of coffee, lit a cigarette, and immersed myself in my book. Five minutes in to my meditation, one of the women tapped on my table. I raised my eyes to find her smiling sweetly. She appraised me scrupulously with her dull blue irises and said: ‘I’m sorry but would you mind moving, the smoke is a little bit smelly.’ I replicated her smile with an equal measure of sweetness, whilst batting down an overwhelming urge to shove my headphones up her nostril, and said: ‘So is the odor of your cheap perfume but do you see me complaining?’ I watched her face congeal in shock; my lips drooped sneeringly. I took another drag on my cigarette, insouciantly flicked the ash in no particular direction, and returned to my book.

Some half an hour later three portly stiffs replaced the bints. After discussing cricket, impending holidays abroad and the socio-economic crisis, their conversation turned to ‘public intellectuals’. (Still slightly perplexed as to the meaning of this term but never mind.) Apparently some magazine has recently drawn up a list of a 100 such persons. Quite bored at this point I plunged in to my book until one of the stiffs informed the other two that he was rather thrilled to see Sir(!) Salman Rushdie make the grade. I lit another cigarette and listened to them sing Sir Salman’s praises. Ten minutes in to it I was convinced the magazine in question was designed for amiable middlebrow liberals and thus the list consisted of the like who energetically applied themselves to fashionable issues such as poverty, Islam, global warming, sectarian loathing etc. All this was good and fine, only I couldn’t understand why Rushdie – neither the most innovative nor thoughtful of writers – was deemed an intellectual. But then I couldn’t think offhand of anything more quintessentially un-intellectual than a ranking system devised by wannabe polymath hacks that'd masticated on some stuff and partially digested it. So never mind.

It seems we live in a world where smoking is equated to sucking on a crack pipe, Big Brother is deemed a major breakthrough in broadcasting and Salman Rushdie is considered an intellectual as opposed to a controversy-courting scribbler and a sugar-daddy to his young wife. Our brave new world is like that joke about the number of surrealists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer being: Banana. No, I don’t find it funny either.