Standing up for Saatchi

The whole thing was so Anglo-Saxon. So bloody English. If they had been in Rome the restaurant would have taken sides, throwing bread pellets. I am talking about the sequence of pictures of Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi.

Okay, bolt me down, thrust a dagger in my heart (I have already lost a lot of Twitter followers) but I think the pictures showed the signs of a dark, wild and fizzing relationship.

Scenes like this are everyday in Latin countries. I worked as an au pair in Pesaro, Italy, for a few years. The husband of the house insisted we made the tomato sauce for the pasta out of fresh tomatoes. Once when we didn't, he turned the whole table upside down.

He also had a way of holding his hand over my mouth and saying, "fare silenzio". For some reason I never thought of it as abuse.

Let me tell you what I do call abuse. I call it abuse when a man takes you out to dinner and turns up wearing a short-sleeved bright-white polycotton shirt with a pen protector in the pocket.

I call it abuse when he doesn't know that Gatsby was first a book before a film and swirls the wine around in his glass and gazes at the ceiling and thinks Evelyn Waugh is a woman.

I call it abuse when he is wearing cheap shoes and goes over and over the bill and finally says, "I think we had one coffee not two." I call it abuse when he takes the leftover wine home, tucked into his faux leather wine carrier.

I call it abuse when he is wearing cheap shoes, has nothing to say and is quite happy about it.

Restaurants all over Cape Town are full of men sitting glumly across from women, men who can't even muster up the energy for a good fight.

Loving is a dangerous thing. It requires passion, emotion, audacity, courage and imagination, something Charles and Nigella have in sledgeloads.

Think of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who once tore a whole house apart and flung chairs out of the windows. Think of Dylan Thomas and Caitlin, leaving their swampy trail of invective in every low-rent hole in town. Their love was like a loaded gun.

There was something so intense, provocative and involved about the photos of Charles and Nigella, a woman the Tudors would have referred to as "a comfortable armful". I'd bet anything that they went home and had the kind of sex that really drains the swamp.

It was Nigella who coined the phrase "Bliss Point", an edgy combo of salt and sugar, the gustatory equivalent of the G-spot. Now here's a girl who knows a cup cake from three dozen oysters and a bottle of Henri Jayer Grand Cru.

She married a barbarian, brilliant, determinedly unfashionable, ruthlessly unconventional, who could hoover up young artists like Damian Hirst long before anyone gave them the time of day.

Here was a man who lived on planet shock, the title of whose book was "Be the worst you can be, life's too long for patience and virtue". A man so easily bored he once said: "If heroin could be offered in more convenient capsule or liquid form, and be easily available at [grocery stores], that would be a considerable boon."

A domestic goddess certainly has her points but, in the future, I think it's going to need more than old-fashioned chocolate cake to do the trick.