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13 things we learned about Germaine Greer's driving history

Feminist and academic Germaine Greer talked drive-ins, spiders and claustrophobia with Victoria Coren Mitchell. Here is what she revealed.

1. Her current car is described as “prize spider accommodation” as it is parked under her house in Australia. Spiders tend to appear suddenly on the windscreen when she’s halfway down the road.

2. She was accused by the police in Oxford of driving erratically. She was breathalysed and said that “for the only five minutes in that week” she didn’t have any alcohol in her system.

3. She describes driving a Mercedes as like marrying Mr Right because it never breaks down. “Most of us are secretly wishing we could marry Mr Wrong.”

4. Germaine’s students taught her to drive.

5. She loves long drives with “a silk dress and the car keys” as her only equipment.

6. Driving to a dinner party, she turned the car over when it had bags of cement in the back. Righting it, she arrived at her host’s house and they screamed as she was so dusted with cement powder she looked like “the original stone guest”.

7. She has been to a drive-in movie but has no idea what the film was as she wasn’t watching.

8. Women don’t feel they can buy something for pure pleasure, like a car, she says. They drive work horses which they use like a shopping trolley.

9. Her mother got the car stuck in a bog and spun the wheels while a young Germaine tried to push it from the back. She got plastered.

10. She’s claustrophobic so loves open cars.

11. “You couldn’t get near sex unless you had a car in the fifties,” she says, but was very annoyed when her date turned up in his Studebaker rather than the Jag she’d hoped for.

12. Her marriage only lasted three weeks, then she got out as “a matter of life and death”. After the “dreaded documents” were signed, the new husband recanted all his feminist beliefs and didn’t want Germaine to continue her independent life.

13. “I’ll still be a beginner at life and then it will be all over”, she says. Not yet, Germaine, not yet.

  • Listen to Germaine Greer talk to Victoria Coren Mitchell.

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