Funny Side Up

Recently I headed to Haute Cabrière with one of my great friends, TOE (The Other Editor), and significant others to lunch with the legendarily eccentric owners, the Von Arnims. By the time we embark on our first course we’re already way past being able to count how many glasses of my favourite wine and its cousins we have sampled to accompany the fabulous food. By the second, we are not so very certain how many of us are around the table. Is it eight or 16?

By dessert, naked artworks have been admired, tales of dancing girls on tables in Zimbabwe and family quarrels have been recounted and poetry has been recited. We’ve all eaten, laughed and drunk way too much.

Then the finale: the Von Arnims’ infamous party trick. Both father and son can deftly circumcise a Pierre Jourdan bottle, separating cork from neck in one elegant slice. With a sabre. No matter how plastered they are.

Grateful to be able to leave with body parts intact, we all part the best of friends, but not before Von Arnim Jr informs me how pleasantly surprised he was to have enjoyed our company at all. He didn’t expect to have much in common with any of us, he says, and was fearing a dismal and boring lunch. Ouch! Someone we didn’t know assumed he wouldn’t like us? Or yay! When he met us he decided he did? How does a girl take this kind of backhanded compliment?

Well, in my opinion good food and wine exist to bring people with little in common together in a spirit of jollity and bonhomie. So, I decide to take the comment as I always do, with a sense of humour. A girl can’t go through life with an intravenous drip of Haute Cabrière attached to her arm to anaesthetise her against the slings and arrows of a world where not everyone thinks she’s marvellous.

A couple of weeks ago I experienced the joy of being attacked online after writing an opinion piece in a newspaper, many of whose readers do not really
appear to love this magazine. The experience reminded me that, no matter what you read in fashion magazines, your only must-have item is a very thick skin. If you create something that some people love, it goes without saying that other people won’t. Attempting never to offend, or always to please everyone, is the route to true insanity and misery. But you might be called on, occasionally, to stand up and defend what you stand for.

There is nothing like getting up close and personal with someone or something that you assume you won’t enjoy, to discover how you truly feel about them. I am clear that COSMO is not for everyone and am happy with that. It has always been 100% for its readers, which leaves very little space on our radar for attempting to please its detractors. Our job is not to convince people who don’t get it, to get it. But you know, if someone had told me I would have really enjoyed the company of two sword-wielding, pole-dance-picture-taking, 11.30am-drinking eccentrics, I might have thought, as Takuan von Arnim initially thought about me, ‘Perhaps not.’ On the surface we don’t have much in common, and if I had decided to be judgmental and he had decided not to be open-minded we might indeed have had a miserable lunch. Instead, everyone had fun.

So here’s to open minds and open hearts; to the desire of very different people to find common ground. Here’s to the very South African spirit of making friends by clinking glasses filled with a beautiful Cape wine.

Here’s to all of you who remind me every day why we dedicate our working days to making this magazine. And here’s a personal, heartfelt thank you that the Von Arnims - and not those angry COSMO-haters - were brandishing the swords....

Author: Vanessa Raphaely