So, I’m at this fancy-pants dinner at a house in the Jo’burg suburbs.
There are about a dozen of us, all young and successful. The girls are tragically beautiful in that 1920s flapper kind of way, dispensing nods and smiles and little laughs to create the illusion they’re following the conversation. The boys would be less good-looking if they weren’t so smart, talking about The State of Things and gesticulating like our fathers would. Everybody has good teeth.
I’ve brought a bottle of Nero d’Avola and pulled my cufflinked sleeves up an inch for the uncorking.
“The thing I like about Sicilian wines,” I say, drier than the Nero, “is their silliness. There are lots of good South African wines, but they’re all so serious. I like a wine you can splash on your face in the morning before going to work.”
The table laughs, as do the people sitting at it. I tug the cork free, the bottle sighs and not even the poor and the sad, if their noses were pressed to the glass, would begrudge us such pleasure.
Then we get to talking about the Mail & Guardian.
“By far superior to the Sunday Times,” the captain of the chess club says.
“Perhaps,” I say. “But it could do with some boobies on the back page.”
Well. I tell you something. It gets pretty quiet for a while.
I don’t think the problem is so much that I said it. It’s more that I meant it.
Not that I would ever suggest that the M&G introduce its own back page. I’d prefer the naughty stuff on page three; makes it easier to conceal when reading in public places.
But it’s that silence you want to avoid — that silence you get when you pronounce a French place name wrong or admit that you don’t like Judi Dench.
In the foyer outside the movies the other night, I mentioned to a friend that I thought Death Proof was the best movie of 2007. If only I knew that the M&G‘s lead film critic, Shaun de Waal, had only the day before declared it foetid industrial waste.
There was that silence again.
Which is why I’ve become paranoid about posting thoughts to Thought Leader, the M&G Online‘s blogging platform for the country’s intelligentsia.
As I write this, the website’s resident thinkers are discussing the meaning of life. So you’ll understand why I’m hesitating over leading these particular thoughts:
- Are the Mormons related to the Moomins?
- Why do penguins covered in oil make us cry instead of salivate? Why not toss them in a pan and call it a buffet?
- Who died and made Bruce the Bed King king?
- Who is the “Ned” in Nedbank? Would you trust your money to Roybank? Or Stevebank?
- How come “luxury” muesli doesn’t crunch? Is the luxury not having to chew?
- Did Medusa ever turn to her husband in a moment of girlish insecurity and ask: “Does my asp look big in this?”
- Is mature cheddar the kind that doesn’t laugh at dirty jokes? In that case, I choose immature cheddar.
Sure, sometimes I do highbrow — like a lot of fancy-pantses, I love sushi.
But if the things that make sushi great are the bright colours, the bold flavours, the bite-size moreish-ness of the stuff, I have to accept that these are the same things I love about Ghostpops.
Just don’t ask me to choose one over the other.