Lots and lots of pushy WIWs

Remember, I was talking about hats the other day? The annual O magazine tea party would have made Oprah proud (she's coming out for a reader's breakfast at the end of the year and I hope to see her again. Last time was in about 2004/6 at the Sandton Convention Centre where the orgy of Oprah adulation saw 4000 women dancing up and down hysterically, with the result that the place nearly fell down).

Everyone wore a hat of some sorts, even if some of the white floppy ones obviously came from Woolies and had done a great deal of service. My FAVOURITE hat of the day belonged to Miss South Africa Tatum Keshwar, who "got changed in the car". She wore a little head-hugging, 30s cocktail hat made of downy little orange-speckled pheasant feathers with a bit of bling keeping it all together in the middle. Feathers are terribly flattering to a woman's face, especially if they frame it softly. I know I have been slagging David Tlale off a lot recently as I just think he has become so impossible and his designs just weren't up to scratch, but this outfit completely redeemed him. Tatum, being a model, knows how to wear her clothes too, and her champagne-coloured, satin ballooon skirt worn with super high heels suited her to perfection. We do have some beautiful women in this country, don't we?

My spirit of sisterliness was shattered a bit when I arrived, I must confess. The parking at Avianto was full so we were being directed around the back. Just as I was about to pull into a space a white Mini Cooper shot around me and took that exact space. It was a lady in white who did the deed but as the whole place was pullulating with WIWs (Women in White) it was hard to track her down inside and poke her eyes out with a tea fork.

She was not alone in her pushiness. Some of the O magazine readers have mistaken Oprah's advice to be assertive for downright aggression. The pushing and shoving in the queues for neck mssages had to be seen to be believed. I was too afraid to go for my tea and sandwiches but the wildebeest hordes seemed to have calmed down by then. Perhaps all the gifts and goody bags had calmed them down.

But it is a peculiar thing about human beings, how situations like this seems to bring out the worst in them, isn't it? Some of the functions I go to, where the people are very well-off, sees displays of pushing and shoving in the food lines as though the whole of Sandton is in the middle of a Stalinburg-like siege and that really is the last sandwich in town that clawlike fingers are stabbing at each other over.

Though I can talk, can't I? All that talk of tea forks!