Rosemary Mcleod
My on-again off-again relationship with Vogue was challenged again this week, but we really must accept that Anna Wintour, that skinny paragon of thin-lipped elegance, is never wrong.
What a relief, because when Kim Kardashian made it to the American issue's latest cover in a pavlova frock, her upper torso oozing out of it like flesh-coloured whipped cream, I thought I was having a bad day.
It's disturbing when you find that famous people have actual flesh. It conjures up thoughts of body odour and dental floss when you thought they were all plastic. Others have condemned Wintour's choice of cover girl; Twitter has sprung into action; but she rules from a tall ladder.
I try, then, to keep up with whatever she declares to be hip, ironic and edgy, bowing to her wisdom, stomach sucked in as best I can, which is neither as easy as it sounds, nor as effective as I could wish.
Finding the relevance of Vogue isn't always easy, either, when your body has never been the shape and size of a toddler's crayon. But a copy of the glossy is really a trip to fantasyland, where you are, in your imagination, a crayon person with hair splayed out on an exotic beach, or brandishing a $50,000 handbag like a threat against insolent beggars.
There is no size, in Vogue world, above a 4, unless you're a Kardashian wearing the aforesaid pavlova. An exception has been made for Kim, as if for royalty. Flesh is elegant if you're very rich must be Wintour's message, so think of Kim Dotcom here, who I'll call Kim II, and his handkerchief-sized wisp of a wife. They'd also make an excellent cover.
I do wish Wintour had been first to recognise Kim I's hip, ironic and edgy qualities, but Playboy and Cosmopolitan beat her to it - in Cosmo's case with the taglines, "Sex Move, the move that brings you closer," and, "How to talk dirty without sounding ridiculous." So cool.
Kim I, like our Kim II, is not like us, because she's famous.
Her life is lived in exclamation marks, usually on down-market magazine covers alongside thought-provoking cover lines about her life, "Tortured by Her Body!" "I'll Never Be Sexy Again!" "Don't Call Me Fat!" "Kayne Demands a Son!" and "Kim's Revenge Body!" She is currently said to be "Pregnant Again!"
Your children probably watch her family's endless spats and antics on TV. So the Kardashian days pass, and the money keeps rolling in.
Recently, below the Kardashian radar, a woman from a different world died. A less glamorous person than Clarissa Dickson Wright, of the 1990s Two Fat Ladies TV cooking programme could hardly be imagined.
Growing up with a distinguished but violent alcoholic father, she offended him by training as a barrister, in due course inheriting a fortune and squandering it on a 12-year alcoholic bender. Sober for the rest of her life, she relished artery-clogging food thick with cream and animal fats, and died at the age of 66.
She may have looked like a haggis tied with string, but Dickson Wright claimed to have had "a splendidly enjoyable life," and her appreciative following quite disregarded her appearance. The Kardashians may be many elegant things, as Wintour sees it, but I know whose company I'd rather have had on a wet Sunday on planet real.