Or.. how Paul Bonna’s Kaffeekommune in the Breidenbacherstrasse in Mainz reached a global audience of over 50 million viewers.
Via Chinese Global Television Network
Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other.
In New Zealand, there are only 2.
Everyone knows someone who knows someone else that you know.
Paul Bonna runs the excellent Kaffeekommune in the Breidenbacherstrasse in Mainz.
John and Anneliese live 10km away in a village founded by the Romans.
They’ve known Paul since 2012 when the Kaffeekommune was a pop-up shop on the corner of Breidenbacherstrasse and Gaustrasse.
John comes from New Zealand.
Isobel Ewing also comes from New Zealand.
She’s an award-winning journalist with Feature Story News, currently based in Budapest. (She also cycled almost 2500km of the Silk Road in just over 2 months, but that’s another story. )
She knows John because her grandfather once owned the cottage in New Zealand which John and Anneliese renovated and moved to the coast and where they spend 4 months of the year.
Isobel also knows John because her mum, Alison, went to school with Robin, wife of Steve Fullmer, a famous New Zealand potter.
John and Anneliese know them both. They’ve been collecting his work for decades.
Paul knows Steve, because John and Anneliese gave Paul and his wife Angela a Steve Fullmer wine cooler as a wedding present.
Isobel was in Frankfurt last week and had a commission from China Global Television Network to produce a clip about the impact of Covid 19 on small businesses.
She had 2 hours to find someone to talk to. She knew no-one in the region.
Apart from John.
She calls John, John calls Paul, just over an hour later, she’s at the Kaffeekommune with a cameraman filming the clip.
And it all ended up in the local newspaper….
And on David Slack’s superb More than a Feilding newsletter. Along with my cheese puffs
Which sort of closes the circle and proves the 2 degrees of separation in New Zealand theory.
I know David because we both rated Doddery Old Fart and his Rest Area 300 blog.
Isobel knows David because they’re both journos in a pretty small pond.
And David knows my surrogate kid sister Robby, because they used to work together back in the early 80s.
Except he didn’t know.
He said that he used to see her and recognisedherbutnotsurefromwhere around the village that is Devonport where they both live.
It didn’t click until the 3 of us bumped into each other on the corner of Victoria and Clarence…..
And it gets better. The folk renting our cottage might be Wellingtonians, but I first met Gabi at Paul’s espresso bar in 2015. And Frida’s boyfriend, a chef, used to work at Ministry of Food, one David Slack’s sources for excellence in cheese scones.
Mainz Daily Photo 