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www.thevillagenews.co.za
6 January 2021
MY HOME
2021 – The Year of the Ox By Stephen de Stadler Managing Director Fine & Country Hermanus, Arabella and Kleinmond
H
appy New Year to all the readers of and contributors to The Village NEWS. May 2021 deliver all your hopes and expectations, and may we end the year in a better frame of mind than many people were in at the end of 2020. Finding ourselves in Level 3 lockdown as 2020 moved into 2021, we were unable to host our traditional New Year’s Party, so my family and I decided to enjoy the Royal Variety Performance on television. For those of you who do not know, the Royal Variety Performance is an annual event arranged by the Royal Variety Charity, which seeks to raise money to support the performing arts, and in particular to support persons who have been professionally involved in the industry and need help. This annual event is normally broadcast from a large theatre in the UK, where the audience (including members of the Royal Family) enjoy a variety of performances. This year the performance was broadcast from Blackpool at the Opera House within the Winter
Gardens, and for the first time ever had a virtual audience. The performers could however see their audience as screens were placed on every seat in the theatre, and those screens showed the audience participating from their homes. It was truly a spectacular sight, but strongly reminded us of the reality of lockdown.
2nd quarter of 2021. The residential property market is experiencing a definite increase in activity, and specifically in Hermanus and Arabella, correctly priced homes are now selling. Sellers have had to lower their expectations, but importantly prices are still showing real growth over the course of the last five years.
We hope that by 31 December 2021, normality will have returned to the world, and concerts such as this will no longer have to be virtual. On the subject of charity, allow me to also at the same time thank all of you, on behalf of the Fine & Country Foundation, for the generous donations which we received on the evening of the Carols for Causes Concert.
We learned during the last year to value friendships, to maintain relationships and to be truly resilient. In my own home we spent a large part of the festive season decluttering our lives. Working through our linen and kitchen cupboards, we removed anything we had not used in over a year. Apart from the fact that the cupboards are now more manageable and just look so much neater, we were able to donate a large amount of mainly unused linen and crockery to our local homeless shelter.
But what of the future? While I am not a believer in horoscopes, I find it interesting to read what various foretellers of the future have predicted for 2021. According to the Chinese zodiac, 2021 is the Year of the Ox, which means that this year is going to be ‘lucky’ and a perfect time to ‘focus on relationships’. We hope that ‘lucky’ is not merely relative to 2020, and that a focus on relationships does not mean we will be entering further periods of rigorous lockdown. Be that as it may, we enter the new year with cautious optimism as the accelerated worldwide development of Covid-19 vaccines means they will be available to us during the
We had a lot of laughs as we tried to remember where a particular serving platter had come from, while wondering why we thought it necessary to have more than one set of cutlery. We had a number of single bed duvets, but our adult children all have larger beds! The experience itself was tremendously satisfying, and really did come about because we realised during 2020 that we did not need as much as we’d thought in order to live comfortably. The world as a whole has changed, and more and more people are happy with what they
have, and do not need to derive comfort from something they think they need. I can certainly recommend the decluttering experience as being most liberating. The start of 2021 also brought some great news from Fitch Ratings. The international rating agency upgraded the national scale creditworthiness assessment of the five biggest banks in South Africa. According to Fitch, “the upgrades reflect Fitch's view that the South African banks' creditworthiness has improved relative to the best credits in the country, including the sovereign and government-related entities. Aside from sovereign risks, Fitch believes the banks have significant headroom to withstand current pressures on the operating environment.” The significance of this action is that the rating agency is assessing our banking sector as remaining strong, and a cornerstone to the future economic development of our country. With a strong banking system it will be much easier for South Africa to recover from the economic cycle within which we currently find ourselves. Let this be the first of many positives in 2021. The views expressed above are those of the writer in his personal capacity and may not necessarily reflect the views of Fine & Country as a national and international brand.
