2021 – The Year of the Ox

By Stephen de Stadler Managing Director Fine & Country Hermanus, Arabella and Kleinmond

Happy 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.

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.

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.

Click below to read more. (The full article can be found on page 12)