After the Bell: Remembering the holidays

I’m not sure if you’re back at work yet. Whether, like me, you have that sinking feeling that your belt got a little shorter during the holidays, that putting closed shoes on your feet feels a little alien, that the concept of wearing long pants has no appeal.

I hope you’re still in your holiday home, the gulls standing in for your local hadeda, the smell of salt and the scent of rest still permeating your being.

We were lucky enough to get to the coast for two weeks, one of those seemingly well-resourced holiday towns where the locals leave at the start of December as traffic just takes over the centre, and Sixty60 motorbikes roar around everywhere.

It was a festive family mood departing Joburg. Despite the early hour, the playlist was argument-free and we had enough excitement to fuel us down the highway.

The happy family fun vibe lasted until the first toll gate. Sanral might think they’re being very clever and all that, but to lose about 50 minutes over the course of three toll gates heading to Bloemfontein from Joburg suggests that something is badly wrong.

I know someone somewhere will tell me to get an e-tag, but that wouldn’t help, because the queue is so long that you would only be able to get into that lane towards the end of it.

And I simply refuse to get one on ideological grounds.

But to have some lanes closed on busy travelling weekends should be a national scandal.

Frankly it’s unacceptable.

However, as we scuttled down the N1 just as fast as the law allows, the forced captivity gives a family time together, with music to discuss, and allows you to get to know your children in unexpected ways.

I had no idea my son knew more about the music from my era than I did, something he was to display again and again through one of his Christmas presents, the game Hitster.

My daughter surprised us with her thoughtful and cutting chirps, something I suspect she gets from her mother.

And then there was the joyful reunion with family and friends and the knowledge that the work of 2025 was finally done.

I have to say, as a country we are blessed with the most extraordinary beaches. To sit on the sand, watching the sun go down, with the lifesavers’ flags still up late into the evening and the children as happy as can be in the waves, perhaps with a chilled something in your hand, is one of life’s simple joys.

Very little can touch it.

And the people who live in holiday towns take full advantage.

According to local legend, there are people in the town we stayed in who fund their mortgages by letting their homes out during December and January.

Tents on the fields of a local primary school suggest that money is flowing into this area in a huge way.

During 2025 I spoke to the CEOs of Shoprite and Woolworths and both confirmed that their businesses in Plettenberg Bay exceeded expectations every festive season.

There is something about these towns that can be a little artificial though.

A friend of mine, who is wonderfully successful and fun, told me that he’d had a good financial year in 2025. He was feeling pretty good about himself. But then he drove through St Francis and immediately started feeling poor.

Another friend, on a beach in a wonderful seaside town in the Western Cape, looked around at all the people enjoying the sand and said, with some unease, that he felt like he was not in South Africa anymore.

And there was another person, perhaps an inspiration to my daughter, who suggested that all the people on a beach in Plett looked so rich, fit and healthy.

If our economy brings us together during much of the year, we seem to separate again into our economic classes during the holidays.

There are many things I will remember from our holiday this time around.

But perhaps the most important, more important even than not knowing and not caring where my phone was, or what the time was, was something else.

There were moments, fleeting perhaps, around a fire, on a beach, next to a pool, surrounded by people I love, with a book nearby, where I could not have told you what day it was.

I literally had no clue.

That sense of my time being my time. Not work’s time, not the office’s time, not anyone else’s time.

My time was mine, and mine alone.

That is what I am savouring the most.

And what I miss the most, on this, the second day of the working year, as I struggle slightly to put on a shirt with buttons, tut-tut about that pothole that remains unfixed and fret so over how Trump is literally changing the world. DM