The summer festive season is a tricky time for many South Africans to inhabit our all-too-human forms.
For young people, there’s the fuss about “beach bodies” and looking good on Instagram. Those of us who are a little older — especially those of us beholden to our health overlords at Discovery, getting our Vitality checks done before the end of the year — there are the reminders that our cholesterol is high, we’re technically overweight and our biological age is about 10 years more than our ID number suggests.
Every December I imagine that I will spend the weeks ahead eating better and drinking less booze; that I’ll be out exercising every day, running (or at least power-walking) up mountains and clocking hundreds of kilometres on the trail before the holidays are done. During this time spent in beautiful scenery, sweating and panting, there will be epiphanies to carry me into the new year. And I will emerge from it all a chiselled Adonis, newly at peace with my medical aid and life insurance providers.
Of course, things never quite work out that way — or at least, they haven’t yet. Yuletide comes with traditions that involve beer, wine, bubbles and plenty of G&T. Not exactly circumstances lending themselves to health and fitness.
But all is not lost. As if intuiting my plight, the good people at Okushal sent me a gift pack of their new range of four nonalcoholic cordials. For now, it’s farewell, chardonnay and cap classique, and welcome instead to the Okushal quartet: prickly pear and mint; ginger and pineapple; raspberry and naartjie; and pomegranate, lime and lemon. Throw in lots of ice and soda water, some mocktail trimmings, and this may be my classiest Christmas yet.
Ordinarily, you have to ply a columnist with alcohol if you want favourable coverage. In this case, however, the Okushalists (yes, it’s a thing) were confident that their nonalcoholic offering would win me over. And it did. Not just because of the contents, but also because of the packaging; for each flavour, an artist or writer has been commissioned to produce an eye-catching design or a thought-arresting piece of text.
Being a wordsmith at heart, my favourite is Isobel Dixon’s poem “Ascent”, which also happens to call out to my trail-running soul. It’s an account of precisely the kind of up-on-the-mountain revelation I yearn for, at this time of year, especially. The speaker describes a “hot and scrappy scramble” uphill, a venture worth it “for the space that opens up inside of you”. Insects, bird calls, a mossy mountain spring. No sublime vision here. Rather, something more modest and more true: the awareness of occupying a mortal frame, grateful for its ability to turn sense data into quiet comfort.
Then there are the abstract designs of Wiehan de Jager and Sibusiso Ngwazi, De Jager’s grid of dots suggesting an enigmatic code, while Ngwazi’s deep blue wash is redolent of an underwater world. Lorraine van Wyk’s photograph of two women, their faces thickly daubed with paint and framed by flowers, is a joyful riot of colour.
Okusha in isiZulu indicates something new and fresh — or, as the Okushal team put it, “reinventing, recreating, routine-breaking and shackle-shedding”. Can mental, emotional, spiritual or corporeal renewal be achieved merely by exploring their “luscious library of lip-smacking neolibations”? Perhaps not, but it’s a start: a first step for the “sober curious”.
That phrase may not quite compete with “brain rot” for Oxford University Press word of the year, but it has picked up some traction in 2024. Sober curious means you don’t have to commit to giving up alcohol. Still, you do have to be more mindful about when and how you drink. It may be a fad, or a cop-out, or something people say to sound clever. Nevertheless, curiosity remains one of our species’ best qualities.
As we head into 2025, there will be choruses of fatalistic cries and cynical cheers to remind us that human beings are a grim bunch, probably doomed to extinction. Maybe, just maybe, we can be saved — if we stay curious and train our eyes, as the Okushalists exhort us to do, “onward, upward, changeward”. I’ll drink to that.
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