Digital Issue | Wanted 2022 Holiday Issue

Ed's Note: A year of too much, too little, and just enough

A lot of passive aggression can happen between “I trust you are well” and “kind regards”. This, after all, has been the year of the great resignation — and, perhaps, greater regret, if we are to believe the data.

The year has also seen workers go from what I’d call “extended hybridity” right up to quiet quitting, as bosses of all genders clutched their pearls, yearning for full offices buzzing with “spontaneous interactions”. Away from matters of employment, this has been the year that completed the transformation of inverters into instruments of magic, and the one that finally made us understand that water doesn’t come from taps but from reservoirs, requiring that elusive electricity to work properly.

Most frustratingly, we still can’t understand load-shedding schedules, even as “Eskom Se Push” tries its best to make sense of it all. More recently, 2022 has also become the year of talk of revolving leadership doors; a chaotic parliament; and wealthy, out-of-touch political heads treading murky financial waters — and you wouldn’t necessarily be talking about South Africa. Most crucially, though, it has been the year that we’ve desperately had to and finally were able to travel again. Properly. In late March — poetically, in my estimation, as it was my birthday month — I travelled overseas for the first time in two years and it felt, hyperbole aside, like I had been born anew.

The flying experience alone was a delight: the legroom was decent (even for those of us who turned right as we entered the plane), the on-board films eclectic and arresting, and the FFP2 mask — mandatory on both legs of my trip — didn’t behave like its usual self, intent on suffocating every bit of life from me. I was even charmed by the unshowered teenage exuberance of the Indian U/17 cricket team seated all around me at some point. My destination, Milan, was a blast, as you may well know, given how I have not shut up about it. It was the ultimate revenge after the Omicron nightmare that prevented a whirl around the world to Design Miami last year.

Talking about revenge, after Justice Malala — who, in this issue, breaks with tradition and spills all about a surreal and altogether awful Vegas trip that was enough to end all fantasies about Sin City  — had written earlier this year about not being ready for revenge travel (that lusty travel one indulges in after a long period of enforced isolation), the term seemed to be everywhere, and is one of the trends Dion Chang, our country’s most prominent trends analyst, has been tracking (and indulging in). For Chang, revenge looked like a villa in Corfu with a group of friends. If Greece is a little out of your reach right now, you needn’t trek too far for the villa life, and Steve Steinfeld selects some of the best in the Western Cape winelands.

Incidentally, as one of South Africa’s leading food critics — with a restaurant never quite open until he says so — Steinfeld also gives us the year’s best restaurants. His list of sumptuous local culinary destinations is bound to be met with resounding approval and, perhaps, a dash of surprise. This is our second-last shot at this for the year, and next month we give you the apparently world-famous Gifting issue. Until then, we wish you — and your luggage — safe transit (do not read “A number’s game” on if you don’t want to jinx this one) and no extra charge for the excess weight.