Our favourite cooldrink

It's been almost too hot to blog today, but a cooling breeze is wafting in off the sea, creating the perfect temperature to sit outside on the deck and watch the sunset on the Back Table. As expected, plenty of refreshment was required today, and while my poison is water, in this family Oros is the choice for a real thirst, with lots of ice and iced water, usually a few glassfuls one after the other. Is Oros a South African-invented cooldrink? I think it might be, and I'm sure my compatriots will also have childhood memories of this all-time favourite, which still proudly boasts of containing 6% orange juice, even after more than 100 years of production. It still contains sugar, which in these days of artificial sweeteners (some manufacturers even have the gall to use aspartame) is also quite refreshing. Rather some real sugar than any form of artificial substitute.

My earliest memory of Oros is way back in the Fifties (I know, I know, most of you weren't born yet!) and we would holiday at Knipe's farm, Baden, just outside Montagu. What a marvellous place it must have been to have remained among my most vivid memories from my childhood! We had a bottle of Oros and a jug of water with glasses on a tray in our big family room at the end of the upstairs wing - a kind of early tea/coffee station you might say. No worries about pocket money or a shop to buy cooldrinks at. Oros was always on hand for a bunch of thirsty children who had spent the day running up and down the dirt roads of the farm, swimming in the big concrete swimming pool fed by the hot springs and doing what kids do on a holiday in the wide open spaces of the Karoo.

Sadly, all that is left of those days is the Oros...