advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Bell Above My Door Started Ringing for Strangers. AI-Generated.
The shop and the smell of it I have kept a second-hand and antiquarian bookshop on a side street in Makhanda for twenty-six years now. People who grew up calling the town Grahamstown still do, and I let them, because a name is a stubborn thing and so am I. The shop is narrow and deep, the way the old buildings here tend to be, and the shelves run from the worn wooden floor almost to the pressed ceiling. There is a ladder on a rail that sticks halfway along and has stuck in the same place since the day my late husband fitted it.
By Josh Maraneyabout 7 hours ago in Journal
The Krugerrands I Kept for Thirty Years Became a Desk and a Hostel Bed. AI-Generated.
Forty-one years at one address I gave the better part of my life to a factory off the Main Reef Road, west of the Johannesburg city centre, where they pressed and finished metal parts for mines and for farms, and I started there at twenty-four when I still believed a job was a thing you held once and did not let go of. I stayed forty-one years. I knew the smell of cutting oil the way some men know the smell of a particular rain. I knew which machine groaned before it failed, and which foreman took sugar in his tea, and which gate guard would wave you through if you were five minutes late because his own train had been late too.
By Josh Maraneyabout 7 hours ago in Journal
The Five-a-Side Shirt That Stopped Fitting the Way I Remembered. AI-Generated.
I used to play five-a-side every Thursday night at a leisure centre in the Midlands, same lads, same sticky sports hall, same argument about whether the ball had crossed the line, for the better part of fifteen years. It was the fixed point of my week. I was not good, I want to be clear about that, I was a slow defender who shouted a lot, but I was fit in the way that a man who runs around for an hour every week without thinking about it is fit. I never once considered my body a project. It just worked.
By Josh Maraneyabout 7 hours ago in Journal
The Map My Father Pinned Above the Workbench. AI-Generated.
My father has wanted to drive to the top of the country since before I was old enough to hold a spanner. He talks about it the way other men talk about a woman they once let get away. There is a map above his workbench, curled at the corners now, with a thick blue line he drew years ago in a koki pen that has long since dried out. The line runs north from our place outside Pretoria, up through Botswana, up and up until it stops somewhere near a river he has only ever seen in other people's photographs. He is sixty-one. I am twenty-eight. Somewhere in the middle of those two numbers is a window, and we both know it is closing.
By Josh Maraneyabout 7 hours ago in Journal
The Month I Learned to Actually Look at the People I Love. AI-Generated.
The airtime voucher years For most of my life I was the worst gift giver in my family, and everybody knew it. My speciality, if you can call it that, was the panic buy. Birthday morning would arrive, I would remember around ten o'clock that I had planned nothing, and I would end up at the petrol station on Cape Road buying a slab of chocolate that had been sitting under a heat lamp since the previous winter. Once, for my mother, I bought airtime. An airtime voucher. I printed the little slip, folded it into a card, and handed it over like it was a diamond. She smiled the way mothers smile when they have decided not to say the thing they are thinking.
By Josh Maraneyabout 9 hours ago in Journal
The Year Thabo Swore the Score Before Kickoff. AI-Generated.
The gate opens before the fire does There is a sound I know better than my own ringtone. It is the scrape of my front gate in Rockville being pushed open too hard, followed by a voice that is already arguing about something. That sound means it is Soweto Derby day, and it means the same men I have known since we were skinny boys kicking a tennis ball in the dusty street are arriving at my house once again.
By Josh Maraneyabout 9 hours ago in Journal
The Needle, the N3, and the Longest Afternoon of My Life. AI-Generated.
Leaving the farm later than I meant to My parents live on a farm outside Harrismith, the kind of place where the children run barefoot by the second morning and refuse to put shoes back on by the third. We had gone up for a long weekend, just the three of us, because my husband was working and because my mother had begged to see the baby before he forgot her face. He is not really a baby anymore. He is a toddler now, two and a bit, all stubborn legs and opinions. My daughter is seven and thinks she is the boss of him, which he mostly allows.
By Josh Maraneyabout 9 hours ago in Journal
The Tooth I Hid for Fourteen Years, and the Boy Who Made Me Fix It. AI-Generated.
The morning Sanele put his hand in mine I am sixty-two years old and until this year I had been smiling with my mouth half closed for so long that I had forgotten I was doing it. You get used to a thing. You teach your face a new habit and after a while the habit becomes the only face you own. Somewhere around my forties a back tooth on the left side went soft and then went altogether, and I decided the gap was my private business and nobody else's. I live in Durban, in a flat in Overport with the bus noise coming up off the road, and for fourteen years that gap and I kept each other's secrets.
By Josh Maraneyabout 9 hours ago in Journal
The Water Bill That Tripled While I Watched the Meter at Dawn. AI-Generated.
A man who trusts a number I taught mathematics for thirty-eight years, most of them at a high school in the east of Pretoria, and the one thing I told every class on their first day was that a number does not lie to you. People lie. Numbers simply are. So when my water bill arrived in the autumn of last year and the figure at the bottom was almost three times what it had been in January, I did not panic the way my daughter assumed I would. I sat down at the kitchen table, I put on my reading glasses, and I decided that somewhere in the arithmetic there was an honest answer waiting for a patient man.
By Josh Maraneyabout 9 hours ago in Journal
The Morning the Storeroom Fan Went Quiet. AI-Generated.
The sound I only noticed once it stopped There is a particular Monday in Durban that I will remember for the rest of my working life, and the strange thing is that it began with a silence rather than a crash. I run a small architecture practice off Florida Road, five of us in total, including me. We are a modest outfit. We design homes, a few small commercial jobs, the occasional school hall, and we do it in two converted rooms above a coffee shop where the smell of the morning roast comes up through the floorboards. For years there was a sound in the background of that office that none of us consciously heard anymore. It was the fan on our server, sitting in the storeroom behind a curtain of lever-arch files and a mop that nobody ever used.
By Josh Maraneyabout 9 hours ago in Journal
The Coffee Tin on the Top Shelf. AI-Generated.
The Tin Started as a Joke I am twenty-eight, I work the line at a restaurant in the city bowl, and until about eight months ago the most expensive thing I had ever bought was my knives. So you can imagine how I felt when I decided I wanted to marry Thandeka, my girlfriend of five years, and realised that somewhere in that decision there was going to have to be a ring.
By Josh Maraneyabout 9 hours ago in Journal
The Night Light We Agreed to Buy Twice. AI-Generated.
The conversation happened at the kitchen table, not the car park There was no slammed door. I think people expect that, when I tell them. They brace, the way you brace when someone starts a story with a car crash. But ours did not end with a shout or a thrown plate or a message found on a phone left face up. It ended at the kitchen table in our place in Linden, on a Tuesday, with the kettle still warm and a dishcloth over the tap, and Thandeka saying the thing we had both been circling for the better part of a year.
By Josh Maraneyabout 9 hours ago in Journal
