advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Backpackers Where Every Sheet Had a Story Written on It in Biro. AI-Generated.
Twenty Years of Galleys For twenty years I cooked on cargo ships. Bulk carriers mostly, out of Durban and Richards Bay, sometimes a container ship to Singapore and back. I have made breakfast for twenty-two men in a swell that threw the frying pan off the stove, and I have baked bread on Christmas Day in the middle of the Indian Ocean with nobody to eat it but the second engineer and a stowaway cat.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Sixty-Four Squares and a Two-Hour Commute. AI-Generated.
The Board on the Upturned Crate I learned chess from a man called Uncle Bheki who played on an upturned bread crate outside a spaza shop in Soshanguve. He used bottle caps for pawns because half his pieces had gone missing. I was nine. He beat me every day for a year, and every day he said the same thing as he set the caps back up: "Again. You are getting worse in a better way."
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Someone Stole My Decks Three Weeks Before the Busiest December I Ever Booked. AI-Generated.
Thirty-One Bookings Every DJ in this country knows that December is the year. Weddings, matric dances, year-end functions, family reunions, the long rolling party that starts at the end of November and does not stop until somebody's uncle falls asleep in a camping chair on New Year's Day.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Target Panic, and the Arrow I Could Not Let Go. AI-Generated.
Seventy Metres If you have never shot a recurve bow, here is the whole sport in one sentence. You stand seventy metres from a target the size of a large pizza, you draw a string weighing as much as a bag of cement, you hold your breath for a second and a half, and you let go.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
My Brazilian Portuguese Got Me Laughed At, Kindly, All the Way Up the Coast. AI-Generated.
The First Sentence I Got Wrong The immigration officer at Maputo airport asked me where I was staying, and I answered him in my best, warmest Recife accent. He looked up from my passport, paused, and then burst out laughing. Not unkindly. He laughed the way you laugh when a child says something adult.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Tuesday Club Elected Me Treasurer Because I Was Late. AI-Generated.
Never Arrive Last to a Meeting There is a lesson I should have learned on the ferries, where the man who turns up last to the engine room briefing gets the job nobody wants. I spent thirty-four years as an engineer on the boats between Ringaskiddy and Roscoff, and I was never late once. Then I retired, joined an investment club, and walked into the back room of a pub in Douglas eleven minutes after seven on a wet Tuesday in January.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
I Timed Twenty Years of Overs on a Watch I Was Afraid to Scratch. AI-Generated.
Six Balls, Then Look Down For twenty-one seasons I stood behind the stumps at grounds all over the Eastern Cape, and every six balls I did the same three things. I called "over". I moved the little pebble from my right pocket back to my left. And I looked at my watch.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Mrs Ndlovu's Rates Bill and the Map I Pinned to the Church Hall Wall. AI-Generated.
The Envelope She Could Not Open Mrs Ndlovu lives three doors down from me in Vincent, in the same house she has lived in since 1979. She is eighty-four, sharp as a tack about the Bible and the cricket scores, and frightened of brown envelopes from the municipality. One Saturday morning she knocked on my gate holding one between two fingers, as if it might bite.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Lion I Drew in Year Four Finally Looked Back at Me. AI-Generated.
The Drawing in the Biscuit Tin I teach Year Four at a small Jewish girls' school in north Manchester, and every September I set the same assignment. Each girl draws the place she most wants to see before she grows up. They bring in rainforests, the Kotel, Disneyland, their grandmother's flat in Antwerp. I pin them along the back wall and leave them there until the summer.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Rainbow on the Water Under My Slipway. AI-Generated.
Thirty Years on the Same Patch of Lagoon I have fixed boat engines on the edge of the Knysna lagoon since I was twenty-two. My workshop is a corrugated iron shed with a concrete slipway that runs down into the water, a workbench my father built out of old yellowwood planks, and a radio that only gets one station properly. I can strip an outboard with my eyes closed. I have done it, more or less, at two in the morning with a torch in my teeth before a fishing charter.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
