advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Borehole We Were So Proud Of Was Quietly Making Us Ill. AI-Generated.
We bought the smallholding four years ago with a head full of romance and very little practical knowledge. Two hectares, a tired old farmhouse, a stand of gum trees, and, most exciting of all, our very own borehole. City people that we were, the borehole felt like the height of self sufficiency. Our own water, out of our own ground, needing nobody's permission and nobody's monthly bill.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
Forty Litres of Bunny Chow Batter and No Cash to Buy the Flour. AI-Generated.
The booking came in on a Monday and it was the kind of thing I had been praying for since I started the stall. A big food and music weekend on the edge of town wanted me there, all three days, and they wanted me to cater a hospitality area on top of my normal stall. It was more work than I had ever taken on. It was also more money than I had ever been offered at once, and I said yes before I had even worked out how I would do it.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
The Map My Daughter Drew of a Garden We Did Not Have Yet. AI-Generated.
For nearly two years we lived in a townhouse in Bellville with a wall we shared with a young couple who liked their music the way I like my coffee, which is to say strong and late at night. I am not writing this to complain about them. They were kind people. But there is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from living pressed up against strangers, and by the end of it I was carrying that tiredness everywhere I went.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
The Chains I Wore in 1997, and the Registration Fee I Could Not Cover. AI-Generated.
When I was twenty three I wore more gold than sense. This was the late nineties, in Durban, and I was a young man with my first real pay packet and a firm belief that a chain around your neck told the world you had arrived. I bought a rope chain first. Then a heavier one. Then a bracelet to match, and a ring with a flat face that I thought made me look like somebody in a music video.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
The Doctor Told Me to Do Nothing, So I Booked the Hardest Nothing I Could Find. AI-Generated.
My doctor used a word I had never had applied to me before. Depleted. She said it kindly, the way you might tell someone their car has finally stopped because there was never any oil in it. She said I needed to rest, properly, for a stretch of time, and I laughed, because rest was the one skill I had spent fifteen years unlearning.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
The Trust That Ran on Sixty-Two Lever Arch Files. AI-Generated.
I have kept the books for a small bursary trust in Pietermaritzburg for eleven years now. We are not a big operation. On a good year we put forty young people through college, most of them the first in their families to sit in a lecture hall, and I am the person who makes sure the money that pays for them can be accounted for down to the last rand. My name is not on the letterhead. My name is on the spines of sixty-two lever arch files, in my own handwriting, in the store cupboard behind my desk.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
The Year My Garden Ornaments Grew Heavier Than Me. AI-Generated.
It started with one ugly birdbath I did not set out to make anything. The first thing I ever cast was a birdbath, and it was genuinely ugly. My mother had died in the spring, and I could not sleep, and one night I found a bag of quick-set concrete in the shed that my late husband had bought years earlier for a job he never finished. I mixed some in an old washing-up bowl at two in the morning, pressed a dinner plate into the middle to make a dish shape, and left it on the back step. In the morning it had set into a lopsided grey saucer with my thumbprints all over the rim. I put it on a tree stump, filled it with water, and by lunchtime a pair of sparrows were fighting over it.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Drawer of Contracts Nobody Had Read Since 2016. AI-Generated.
The drawer I inherited When I became the operations manager of a small architecture practice in Cape Town, I inherited a beautiful office, eleven talented and slightly chaotic people, a coffee machine that was worshipped like a minor god, and a drawer. The drawer lived in a grey steel filing cabinet in the corner of the admin room, and it was where every contract the practice had ever signed went to be forgotten. Leases, supplier agreements, our professional indemnity insurance, software licences, the cleaning contract, the agreement with the printer people, the maintenance deal on the plotters. All of it, folded into that drawer, some of it dating back to 2016, none of it looked at since the day it was signed.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Round Brass Knob That Beat Me One Winter Morning. AI-Generated.
The door that would not open for me There is a particular kind of shame that arrives quietly. Mine arrived on a cold July morning in Bloemfontein, standing in my own passage in my pyjamas, unable to open my own bathroom door. The knob was a round brass one, original to the house, the kind my late wife Sannie chose in the eighties because they matched the light fittings. For forty years my hand closed around that knob without a thought. That morning my fingers simply would not grip and turn at the same time. The arthritis had been creeping up on me for a few years, but that was the first day it locked me out of a room in my own home.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Grandfather Who Was Sure the Bush Was Not For Him. AI-Generated.
My very good excuse I had a very good excuse for never going to the bush, and I had used it for forty years. I keep kosher. Properly, carefully, the way my mother kept it and her mother before her. In the city this is simply my life, unremarkable, woven into every ordinary day. But the bush, the lodges, the game reserves that everyone around me seemed to adore, those I had quietly filed under things that are not for me. How could they be? A camp in the middle of nowhere, a communal kitchen, meat of who knows what and prepared who knows how. It was easier, and I told myself more honest, to simply stay home.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
We Found Out We Were Having a Baby in a Cottage With Damp. AI-Generated.
Two lines and a patch of black mould We found out we were having a baby on a Tuesday evening, in the bathroom of a rented garden cottage, and the first thing I saw when my wife Refilwe held up the test with both lines showing and started to cry the good kind of tears was the patch of black mould creeping up the wall behind her head. That is the honest image I carry from the best moment of my life. Joy in the foreground, damp in the background, and me standing in the doorway feeling two enormous things at once.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Lettuces That Told Me What the Road Was Doing. AI-Generated.
Green that was not quite green I grow vegetables for a living. Not a farm, nothing grand, just under two hectares of beds where I raise salad leaves, herbs, spring onions and whatever else the restaurants in the valley will take from me each week. I took it over from an old couple who were retiring, and for the first few seasons it was the happiest work I have ever done. I would walk the rows first thing with my coffee and the leaves would be so green in the early light that it almost hurt to look at them.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
