What keeps me awake at night

 “One of the writers on the internet who tell people what they need to do to be a proper writer recently said you should write about what keeps you awake at night…”  so starts a piece of writing by Tom Cox. 

Cox then proceeds to write beautifully about what it is that keeps him awake at night – mostly, one of his cats loudly eating mice that it has caught.

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How to (not) be a middle-class homesteader

Homesteading means living a self-sufficient lifestyle, with little help from others. Can you be a homesteader in a Cape Town suburb? Sort of…

Wrapping a present for my mother’s birthday, I remarked to assembled family members: “We are now full members of the middle classes.”

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A 21st century business value – honesty 

An interview with Jack Seddon, bottler of honey and breaker of business models. What if we all went for total honesty in business?

When you buy something in a supermarket, how much do you know about it really? Say it’s a bottle of honey – where did the honey come from, where was it bottled, how did it get to that shelf?

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Making up with make-up

To use make-up, or not? I’ve always been in the camp of keeping it to a minimum but that could change…

My ideas of ways to dress and how I look are firmly held,

And some of them are just ridiculous.

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Breaking up with cars is hard to do

Cars are fossil-fuel-guzzling dinosaurs. And yet, they meet human needs, and capture our hearts, in ways that public transport just does not…

 In August 1996, I bought a car – out of the box, brand new.

Until that point, I’d owned two second-hand cars, with various idiosyncrasies. The first, a Ford Escort, listed endearingly to one side, and yet made several 1000km trips from Cape Town to East London and back. The car was stolen while I was at a music concert, and found burnt out and ruined.

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Why training is so expensive

Training is big business. From online courses to workplace workshops, skills development is a Big Thing. But why does it cost so much?

The price of training comes down to time.

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