Tax Avoidance

It has been a wet, cloudy sort of day, and we have had visitors.

One friend came to ask for Mark’s opinions about his car, and another came to talk to me about her adventures.

It was lovely to see them both, because both of them are only very occasional visitors, and between them they provided a perfect excuse for achieving absolutely nothing to do with my tax return for the year ending April 2015, or any purchase of any new car insurance, both of which were on my list of things that I thought it would be nice to do today.

By this of course I don’t mean that the doing would be nice, because of course it isn’t, and I am not sure which is the worse, but I know that it is very nice indeed actually to have done both things. If only I were a person with some new taxi insurance and a completed tax return, how happy and organised and fulfilled my life would be.

Both things are becoming increasingly urgent, the insurance because it is due next week and the tax return because it is due in January and I am not very good at tax returns, and it will take my accountant at least that long to come to any sensible conclusions from the improbable figures and the accompanying long-winded explanations that go with them.

Also the numbers involved are always horrifying, one way or another, and also both insurance and tax returns are things that I really should have saved up for if only I had thought about them in time, which obviously I didn’t.

On the plus side, if we had wasted all our money saving up for boring things like tax and insurance then we would never have been on holiday, and I would never have known what it was like to drink champagne and be kissed at the top of the Eiffel Tower whilst the children made sick noises, so I feel as though I have made the right decisions about my life and we can always start saving up for the other stuff now.

Mark does not have a tax return for most of last year, because he was working at a proper job where the Inland Revenue were more interfering, and so all of his tax has gone already and he is not in any danger of going to prison, it is only me, so I had really better get on with it.

Of course I would have got on with it today if it were not that it would have been terribly impolite to say to our visitors that I was sorry but I would prefer to do my tax return, so I have been a victim of my own good manners. Also I was dying to hear what my friends have been doing since I saw them and also, if I am scrupulously honest, to have a captive audience to be regaled with travellers’ tales of our Paris trip.

They both listened very kindly, and after they had gone I still didn’t do the tax return. The thing is that it is all very confusing because of money coming and going randomly out of the business bank account where I borrowed it out of Mark’s wages so although it looks as though it might be income it wasn’t, because you don’t get taxed on money that your husband gives to you.

Of course I should have transferred it directly from his wages account in to our joint account and then into the taxi business account so that it would be clear where it had come from but I didn’t bother with such an enormous amount of messing about and so now unless I check carefully it just looks like a random cash payment, because what I actually did was pop across the road in to the Nat West when I had finished doing my shopping in Booths, and took some cash out, which I paid into Barclays which I handily passed on my way home.

I now know that I should not have done this, because I do not remember it all nearly as well as I thought that I would, and now I have got to go through all of Mark’s bank statements as well as my own. This is not very interesting, and the potential for messing it up is enormous.

Maybe I will have another go tomorrow.

Unless we have more visitors.

The picture is taken at the top of the Eiffel Tower, by Oliver, who does not drink champagne, and who seems to have got his finger a bit in the way, but I didn’t think you would mind.