I am very pleased to announce that I have done my year’s tax returns.
Well, I haven’t actually done them. That is to say, I have collated all of the information, put it on a spreadsheet with an apologetic letter to the accountant and sent it off.
It was a very apologetic letter. A great deal of my accounting this year – not all of it but some – was done by some utterly incomprehensible software called FreeAgent, to which my accountant also has a key, not that he ever looks at it. It is linked to the bank account for the purposes of online surveillance and I am supposed to explain every single transaction by choosing an option in a little pop-up box.
The problem has been that the options are so limited. There isn’t a box for: well, we ran out of money when we were in town and didn’t have any other cards with us so we borrowed some money out of the business account and if you look on the day after tomorrow you can see where we paid it back in. Neither is there a box for: Mark bought this on the wrong card and forgot to tell me, and I am really sorry, I am always telling him not to but he has jolly well gone and done it anyway, you take it up with him if it’s such a problem.
You get the idea. Accounting is a fraught and difficult business.
Lucy is currently studying accounting in her spare time. She says that it is far more interesting than being a detective, which is just boring rapes and murders and stuff. Rows of figures which add up at the bottom, they’re the material of real adventure.
Sometimes my children are quite surprisingly not like me.
I was very pleased with myself indeed when I had finished, and felt as though I was walking more lightly, so it must have been bothering me for a while and I hadn’t noticed, sometimes things do that. I had a choice then between carrying on with my garden fairy-manufacture, or editing my story to put on here, when I have finally got round to sorting the site out. The last one has been on my To Do List for so long I expect you had forgotten all about it, well, I haven’t, and it has been another small guilty weight making me sigh wearily every now and again.
In the end I did a bit of both. I pulled my story up on the computer and realised that it has been so long since I had looked at it I had quite forgotten what happened next, and started reading with almost as much fascination as if it had been the latest JK Rowling. I didn’t do much editing in the end, but I had a very pleasant couple of hours pondering on plot details and feeling as though I was busy.
Oliver came downstairs then. He has been provisionally accepted by the Army, on condition he passes the interview and the fitness tests, and has been told that if he manages all of that he will be Signing Up next September.
That is a year away.
We pondered this.
He is quite excited about it. It gives him a whole year to earn some extra cash, and to get fit and be sufficiently heavy not to be picked up and thrown around by all of the other soldiers. I was pleased as well. Oliver has not spent any great length of time at home since he was eight and was heartlessly dispatched off to boarding school, and it will be the first time since then that we have all lived together at home.
I told Mark later, and he said Hmm, and then that Oliver could learn to fix his own car whilst he was here.
He could help to fix mine as well I expect.
After that I went into the conservatory and spent another happy hour giving my Ugly Fairy some legs. She is looking very splendidly ugly now.
I still can’t take a photograph.
Getting the site fixed is on my List Of Guilty Things To Do as well.
