I have got a few minutes before I need to rush out to work, and so I thought I would drop you a line quickly.
I should not be writing diary entries. I should be sewing a button on my dungarees, but somehow it is just too difficult, and so I am not going to bother. It can be a job for tomorrow.
Oliver has gone, and I am by myself. I think probably that I quite like this, except that if I have forgotten to do something, like bringing the washing in out of the rain or emptying the dogs before I dash off out, there is nobody to step nobly into the breach and do it for me.
I don’t know what I will do if there is another spider.
Rescue myself, I suppose.
Fortunately there have been no further spider invasions today. I have occupied the day with the seemingly endless and wearisome task of clearing up after Guffy and her very misfortunate poo problem.
I had thought that I was managing to stay on top of it, but of course I wasn’t, and when I swept the kitchen this morning, I realised that once again, it was liberally spattered with dried-up splashes of kitten accident.
I think I can safely say that when you get to the point of thinking: Oh well, it’s only a little splash of cat poo, then you have got far too much cat poo in your life.
I mopped and scrubbed and swept and hoovered and scraped.
Once I started looking, it was everywhere. It was even on the chairs in the conservatory.
I was so revolted that I have given myself a headache from screwing my face up.
I swilled everywhere with a mix of boiling water and bleach, and the place is beginning to feel a little less dreadful, but I really don’t know what I am going to do. Mark suggested that I shut her in the conservatory, but I would have to shut the dogs in there as well, because she gets lonely and mews her head off if she is left by herself.
If I leave the dogs in the conservatory they bark their heads off every time something interesting happens in the alley, which must drive the neighbours mental.
Not that the neighbours matter all that much, they will all have gone back to Preston by Friday, ready to be replaced by a new lot.
I do not know what we can do. I have stopped feeding her on cat food, just in case there is something in it that she can’t digest, certainly it smells disgusting enough. She is currently being the most expensively fed cat in Windermere, on a diet of chicken and fish, all of which I expect will just shoot straight through her digestive system and out at the other end to make a splurge on the carpet.
I am aweary, aweary.
The other activity with which I have occupied my day was, frankly, no less wearisome.
I have had a letter from Companies House requesting that I update my identification details.
When you have got a Limited Company you have got to do this every year. I do not entirely understand what the point of it is. You give them fifty quid and fill in their form which asks you to tell them the identification number that they gave you last year, and everybody is happy, especially them.
It really is exactly like that, for anybody who has not been sucked into their system. There is no more to it than that.
Except this year there was.
I came to put in my identification number and it wouldn’t accept it.
That number, it explained, belonged to somebody with a different date of birth, not me at all, and so I had to go away and get them to do it.
I was utterly perplexed.
It took hours and hours of pointless scrolling through incomprehensible forms before I discovered that somehow they had got my date of birth wrong on our company registration form.
I have no idea how this happened. Certainly it was not me. I know when my birthday is and it is not something I tend to forget and then invent in a panicked emergency, like when they ask you how long you have held your bank account.
I discovered that the only way to change it was to fill in two Companies House forms, both twelve pages long, on paper, because it couldn’t be done online, and then send them to Companies House with a copy of my driving licence and my passport. It added that this would take at least twenty days for them to process, and take me out of the time when I would be allowed to file my identification, so probably I would get a fine anyway.
I thought, bitterly, that I would certainly vote for any parliamentary candidate who stood on the issue of potentially demolishing Companies House.
In the end I hit on a solution.
I executed the imposter. I took her name off the company, stripped her of her directorship rights and her executive control and her shareholder’s status. I dismissed her and sent her packing.
Then, quite simply, I re-registered myself in her place. I added last year’s identification number and announced myself to have administrative authority.
To my astonishment, Companies House did not have the smallest problem with this. The forms were accepted and they sent me no less than twelve emails telling me about it.
Twelve.
I am not convinced that it is over. I have a nasty suspicion that I might not have heard the end of this, probably at about this time next year when I have forgotten all about it and won’t remember anything that I did today.
I don’t care. That is a problem for future me.
LATER NOTE. I was just about to leave for work when I went to close my bedroom curtains and discovered several long, gruesome streaks of hideous, slimy evidence that Guffy had been on my bed, dotted with a trail of smaller splashes and paw prints.
I am afraid I am going to have to come up with a solution.
I don’t want to think about it, but it isn’t looking good.
