I have had a difficult day.
It is our Year End.
This is an exciting and complicated business. We are not just any old self-employed joe now, we are a mighty Limited Company, with a registration at Companies House and accounting software and a real live accountant.
The latter is very patient and kindly but thinks I am an idiot. He is very nice about it but it shows.
I have never attempted tax fraud for this reason, being that I am barely intelligent enough to fill in a tax return properly, never mind introduce cunning ruses for the purposes of deceiving the Inland Revenue into thinking that I shouldn’t be giving them any money after all.
Also it appears there is a world of difference between being self-employed and employing oneself. I am not exactly sure what this is, but I have had it firmly explained to me that it is so.
Today I have been through the online accounting software, trying to Explain Transactions. This does not mean saying Well, actually, that was the time when we had bought some spare wheels on EBay and forgot to take cash with us when we went to collect them, so we had to find a cash machine because it was one of those little Indian outfits that wouldn’t take card payments.
It means choosing one explanation out of their list of multiple choice answers, none of which I understand, like Money Received From User, and Payment From Contra Account, and which basically amounts to the sort of guessing I recall doing in my O Level maths, the sort where you close your eyes and stab hopefully with a pencil.
Things were not improved when I wanted to dig out records of our pension contributions and discovered that Guffy had been using my In tray as a bathroom facility.
I was not pleased, although I thought afterwards that there had been something rather splendidly liberating about throwing away all of that paperwork.
I do not know what I am going to say to the accountant. I am too old for variations on the sort of excuse that goes The Dog Ate It.
It might not have been entirely a bad thing. I discovered some letters from a pension company about a pension which Mark seemed to have entirely forgotten. They were unpleasantly brown and smeary, so I threw them away and became engrossed in transferring his pension across to the pension fund which really interests him, being the one he can play with and invest himself.
He telephoned this morning, rhapsodising about some company that makes a new sort of battery in which he wished to invest, and although I made interested noises, I had not got the first idea what he was talking about. It might have involved electrifying salt, although then again it might not, and actually it might not have been a battery at all but some sort of generator. I jolly well hope all of these thrilling new power-supplying schemes catch on, because we will be able to spend our old age lolling about beatifically in luxury and idleness if they do.
In fact it has not been a bad sort of day for this type of activity, by which I mean paperwork, not lolling about in luxury and idleness or clearing up cat accidents. This is because we have had no wish whatsoever to be outdoors in consequence of a torrential downpour which has lasted, so far, all day.
Oliver came with me on the dog walk this morning, by the end of which we were both sodden, despite our waterproofs. Our boots were squelching, our clothes were drenched to the underwear, and water was running in chilly little rivulets down the backs of our necks. I soaked two handkerchiefs wiping away the small beck that had begun to flow over my eyebrows to drip persistently and irritatingly, off the end of my nose, and the poor, newly bald dogs were shivering miserably.
Guffy does not come on the walk, but did not seem to share the family distaste for the rain, and has been refusing to come in out of the yard all day. She has curled up contentedly underneath the saw and has declined to return, even when encouraged with some fish skin.
I am not exactly sorry about this. It was rather nice to think, as I was clearing up cat accidents, that they were not busily being replaced in some other corner whilst I was doing it.
It has been very, very wet.
Our macintoshes are still dripping in the conservatory even as I write, our boots are steaming by the fire.
I hope they are dry by tomorrow.
