Throw away

I am writing from the middle of the most colossal mess.

I thought this morning how fed up I am of this whole bat-flu crisis. It is a sunny May weekend, and if we were not plague-ridden we would be making a very lot of money indeed at the moment. I mean a very lot. May is brilliant for earning money. It is full of holidays and bluebells and sunshine.

I resolved that since we are not earning a fortune, instead I would come out of it with something else splendid to show for it, so that in the end I will not mind in the least.

When we finally go back to work we will be working from the most immaculate and perfectly tidy house on our street.

This is an ambitious goal for somebody who lives with Mark.

With this in mind, I decided to renovate my office.

I can’t blame Mark for any of the mess to do with my office, since he only ever comes into it to drink wine and laugh at things that I show him on Facebook.

The scruffy mess in here has been entirely of my own making.

It started off this morning as a small project of tidying up the pile of junk at the back of the desk. It is now twelve hours later, I am covered in paint, and there are piles of stuff everywhere.

I had come to the happy recollection that you are allowed to throw away your tax records after five years.

I had piles and piles of tax records.

There were boxes and boxes of carefully filed receipts, all in date order. There were wage slips paid to drivers, all covered with my anxiously-puzzled calculations of PAYE. There were time sheets and log sheets, vehicle checks and licence certificates, and I threw it all in the dustbin.

The dustbins are filling up at the moment, since we are all tidying things up. It is a good job there are so many holiday houses on our street.

There is still quite a bit of paperwork left. I have just thrown it away up until 2015. There are still years and years of sums remaining, although most of it, these days, is stored in cyber-shoe boxes, on my computer.

It was almost disappointing that the Inland Revenue have never demanded to see any of it. I have clearly been a meticulous chronicler of our business activities, and impressed even me with my past-self’s weary and painstaking endeavours.

I wish my present self were quite as careful. I do not bother filing receipts in date order these days. If I were to be Inspected nowadays there would be an awful lot more flapping about and guilty searching for stuff.

I have become more lax now that we are no longer registered for VAT. Life is very much happier since that auspicious day. I have always thought that they recruit VAT inspectors from retirement homes for KGB officials. They are a scary species, especially if you are a numerical idiot with PREY written on your tax return in big letters.

Anyway, today I disposed of the lot. Probably I will never need to worry about VAT officials ever again.

Once I had completely filled next door’s wheelie bin I turned my attention to cleaning up the grim glory hole where they had been stacked.

This was now empty apart from some miserable spiders, hopelessly trying to restore their ancestral homes.

I flapped about a bit and they all ran away behind the desk and through the hole in the wall which goes into the bathroom and under the bath. We need never meet again. They can build themselves spidery palaces under there if they wish.

I started to scrub the black mould away. Mostly it came off, but it left horrid dark stains all over the wall, so I wondered about paint.

To my great joy I discovered half a tin of the lovely yellow office colour still under the stairs.

I made some more spiders homeless when I dug it out.

I painted the office.

This took ages, and I haven’t finished. The walls were absolutely covered with certificates detailing the children’s meritorious behaviour at various schools over the years. I had to take these all down, obviously. They were filthy as well.

I summoned Oliver to ask tactfully if he still wanted me to display them, and discovered that he did, very much, it would be unthinkable not to. Goodness, what sort of awful parent would consider throwing away his Best Footballer Certificate from 2014?

After that I spent a couple of hours tediously wiping dust off award certificates. There were dozens and dozens of them, and I wished, guiltily, after a while, that they had all been rather less virtuous.

I took the curtains down and washed them.

I washed and wiped and painted and trotted up and down to and from the dustbin.

I am going to have the loveliest office on our street.

Have a picture of our morning walk.

Life is jolly good.