It is the first day of the new financial year and I have been faffing about doing all sorts of cash-related things. I have read our electricity meter and our gas meter. I have put some cash into the bank and paid our telephone bill.
It is quite amazing how much time and thinking all of this sort of thing seems to occupy. Also when it was all done I expected to feel a sense of completion, the sort of satisfaction that comes with well-ordered financial affairs, but I didn’t. Instead I made sure that I had remembered to turn the bathroom light off, and had my breakfast in the conservatory, where warmth and light comes courtesy of the Weather Gods rather than the Big Six Energy Companies.
You do not pay VAT on this sort.
I am definitely rather off the Government at the moment. Not only is absolutely everything costing me twice as much as it was three weeks ago, it would also seem that they have banned slug pellets as of today. It appears that this is in case hedgehogs eat them. I am really unimpressed about this, because since the sun started to shine there are a lot of slugs in our conservatory, but as far as I can tell, no hedgehogs at all, and I have looked thoroughly, even behind the washing machine.
There are slug trails everywhere. They are up the insides of the windows and over the coffee-grounds where we empty the coffee pot every morning, and every nice-looking plant has had bits chewed off it.
I do not drink beer and so beer traps are not on my list of weaponry.
What is still on my list of weaponry is the bottle of slug pellets left over from last year. There are no slug-predators in the conservatory, even the nematodes we put down last year seem to have got bored and moved out.
I have put slug pellets down. If the Government find out I expect I will be put in prison.
It is yet another thing to be cross with Boris about.
Apart from being cross with the Government, which I am almost all of the time at the moment, it has been quite a pleasant sort of day.
This was because I was by myself for most of it. I like my family but it was very nice when they all went out.
They went out because Oliver has decided to have an anti-bat-flu injection. This is because he wants to go to Canada, and they won’t let you in without one.
It is supposed to be easy to do this, but in the event it wasn’t.
We needed to know his NHS number and who his GP was, and we didn’t know either.
This was because his GP is some Scottish bloke engaged by school. Oliver has never met him, and it did not seem to be anywhere on the countless letters sent by Gordonstoun, so in the end I had to ring the school receptionist this morning and ask.
Once we had found out who is responsible in the event of his sudden death, Mark escorted the children into Kendal to Do The Deed.
It turned out that although they could find out who his GP was, Oliver’s address appeared to be Aysgarth School Yorkshire. This involved a lot of faffing about and proving that he was who he said he was, although they were so keen to inject him with their mysterious serum that they explained that they would inject him anyway, even if he had been an allergic Russian who had had a hundred and thirty five injections already, and who just had a quiet happiness when he thought about needles.
They just needed to know which arm of the Government needed to be informed afterwards.
Probably the Hedgehog Protection Society.
