I am writing whilst the football match is on.
This is because, as is always the case, it is a remarkably peaceful time to be a taxi driver. Nobody is going anywhere, not even during the interval, and the only sounds in Bowness are the occasional bursts of cheering from some of the pubs, presumably when some footballer makes an especially thrilling kick.
I like driving a taxi when the world is like this.
It is very pleasant to stop and do nothing because I have had a remarkably busy day.
Mark is leaving tomorrow, on what will be his first trip since we became limited. That is, we have always been a bit limited, most generally by lack of money and occasionally by other things like being fat and idle, but obviously I mean since we were a Limited Company.
He has been away for the last few weeks but that one was still as part of his indentured servitude, and he was paid just like a normal sort of person who never gets to even borrow his tax back to get himself out of a fix in an emergency. I do not like living like this at all and am pleased and relieved that we are going to be functioning relatively normally again.
The thing is that this has meant a sudden overturning of all our systems because we are not merely self-employed but Limited. We have done this before, and once again I am going to have to organise things like National Insurance and our very own payslips. Nat West has offered us an accounting system but frankly I even messed up getting the right PIN into the cash machine and so I do not hold out very much hope for my success with that.
It is the first time we have tried out the bank account we have especially opened for the business. I took our cards to the cash machine and tried to change the numbers for ones that we might conceivably remember, and you will not be surprised to hear that that the machine was having none of it. It accepted my card, at about the fourth try, but it does not wish to know about Mark’s card, despite two telephone calls to some people at the bank who made very helpful noises that made no difference whatsoever.
I am going to order another card tomorrow and just start all over again. He will just have to take mine with him. I could borrow his credit card in exchange perhaps.
After that we had to purchase some insurance, which cost a very lot of money but which will stop anybody being upset with him if he drops a spanner on their heads, and also I had to pay for airport parking and book him into an hotel tomorrow night when he gets to Aberdeen. Hence Ibbetson Limited is now in minus figures, because it has spent an absolute fortune but not yet earned a bean.
This is a familiar theme of my life so I do not really mind.
Hence I have occupied a very great deal of the day with the very first beginnings of sums, and with setting my administrative life in a newly tidy order. I do like doing this, it is always satisfying, although occasionally terrifying, because the Inland Revenue are not the jolliest of good humoured chaps when you mess it up. Actually they tend not to be any sort of chaps at all unless you have seriously messed it up and they are pursuing you, because they have a new corporate policy of not answering the telephone, vigorously enforced especially when they owe money to you.
I am enjoying myself very much with this. I have a new computer and a new bank account and I am drafting neat columns of figures. I am going to try and remember how you might pay into a pension and find out if we have paid anything into one already. We will be elderly quite soon so I suppose we had better think about making a start.
I am going to do some more of it all tomorrow.
It is almost as much fun as sawing up firewood.
