I am feeling unspeakably smug and pleased with myself.
I have spent most of the day doing our tax returns.
This particularly nasty annual chore, once the stuff of VAT-related nightmares, has become so astoundingly simple now that we are not running a Big Business, it is almost a pleasure to do.
All I have to do is work out what we have earned, deduct what we have spent, remember the things I had forgotten, divide the total by two, because there are two of us, and then send the whole lot over to the accountant.
Usually he sends it back covers in virtual red ink along with exclamation marks and queries, but that is not the point. The point is that now I am not calculating wages and National Insurance and PAYE and VAT returns and depreciation, the whole thing is a breeze.
The Inland Revenue no longer stalks my waking hours like the space monster in that ghastly film about the woman and the alien, you never quite knew where it was going to pop up next. I am not quite free of the creeping dread yet, but I am no longer ploughing my way through a confused muddle of numbers, several bank accounts and a stack of incomprehensible invoices. This is a happy way to live and I am constantly glad that I am merely a taxi driver these days, and no longer an aspirational plutocrat.
On which subject, my friend Elspeth came to see me this morning. She is definitely an aspirational plutocrat, and having more staying power than I have, is getting rather closer to amassing her empire than I ever bothered to. This is all very splendid to hear about, and even better, she brought us a dehumidifier and suggested a poly tunnel for storing Mark’s clutter. Mark liked this idea very much, and has been looking at poly tunnels on eBay ever since. He has got time to do this sort of thing now as he can no longer wash up due to having a disabled finger.
Mark went off to the farm to finish patching the roof light and glueing the new chimney into the camper van. I know this doesn’t sound much like organising himself to move out, but he needs to get everything done to the camper whilst he still has a workshop. Also, everything that is actually fixed to it is not being carried around in boxes waiting to be installed and getting lost in the meantime.
I had my second idle shirk in two days. Elspeth and I drank coffee and once we had exhausted our tales about teenagers, we discussed the ways in which we would run the world so that it would work far better than it does at present. This made us feel very clever and satisfied with ourselves, I haven’t been this good at knowing everything since I was sixteen. It is nice to be getting old.
When she had gone I brought firewood into the house and cleaned the hearth and hung the washing up, and generally procrastinated for as long as I could before I had to drag my slippered feet upstairs to the computer, and the spreadsheet, and the downloaded bank statements.
Of course once I had started it was completely absorbing. I didn’t even notice Mark and the dogs coming back and clattering up and down the stairs, and in the end Mark had to start getting our picnic ready whilst I hunted for Amazon receipts for latex gloves and welding rods.
In the end I had to stop and go to work, but another couple of hours tomorrow should see the whole thing done, which will be magnificent. I will be able to consider myself a truly organised person, the sort whose life is properly contained in ordered, tax-deductible pigeon holes, and who has no guilty horrors lurking anywhere.
If only that were ever likely to be true.
The picture is the newly repaired roof light.
