Friday 20th March - Unreal Times

In the past 8 days,

I've visited my godmother's house for the last time, saying goodbye to things which I can't keep but hated parting with;

The cabinet came from my childhood home and I'm pleased that my brother took it. The wall hanging(it's huge) and pictures were all made by her, but there's a limit to how much I can fit into my own house.

I decided to stop teaching after last weekend. I felt that I was a bit of a 'typhoid Mary', collecting the germs from one school and taking them along to the next. That took endless phone calls and emails, and I've had to organise refunds or credits for a dozen pupils. As part of this exercise I ended up working out the self-employed part of my income for the tax year ending April 2020; everything was a complete tangle as so many lessons were cancelled or rescheduled over the year while my god-mother was ill. Still - that is a huge achievement - this could be the first time ever that I get my tax return in within weeks of close of year!

I've restarted my music blog, www.themusicjungle.co.uk, which has lain dormant for over a year. I'm posting up various music bits and pieces to keep the pupils going in the meantime.

On Tuesday I went to Nymans Gardens with some friends. Bitterly cold, but the place is full of flowers;

I was wishing that I had added my nose to the fingerprint sensor so that I could unlock the phone without taking my gloves off.

I've been having lovely slow mornings and breakfast in bed! Oh what luxury!

Lent is still happening; I'm reading St Mark's Gospel along with Ryce's commentary, roughly the same vintage as my great-grandfather might have used. How Biblical interpretation has changed over the years... I'm using a Bible with space for you to add your notes and drawings

The font is minute and the pages paper-thin, but I like having them all crinkled up where I paint pictures as I go along. (Maybe painting watercolours in bed is living dangerously, but so far, so good.) Any book looks more cheerful with lots of coloured pictures along the way.

Himself has had a birthday. The off-spring came a-visiting, bearing lunch and presents and cards. We had planned to meet in a cafe halfway, but these days....

Leo the cat thoroughly approves. She pins me down so that I can't move

Today we tried out the exploding chocolate snowman Himself received for Christmas. The idea is that you heat a mug of mild, drop in the unfortunate snowman, stir him about and drink him.

Himself pronounced it 'very good',  the snowman didn't get a chance to express an opinion. It will be the turn of my white chocolate one soon. I wonder if I should drop him into a cup of coffee so that he shows up properly?

Thursday 31st October - Still in Europe

Still in Europe, but for how much longer? I don't even want to think about leaving. It has been such an ill-tempered, badly-thought-out, warped and distorted wrangle from start until - well, it's not finished yet.

Moving on, moving on...

If anyone comes trick or treating tonight I'm not sure what we'll be able to give them. I've eaten every scrap of chocolate, and we have no biscuits in the house. They can have a carrot - maybe that will help them see in the dark. I'm not a great Halloween fan, and I've never been trick or treating. Aha, I've just remembered - I think there may be some party blowers in the drawer left over from Christmas - just gone to check - yes. Good.

I've been at home all day. Luxury. Although I earned it by sending out invoices to the piano pupils. Then I discovered that I forgot that lessons at one school are meant to be £11 for twenty minutes, not £10. So I have diddled myself out of £25. I really can't be bothered - I made such a mess of last term's invoices that I'll live with the consequences.

The next big thing on the list is The Dreaded Tax Return. Ugh. One of the real pains is that my teaching year is September to July, and the tax year is April to April. I start a new register and folder and everything in September for the school year, and then have to wangle the information across two school years - which means two record books -  to get the figures. That's the bit I did this afternoon. I deserve chocolate.

Yesterday was a Major Achievement Day -  I stayed home then as well, and took on the kitchen floor. The kitchen isn't that big - I scuffled over it tile by tile, doing it pretty thoroughly, including the cupboard doors and the trolleys where the cats sleep and various things are stored.

But then, because I was working at floor level, I came nose to nose with the oven door. I like stained glass as a concept, and would love to have some panels in the house. But maybe not the oven door, even though it had become a pleasant caramel/brown colour, as in a good creme caramel desert topping. Unfortunately it is meant to be clear glass.

And here's some useful information; if you coat the surface of the glass with neat fairy liquid, and leave it to do its stuff, adding more from time to time, the fairies in the liquid will soften up all the grease and a moderately light effort with the nylon scourer will deal with it in a most satisfying way. Even the little hard lumps of brown-ness gave way eventually. See, see, lookee, lookee in the second picture above. Looks like newish.

The piano is looking very clean and dusted - that's because the piano tuner came yesterday morning. However the dining room table has reverted to its usual state of overloaded chaos. Hey ho. We should up-size; down-sizing is never going to work for us.

The triffid grows apace;

That picture is from yesterday afternoon. It was warm enough, just, for me to sit outside in the sun for half an hour with a cup of coffee;

   but I chose the chair that was further away from the triffid, just in case....

And now for 'show-and-tell'

I am immensely proud of having completed six hats for the 'Shoeboxes-for-Roumania' appeal; we will be packing them at church on Sunday.

These are crochet - I learned how to make them from youtube, and even how to start with a magic circle - whoop whoop. Our Canadian friends may notice the similarity between the smallest hat, on top of the pile, and a tea cosy in their possession...



These are knitted. I switched to crochet after making these, as sewing up knitting is not a favourite activity, and knitting them completely in the round brings other challenges when you start decreasing the stitches.

However, that's four lots of odds and ends of yarn used up, gone, removed from the house. Hooray and worth the effort.

Friday 5th January 2018 - 12th Night

We'll be finishing off clearing the Christmas Decorations this weekend.
Once the house is back back to normal it will feel like the real start to the year.

No, wait, the year 'began' yesterday, on the 4th, when term started.

No, hang on, isn't 1st January the date? Or was it the 1st Sunday in Advent, at the beginning of December? That's when the church year begins.

Or the start of the school year, last September?

Or way back in April, at the start of a new tax year? Tax Year!!!!! Aaargh!!!!

I have been wrestling with Phase 1 of doing my tax return; the Gathering Together of All The Paperwork. The deadline of 31st January is ominously close.

psychologytoday.com

The stuff I earn through PAYE is easy to deal with - round up the P60s and there you are. It's the self-employed teaching that drives me loopy.

I would have got on a lot better if it wasn't for the fact that I organise the figures in school years, eg for the last school year I divide them into Autumn Term 2016, Spring Term 2017, and Summer Term 2017. But the tax year cuts across everything, so for my 2016-17 tax return I have to select the figures for Summer 2016, Autumn 2016 and Spring 2017. I knew I had all the numbers, but in two notebooks (one for each school year) and in various folders on the computer. It was just all a bit brain-bending.

Anyway, three hours later and my papers are in neat piles and the necessary figures are all noted in the current notebook, ready for Phase 2; Do The Tax Return, once I have regained my strength.

Meanwhile... I'll take a break... cup of tea, biscuit, unexpected piano pupil (must remember to add that to this term's records....

Tuesday 14th August - To do, done, not going to get done

 Done:

(Writing "done" things on a "to-do" list is a cheat, but it makes me feel better.)

1. Sort out hospital appointment
2. Phone the people about collecting the bed (they are out)
3. Put an email round about getting hold of an IKEA catalogue - you can only get the hard copy by collecting it from a store - "otherwise you have to browse on-line"
4. Deliver another four bags of stuff to Age
5. UK - they take dressmaking snips and snaps - hooray! (It's a bit depressing that delivering 10 bags and boxes of stuff to various charity shops in the last week has made no appreciable difference in the amount of clutter in the house)
6. Sort out the number of stitches you need to cast on to knit a 6 inch square (to make blankets to give to the Red cross) using 4mm needles and double knitting wool (yeah, my needles may be metric but I'm still Imperial. You may bow or curtsy if you like.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Do:

1. Knit the flippin' square for real, now I know that it isn't 50 or 30 or 35 stitches that are needed - the organiser blithely estimated 50 stitches, and I believed her. To help out, I've knitted a few trial runs to work out what's right. Her plan is to produce blankets for the Red Cross which I will thoroughly approve of when I am restored to a better frame of mind. It's 33 stitches.
2. Tidy the dining room table - again, again, again. I nearly bought an "inspirational" book for my Kindle called "The Fifteen Minute Rule", or some such. I looked at the preview, and the "inspirational" idea is - pretty inspirational; any task can be chipped away at, from tidying to tax returns, in fifteen minute bursts. The writer is so upbeat and optimistic. It worked for her.
3. Which reminds me. The Tax Return.
4. Washing. nearly out of pale clothes, which could be catastrophic or embarrassing, or just irritating.
5. Make cake.
6. Choose flavour of cake.
7. Lift the potatoes
8. Weeding and general garden warfare.

Not going to get done:

1. Probably the Tax Return.
2. Most likely the dining room table.
3. Garden warfare. I feel a pacifist phase coming on. And the nettles and briars are truly triffidous. I expect they are good for wild life. As are the slugs and snail under every leaf.   

Omissions:

Nothing about music practise here
or ironing.....................
or housework................

Oh well.

"Tomorrow is another day"

Sunday 22nd April - Rendering unto Caesar

A Biblical kind of title seems appropriate as I have skived off church this morning - one of the rare Sundays when I am not down for any jobs on the rota (I hope! - sorry if I missed something) and so I stayed in bed...

After a more substantial breakfast this morning (cereal AND toast) I felt strong enough to start work on my tax return.... 

I'm not sure how well a toga would suit George Osborne. Perhaps they should issue them to all workers in HMRC; a badge of honour for they work they are doing to fill the country's coffers in our time of economic need. I'll suggest this to He-knows-who-he-is-if-he-is-reading-this. (As a responsible citizen, I'm not actually going to reveal his real name - it would only add to the drain on the exchequer in having to provide him with round-the-clock police protection, and it's not really his fault anyway - he doesn't Make the rules, he is just the Enforcer of the consequences of living in a democratic society where one lot of politicians spend all the country's money and get voted out, and the next lot have to claw it back somehow without upsetting the people who could afford to pay lots of taxes but have worked out how not to).

He-knows-who-he-is-if-he-is-reading-this could have a red border round his toga, to signify his expertise in all things VAT. I haven't asked him about hot and cold custard tarts and pasties because, as I said earlier, it's not his fault, and he is a really, really nice guy and I like him. Then the ones in charge of benefits could have blue stripes, and the ones who deal with tax relief for planting trees and eco-efficiencies and other suchlike could have green stripes. I've just about reached the end of my knowledge of the tax system. Oh, of course, purple for pensions. I was given the opportunity to read the reply from a tax official to a query about some pension thingy, and it was two sides of A4 of such eloquent, technical, dense, interwoven clauses and subclauses and adverbial phrases and tenses and pronouns and any other bits of grammar that could be incorporated into the long, convoluted sentences, that it should have been set a the main the entrance exam for all potential candidates for any vacancies in the Plain English Society.

"Explain what this letter is about, and rewrite it so the average well-educated adult with a first degree in Accountancy, a Masters in Semantics, and a Doctorate in Quantum Physics can understand it and act appropriately upon the information therein".

Where was I? Oh yes. Embarking upon the long, slow process of gathering together all the bits of information that will gradually coalesce into my tax return. I've now got the kind of brain-ache that only another cup of strong, fully-caffeinated coffee will resolve.

Thinking about it, I don't think togas would be such a good idea. I have a feeling that ther are made of pure wool, which would be a great benefit to the Chinese woolen industry (I can't believe for one minute that the government would do something so out-of-character as to place the order with a British farmers, spinners and weavers), so the dry-cleaning charges would probably bankrupt the nation within days.