Tuesday and its wet and cold. My partner brings me my morning hot water and I get up and make myself breakfast while my partner goes to the gym for her aqua class. With the refuelling done I set to work on preparing my accounts for 2024/25. In order to do this I have to run off my bank statements for my current account and my credit card. To my surprise my ancient HP P2600 printer is connected to my phone, I have absolutely no idea how this happened but it means I can run off all my statements from my phone. I patiently plod through all the printing, occasionally adding fresh paper, but apart from that the techno did all the work.

I finally have a pile of statements which I then go through item by item and highlighting the ones that are related to my poetry adventure along with interest payments. It is a long and tedious task but I find all the expenditure and royalties that I was expecting to find. I also discovered that I am Amazon dependant. I’m not claiming it as a mental illness or anything but it is clear I am too bloody lazy to go shopping and too impatient to wait for anything to arrive. Some would say this is me adapting to my situation and making the best use of technology, I’m sure others would see it differently. Any way I finally get all the statements marked up and I am ready to construct my accounts. They are very basic, what goes out against what comes in. I knew I spent a lot on publishing services but I had not toted up my royalties. I was pleasantly surprised. Do not get me wrong, they no way covered my costs of publication services but they did indicate that there are more of my books out there than I thought. In the end I have accounts that I can now use when I jump on the HMRC account and wrestle with the annual tax return. I am hoping my poetry losses might off set some other income.

With the hard graft done on the accounts its time for a sandwich and a drink before my next project of the day. By now my partner is home and we put our heads together to do the quick crossword before I move onto dishwasher spray arm replacement. I am feeling confident as I have watched several short videos which invariably ended with the words equivalent to “there you go its a piece of piss”. You always know there is going to be a problem when you open up the package with the spare parts and there is a piece you do not expect. In this case a flat horse shoe shaped bit of plastic that was supposed to slide into the end of one of the spray arms. No idea what it is for and still haven’t. It is also tricky when the person on the video says “make sure you fit this piece up the right way” and gives no indication which is the right way. If you do not take a picture of the original in situ you stand a fifty fifty chance of screwing it up.

I started on the upper spray arm as I knew I would have to fit a new supply inlet on the back wall of the washer. I had seen it done on the video and remembered that just after she said “ease the metal clips with a flat head screwdriver and the inlet will pop out” there was an edit from screwdriver to the inlet popping out. Of course the metal clips did not yield so easily and the inlet did everything apart from “just pop out”. Eventually I got the damn thing out and was then faced with “just pop the new one on”. I did manage to get the thing into place but not without contorting myself in some weird yoga poses to reach the back of the washer. I breathed a sigh of relief and moved onto installing the new spray arm onto the underside of the upper basket. This was relatively simple, however this is where the mystery piece came into play. I think it was meant to be a spacer but the space it was supposed to go in was filled by the wire of the basket that anchored the spray arm end. I tried several possibilities from gentle coaxing to brute force but sometimes you just know that you cannot get two things into one space. In the end I decided that it was functional and left it alone. The putting in of the lower spray arm was a doddle and everything the videos said was true. I packed away my tools and set the dishwasher off on a half load test run. It is whirring as I type and I will soon know if my project has been a success.

By now I am knackered and treat myself to a drink and a hot cross bun (Tesco, surprisingly good) and set about writing todays blog. Already its tea time and the day has flown by. I ready myself for more of the Brokenwood Mysteries, its clear I am hooked on them, but by now I know the formulae. I do like the way the same characters keep popping up. like Frodo the luckless and hapless small entrepreneur who is always involved in some way in finding the initial corpse. The Russian medical officer is a breath of fresh air and creates a lot of the humour. So I will indulge in the fun of Brokenwood and then take my night meds and hope for a good nights sleep before going to the HMRC website tomorrow. If it crashes I am screwed. One last note, I have written a small new piece for the blog on prost8kancerman.com its just about another of my favourite second hand poetry books.