DVT DAY 298

Thursday, new years eve and there a few things to do. 1. Do my tax return, 2. finish the damn jigsaw. So after coffee and bacon we set to and go at the jigsaw. Outcome inevitable but strangely satisfying and reinforces the strange ritual of festive jigsaw doing.

Time to get the taxman done. I retreat to the office and pull out my account book and all the relevant P60s. I run off the relevant bank statements and settle down to do the maths and fill in the accounts. Once the books are done I log on to the website and log in. It is disturbing how much the government already knows about me, or at least my finances. I plough my way through the online pages and eventually get to the painful bit, the final debt. I submit my self assessment and get a reference number. Now I have to wait 72 hours before I can pay off my debt. I can wait.

Its taken hours so its the sofa for me and a quick read. I am hooked on my new book by Studs Terkel, a radio presenter in the USA who interviewed ordinary working people up until his death in 2008 aged 96. He won the Pulitzer prize in 1985 for general non-fiction. His ability to get ordinary working people to talk about work is brilliant. Some of his early work feels like the world that Steinbeck wrote about in Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Its a book that can be dipped into but I am reading my way through it and surprisingly find myself making pencil notes in the margin.

Time for dinner and The Celebrity Great British Sewing Bee and I realise that it is New Years Eve. Honestly I could not give a toss, 2021 will come in its own good time. Sound bah humbug? Probably, but Tier 4 has cast its shadow over the land. I shall pick the most entertaining TV and welcome the new COVID year with a smoothie.

Well thank you for reading my blog I hope it’s still being useful and that 2021 will be as good as it can be. See you all as soon as possible. I promise to be the first leper out of the colony!