Friday and I wake up and find my partner who is off to the gym. I get up, having taken my vitals and get into my training kit. After a brief breakfast and my morning meds I get into the garden and start to tidy things up. After preparing another flower bed ready for my partner to sow the flower seeds she bought the other day. I am hot and tired when I get back inside the house for a rest, just before the post person delivered a large envelope addressed to my eldest daughter. And then the fun began, the letter was from HMRC.

Yes that is right the delay in responding, which they apologised for, was 76 weeks! What they were demanding was a tax return (self assessment) for the tax year before my sister died! They have sent the letter to the family member who was the executor for my sisters estate, which was wound up 53 weeks ago! Only Her Majesties Revenue and Customs could be so inept, idiotic and ineffectual. But it meant that I and my eldest daughter spent the rest of the day going through the accounts from my sisters estate and talking to HMRC in between emailing and talking to the accountants to who sent the letter to HMRC 76 weeks ago. There are some interesting complexities but as the estate is closed there is no one to complete a tax return, is raises some issues. Can HMRC get dead people to fill in a tax for what is deemed a personal tax liability. Can HMRC collect taxes from dead people? That is called death duties that in this case have all been paid, so is this double jeopardy. After a day of having to drag myself through all my dead sisters papers all over again I am battered and homicidal, I just drag myself into the evening and watch TV until I take my meds and retreat to bed, with a sense that there will be more HMRC nonsense ahead. It feels as if I am stepping into a Kafkaesque world.

Saturday and having put HMRC behind me for at least the weekend I wake up and find my partner still fast asleep. Eventually I get up and like my partner have breakfast, take my meds and get ready to go shopping. Its a raid on Sainsburys, cash from the ATM and a pile of fruit and veg with a smattering of meat. Once home its rugby for me but its interrupted by the arrival of a mystery parcel. When I open it I find an official Lions baseball cap for the coming Lions tour. It can only be from one of my friends, so I message him and send him a picture of me in it.

I watch a rugby match and when its over I swing into cook mode. Tonight I am making Mary Berry’s pork Stroganoff. It goes very well and I make two versions one using soured cream, and as my eldest daughter does not do well with dairy, a white wine version. it goes down well. By the time I have eaten I am knackered and escape to Dr Who ( not impressed so far) and then take to drafting the blog. The evening ends with meds and some reading before putting on the finger splint and settling down.