Taxing Times

The deadline for filing a self-assessment tax return online is 31st January, as all self-employed people know. There are those of you (and I’m not judging; good for you!) who file theirs on 6^th April and bask in a warm glow of satisfaction for the rest of the year while those of us (me) who leave everything to the last minute have the blasted thing hanging over us like some kind of snarling, bat-winged night creature.

Sure enough, I spent all of last Saturday doing my self-assessment. Bent over my spreadsheet, I vowed never to leave it this late again. This time last year, I said, “Next year, I will do my tax return in April.” I meant it when I said it back then. I mean it every time.

This being a blog about the writing process, you might be wondering where I’m going with this. Fear not, dear reader. As I clicked through the endless questions apparently written by a cave-dwelling accountant, I came across a section which I’ve noticed before but not thought of applying to myself. I am a creator of literary or artistic works which should mean I can take advantage of something calling itself yearly averaging. I read it out loud. I didn’t get it. Frowning and with my glasses slipping to the end of my nose, I read it again in a slightly louder voice. My husband came in with a cup of tea. I tried it out on him. He didn’t understand it either.

Yet more information came to light. By now, face contorted and lip curled into a snarl, I was beginning to resemble Bernard trying to do his tax return in Episode One Series One of Black Books (click here to enjoy it https://www.facebook.com/Channel4/videos/971621189639234/?v=971621189639234). It seemed that if I were a diver, I could claim yearly averaging. Why a diver? Is it because they spend so much time under water? If I took up scuba diving, would I too benefit from tax breaks? I’m not a strong swimmer and I hate getting my face wet, so it didn’t seem likely. 

The language used in the mysterious communications from HMRC must have been written by an actual person, with a life outside its dusty precincts. Someone else must have checked it. But what if they didn’t? What if there is some kind of mischievous word goblin haunting the echoing corridors of HMRC, every year inserting a new bonkers paragraph into the form?

Words and phrases that I can’t ever imagine using kept popping up. Post-cessation, anyone? While we’re at it, does anyone fancy a bit of disguised renumeration? Better yet, amount of non-PAYE disguised remuneration employment income. What the heck does that mean?

One of the comments I often get when I publish my blogs (and please, do make comments if you are so inclined. They are the crumbs of encouragement we self-employed creators of literary or artistic works live for) is that reading them is like listening to me speak. This is a good thing. Who speaks the way the HMRC write?

It’s been a long week. I’m tired. It’s January. I spent too many hours doing my tax return that I’ll never get back. I should probably stop now as I am starting to sound a touch bitter and twisted. As I write, a strong winter sun is shining, some hardy feathered friends outside are twittering and the camellia bush is in bud. There is hope. Spring isn’t that far away. And in only 9 weeks, I’ll be doing this all over again. If I keep my promise to myself.

Watch this space.

Images by Pixabay

When is a bench not a bench?

My husband and I are devoted fans of the BBC show “Detectorists.” Not a huge amount happens in it. Two friends, Lance and Andy, wander over the fields metal detecting, chatting about University Challenge, ring pulls and the never-seen but often discussed Bob Cromer (poor old Bob). We love the humour, the characterisation, the music and of course the setting. The fictional Essex town of Danebury is actually Framlingham, just up the road from us in East Suffolk. From time to time, we amuse ourselves by taking a trip over there to tick locations off our lists. Some are really obvious. The Castle pub is the exterior of the Two Brewers, much loved by the DMDC, while its interior is the Crown up the A12 at Great Glemham. Lance’s house is just up from the church, which itself makes several appearances in all three series. However, there are the odd locations which have us completely stumped.

In no particular order, here they are:

1.    The bench where Lance sits waiting for Kate while Sophie and Peter spy on him.

2.    Andy and Becky’s house.

3.    Lance’s place of work, the fruit and veg yard.

Framlingham College sits on a hill looking over the Mere and the castle immortalised by Suffolk’s own Ed Sheeran. It appears several times in Detectorists, both inside and out. I was there on Monday, having a meeting with two of its fine staff. We started chatting about the show and to my delight, both Tracey and Tom were a mine of information as they hosted the cast and crew a fair bit during filming.

That bench, for which we’ve searched many times in vain, was brought in by the crew and placed in a meadow alongside a fake lamp post and bin. It looked so real. It wasn’t. No wonder we couldn’t find it. The yard which Lance roars into in his yellow TR7 is actually on Bentwaters, the old RAF base in Rendlesham. The police station is the exterior of a college boarding house (complete with fake sign) and the hypnotherapy centre where Lance goes to try to cure his seasickness is a number of locations around the college.

As we chatted, we agreed that things look so different on the TV to the way they do in real life. The closest we viewers get is when we watch the DVD extras (told you we were fans) and get to see a scene surrounded by all the paraphernalia of filming. Dollies and dolly tracks, people with clapperboards, sound equipment, make up ladies hovering in the background. You know they’re there, but when you’re watching the show, you pretend they're not.

Like the concept of  the willing suspension of disbelief (you read a work of fiction, you know it’s all made up but you agree with the author to pretend it’s real), TV shows sell themselves to us by encouraging us to believe that it’s just two men trudging over a muddy Suffolk field with their detectors, even though we know that they’re surrounded by the crew.

A bench that is not a bench. A solitary field peopled by crowds of invisible workers. So much in life appears to be one thing but is actually quite another. Friendships which start well but soon falter. Jobs which promise much but turn out to be a pointless slog. Social media posts about perfect lives which mask great sadness.

I was at the College to chat about the upcoming concert by Christina Johnston there this Saturday. Looking at pictures of Christina (I’ve attached one), you might think she is some kind of semi-divine being who lives in a tower somewhere, clad in beautiful gowns 24/7. In fact, she is the most delightful, down-to-earth person who is very modest about her God-given talent. I’ve shared in the past how she’s converted me to opera (well, some of it) with her beautiful voice. She is the real thing, unlike that bench. If you want to come and enjoy a wonderful evening, click here to find out more: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/christina-johnston-concert-miracle-of-the-voice-tickets-77908102231?fbclid=IwAR1ta9mLd4Wgo7mcWfP4-3YHSsh8i7vLZmNsakjiL2n8wz2nUhNhgRh1FHY

As I’ve grown older, I’ve started to learn discernment and to distinguish what’s real from what’s fake. Just like that bench, not everything is in its correct place, but there is plenty out there to enjoy to and to believe in. And now all we need to do is track down Andy and Becky's house. Anyone out there with any ideas.....?

Image by Pixabay

Mrs Hinch versus Mrs Leigh

Following on from my dream about King Zog last week (click here if you missed it: https://bigwordsandmadeupstories.blogspot.com/2020/01/king-zog-and-mystery-of-dreams.html), I was hard put to think of something to write about this week. As often happens, however, a seemingly random event fired up my creative writing spark.

If I wasn’t so awash with morals, I’d tell you a fib. It might go something like this. “Having woken early to write for three hours in peace, sipping crystalline water from my own well as I do every morning, I was visited by the Muse. ‘Eureka!’ I cried (quietly, so as not to wake my sleeping household). ‘I have it!’ This week, I shall craft a most marvellous piece for my devoted fans upon the art of cleaning. Thank heavens that I run such a tidy house, with sparkling worktops, gleaming sinks and a pleasant fragrance of spring flowers always in the air.”

This is not what happened. Don’t spread it around, but in between writing some articles, my monthly blog for the ACW and some freelance blogs for clients, I took five to scroll through Facebook. Like you do. Well, like I do.

I knew vaguely that there was a person called Mrs Hinch with a huge Instagram following who cleaned things. As I was time-sucking my way through other people’s lives, up popped something called Mrs Hinch’s Cleaning Army.

Turns out that Mrs Hinch (aka Sophie Hinchcliffe) is an Essex housewife in her late twenties who has attracted over 3 million followers on Instagram alone with her cleaning tips and hacks. The woman is an internet sensation. Her chatty, everywoman videos have led to cleaning products selling out all over the UK. Reassuringly, she’s not a fan of extremely expensive stuff, quite the reverse. Intrigued, I trawled through some of her posts and was surprised by how chuffed I was to realise that I had some of her favourites in my cleaning cupboard.

Mrs Hinch admits that she suffers from anxiety and finds that a regular cleaning routine helps her deal with it. She’s even made the Sunday Times Bestseller list with her first book, “Hinch Yourself Happy”.

Let me refer you back to the title of this blog.

I can 100% guarantee that you will never, ever be watching tips from Mrs Leigh on how to clean or style your home. I will not be writing about any of my housework tips because I’ve only got one:

Why keep on doing housework when it only encourages it to come back?

I do clean, obviously. I wash up almost constantly, and I’ve either got a wash on, a wash drying or a wash folded and dry waiting to be put away. Sometimes all three at once. I dust fairly often, wipe the smears off the mirrors and whip out my crevice tool (what a great phrase!) when vacuuming with my Shark. However, I don’t have a cleaning routine. I don’t enjoy it. I hate the fact that you could spend an entire day to get your house gleaming and within 24 hours, the rot would have set in. It doesn’t help that our draughty Victorian house is heated via a solid fuel Rayburn, meaning we have soot and dust flying around between October and May.

So, what would @mrsleigh be famous for? What exactly would my imaginary 3 million followers be following? I’d like to think it was my writing.

Mrs Hinch shares pictures of her beautiful grey and white interiors, not a hair out of place. But she manages to do this without ever being annoying, or smug or pretending that she’s got this life thing down. She shares her vulnerability. I like that. I am a brand-new Mrs Hinch fan, but I have detected real authenticity and courage in her posts.

I posted my first ever personal blog back on 7^th November last year (here it is: https://morethanwriters.blogspot.com/2019/11/its-all-completely-fabulous-by-ruth.html). I was a bit scared, to be honest. It’s easy to interview people and write up their stories, quite another matter to let your slip show to potential readers you’ve never even met. I hit “publish” and waited for people either not to read it, or to read it and hate it. They didn’t. Phew. And that was the beginning of something which has helped me to build up my confidence and deal with the odd outbreak of anxiety. Feeling nervous about something? Write a blog. Random memory floating about in your head? Write a story about it. It works for me, but I appreciate that Mrs Leigh’s Writing Army may never exist.  If it did, I’d have to ask one of the children to show me how to work Instagram, but it may never come to that.

Writing. My saviour, my pleasure, my job, my dream. Just as Mrs Hinch can’t rest until her plughole smells lovely, I keep on coming up with more and more blog ideas and can’t relax till they’re written.

My house is no more gleaming than when I first started writing this. But I’ve learned something in the meantime. Thanks Mrs Hinch!

King Zog and the mystery of dreams

On Sunday night, I dreamt (amongst other things) that King Zog’s grandson was running a brewery a quarter of a mile from my house. Now this is the kind of thing you’d think I’d know, but it came as a complete surprise to me. Perhaps the fact that I was helping our church trumpeter to run a stall at the local school fair while chatting to Steve the mechanic and wondering why someone had graffitied “paint your barge boards” on our neighbour’s house had something to do with it.

The last time I had a dream that clear and specific was about 20 years ago when I dreamed an entire episode of “The Bill”, complete with ad break. The plot was based on lead being stolen from church roofs. Turned out it was the postman, who smuggled it out in his post bag.

Looking at all this from a scientific point of view, dreams are nothing more than our brain processing memories, experiences and thoughts from the day during the period of REM sleep. Scientists have found that our dreams are generated in the right inferior lingual gyrus (located in the visual cortex). So far, so factual.

In time-honoured family tradition, I shared my dream when I woke up. We went through it and managed to decode much of the seemingly random goings-on. I had a long chat with my neighbour the other day, during which he told me he intended to paint his barge boards[1]. We went back to school on Monday so I was probably thinking about the Christmas school fair where I bought a scented candle which I’ve never been able to find again. In my dream, the church trumpeter and I were selling candles, although all the ones which smelled of pomegranate and fig were gone by the time I came to buy one (incredibly specific for a dream. I even managed to get the fragrance when I sniffed them in the early part of the dream). My car needs an MOT, hence Steve the mechanic.

Where King Zog[2] and his grandson’s brewery came from, I cannot tell you. However, whatever that was all about, it’s given me my blog for this week. I’ve been tinkering with lots of different ideas, none of which worked out. King Zog flowed.

Dreams are transient and fleeting, but the odd one really stays with you. I remember lots of mine and this is the first, but probably not the last time that I’ll use them as inspiration. One of the most frequent questions writers get asked is “where do you get your ideas from?” Well, in this case, from a rather insane dream that left me feeling puzzled yet inspired.

I can’t explain all of my dream, but that makes it all the more interesting and inspiring. A big thank you to Ahmet Muhtar Zogolli, aka Zog I, King of the Albanians. I hope the brewery’s going well …….

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[1] Whatever a barge board is. I don’t know.

[2] Colourful first and only King of Albania from 1928-1939.