Figures

As from this year, I'm going to have an accountant. Up until now I've done my own tax returns, largely because on the one and only year I paid an accountancy firm which 'specialized' in pharmacists to do my books, they cost me a small fortune to hire - and nearly cost me several hundred pounds in unnecessary taxes through a couple of elementary data entry errors that took me twenty seconds to spot. I fired them, got the fees back, and did the books myself.

Now, however, things are getting messy. This year there will be employed income, self-employed income as a pharmacist, self-employed income as a writer, and I'm setting up a partnership of some sort. Writing is fiddly enough on its own as you have so many minor expenses to track, and you can 'carry forward' or 'carry back' to adjacent tax years by a process known as 'averaging'. I have a headache just thinking about that, let alone trying to work out how the partnership will work - so, accountant. It's taken me two full days to sort last year's books out, and apart from the ritual concentration music it's not something I enjoy. Besides, I should be planning this year's planting and getting some early seeds in, not scowling at my calculator.

Still, if you have to fill in a tax return the feeling of having it done and dusted for another year is wonderful - like the moment when a piece of bagpipe music finally finishes. Sadly it only lasts until the next piece of Revenue-related stupidity starts, as Scott Adams points out. Ding-dong: "We're from the IRS Adjustments Service. We've come to take your socks and shave 40% of your dog."

Explain Yourself

I found myself trying to explain what I'm on about to a local gent this evening, and thought I might share it with you all too in lieu of witty banter. I'm off now for a glass of Hedgewizard's Old Peculiar (or should that be Old and Peculiar?) and a warm in front of the wood burner. Slainte.

"I'm not selling the Sustainable Communities Act as such - it may become a useful tool in time, and I'm keen that everyone makes the best use possible of it, but it's not the main focus of my attention.

"The Transition movement is more interesting. It presupposes that governments won't and can't respond (at least in time) to what's going on, and that therefore the only action that can make any difference is local action. That doesn't mean that groups can't support global issues, but it's really far more about growing more food, going off-grid, improving local facilities and so on. Improving local resilience to the knocks that are likely to come - say another petrol blockade that empties the shelves in Tesco - is what Transition is all about. I have young children; I can't hand them a saved planet, but perhaps I can make a corner of the world that won't go tits-up if the lights go off for twenty minutes, if you'll pardon the vernacular.

"I'm personally a grow-your-own man, and cook-your-own, pick-your-own, brew-your-own and whatever else you fancy. I happen to think this is what life should be all about, and hair shirts are not for me (although I have the decency to feel guilty about hating sandals). Like yourself I think the end of civilization is probably just a matter of time, but if there's any future for mankind as a species I think it lies in what the Transition people call 'managed descent' - actually moving towards a future where there's less oil and less energy as if it was somewhere we really wanted to go.

"Enough blather with no drink in hand - 'tis a big enough subject anyway. I take slight exception, by the way, to being considered a 'chap like' anyone. Oliver Letwin had me bracketed as a 'chap like' Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, which amused me no end. Ah, that I had a tenth of his money and half his hair.

"See you after the flood -
Andy"

The Case of the Vampire Mouse

Dealing with rodents in the home is part and parcel of life. Way back when Ceres first popped a handful of grains into her satchel, there was a mouse watching her from the shadows and thinking 'A-ha.'* Ever since then, mice and rats have kept us company everywhere we've gone (except perhaps to Marks and Spencers, where they don't encourage that sort of
thing).

You might think that having a cat would put a stop to rodent problems forever, but I'm afraid you'd be wrong. Infestations do tend to be very short when there's a decent moggie around, but they also tend to be rather more frequent as they have a habit of catching mice outside and bringing them in for a bit of a chat and a spot of tea. And then losing them. Witness Number Two Cat sitting on the upstairs landing last week, looking a bit perplexed.

What was I doing again? his expression said. I'm sure I was doing something a minute ago. Was I looking for something? ...oh, never mind. It'll be teatime in a minute.

On Friday morning, Number Two Son pointed out a superficial wound on his big toe, in tones that implied it was somehow my fault (for some reason it always seems to be my fault). I cleaned said toe and advised him to stop running around in bare feet, for the child is a hobbit. It then transpired that the poorly toe had woken him up, and that he had seen a mouse in his
room.**

I checked, and sure enough there were signs of recent mousy activity; the draw-string for his blinds (nylon, inedible) had been nibbled on and there were spots of mouse juice on nearby surfaces. The most notable casualty of the incursion though was that large patches of skin had been chewed off N2S's half-finished model dragon. The skin was a synthetic clay; clearly
this was a pretty desperate mouse. I set a trap with a tiny bit of chocolate in it, and waited for the crack. It generally takes around 20 minutes.

But nothing happened. Odd, thought I. Perhaps mouse is sleeping.

Twelve hours later and with still nary a mouse in the trap, it was time for Number Two Son to go to bed. He was a bit wary about going to sleep with a potential mouse in the room, and I was jollying him along trying not to make a big deal about it - until I swept the duvet off his bed to give it a good shake.

Ah. Mouse is dead, in bed, mafia-style. All becomes clear - the wretched thing must have crept into N2S's bed for purposes unknown, got rolled on, and bitten his toe as a last gesture of defiance. It's not the first time mice have bitten back either - so moggies, beware!



*And unknown to the mouse, a cat was watching it and thinking 'O-ho.'

**Behold the country child, who sees a mouse in his room and waits until morning to alert a grown-up; a similar incident when I was his age resulted in me declaring a state of national emergency, causing my father to come upstairs armed with a shovel, and with trousers tucked into his socks, while our large and highly-trained guard dog hid under the kitchen table until someone told him it was safe to come out.

Of meetings, sustainability, and awkward questions

Okay, so. It's odd, but since I've had more time to write I actually seem to be doing less of it than previously - instead I find myself trying to undo the evils wrought by five years of not having time to finish anything, ever. I'm answering e-mails, filing paperwork, posting seeds to people, and generally Catching Up. This can by definition only be a temporary state of affairs, unless I move seamlessly onto Taking Too Much On again, which is always a possibility. Last night was a case in point.

Last night was, in fact, a fairly large county-wide meeting concerning a new piece of UK legislation, the Sustainable Communities Act. This has two prongs; the first is that it forces Whitehall (the seat of our hideously powerful, permanent and unelected Civil Service) to publish details of what exactly it spends our money on, broken down into areas. This starts in April, and it's going to be one of those things that would be funny if only it wasn't so damned serious.

The second prong is that Citizens' Panels get to look at this information, and propose changes to the particularly nutty pieces of the fruit cake. That's not new of course; the new bit is that the local authorities have to reach agreement with the panels about these proposals, and then central government has to reach agreement with the local authorities. Government can get off the hook using various arguments, but the more local authorities are pressing them on a particular issue the more embarrassing and damaging this will be. There's the theory, as I understand it. It could be tremendously useful for the Transition movement, but as Whitehall will drag its feet over things and anyway there's no extra money to fund any of this, it's likely to be something of a slow-burning fuse.

The reason I mention all this is that, owing to my not stepping back smartly enough when volunteers were called for, I ended up being the token local celebrity at the event and had to make a short speech (The Transition Economy at the Level of a Radish). I'm not used to public speaking but I did OK, and the diarrhoea has nearly stopped now so thanks for asking. What I hadn't been warned about was that I'd actually be nailed to a podium with the head of the County Council, a local MP, and the head of Local Works who helped to draft the Act. In other words, three chaps who understood what was going on a hell of a lot better than I did. And then people asked us questions for an hour. The next time anyone uses the word panel I will know exactly what it means.

Things went swimmingly for a while as I simply kept my mouth shut, but inevitably questions started to come up that none of the others fancied, so guess who got them? Bingo. Then came a doozie.

"What is the panel's idea of Utopia?"

A microphone appeared in my hand and I gazed at it stupidly for a moment. "Er..."

Of course, now I realise that I should have just turned the question back on itself. What my idea of Utopia was didn't matter a damn - it was the questioner's idea of Utopia that was relevant to the question. I should have just asked him what it was, and then the question would have been useful. But I didn't think of that at the time - my mind was a blur featuring hammocks, organic fields as far as the eye could see, eternal summer and Scottish fudge. Hey, he asked.

My mouth opened, and then I closed it again. It had been about to say "I strongly suspect that what's coming will be no-one's vision of Utopia", but my mouth has a very long history of saying things that I haven't told it to, and this simply wasn't the time or place to bring people down. Instead I opined that we couldn't just try to turn the clocks back to 1930 but we were going to have to bring parts of that era back, and mentioned working horses as an example. Some of the audience looked baffled.

But I think this may be true. In Cuba's 'special period', where they had to reduce their fuel usage in a big hurry because the Soviet Union was no longer exporting to them, they found that tractors quickly became too unreliable for many uses. The problem wasn't fuelling them - you can reserve fuel for that - it was that when they suffered a minor breakdown you had to wait a hell of a long time for parts to be found and shipped to where they were needed. You can't reserve fuel for that sort of contingency, you see, and you can't have a time-critical crop like wheat depending on a machine that only works when it feels like it.

This is only one example, and it may take a long time for it to happen, but the reaction of the audience told me that there's still a lot of work for the Transition Network to do. The people in that hall were there to discuss an Act which has come into being because our way of life is unsustainable, but a few of them didn't really seem to grasp that unsustainable actually means 'not possible to continue' or 'doomed in its present form'.

Interesting times, indeed.

Sparks

Ah. This will be New Year, then - my first few official Writery Working Days disappearing in a welter of emergencies, backlogged jobs which now decide that they are urgent, and being unable to find things for Lo, they are On The Desk. I did manage a couple of articles to support the book, but none of the jobs that I am bursting to get on with. No matter.

Earthenwitch has started the New Year in much better style than me, with an abrupt cessation of her water supply which can only mean frozen (and no doubt burst, come the thaw) pipes somewhere, a mouse trapped somewhere under the living room carpet, and flu to boot. All I've been able to muster in the disaster department is an electrical nearly-fire resulting in loss of power to the kitchen. Mental note to self: smell of dead fish = slowly cooking insulation. Hardly in the same league though, is it?

The garden remains untouched due to being frozen solid*, an event unheard of in Dorset - where the sea froze for the first time in decades and a large gentleman nearly croaked trying to rescue his dog when it fell through the ice. Here in Blighty we're simply not used to real cold; two inches of snow and everything grinds to a halt. Roads, rail, you name it - we're not ready for it. This is utterly pathetic, but not as pathetic as the observation that we act as surprised as hell every year. One of my favourite annual news events is watching the media frenzy when it snows in the southeast (where all the BBC execs live) - 'snow chaos hits thousands' - whereas snow anywhere else is interesting - but it's hardly news, is it?


*The polytunnel, on the other hand, remains untouched due to laziness. It's on my list, okay?