Today was set aside to do my taxes – the lovely Moira Stewart has been terrifying me only half as much as Julie Walters smoke alarm adverts, and the constant reassurance that tax doesn’t have to be taxing has lured me into a false sense of security.
Well, I can safely say that tax might not have to be taxing, but it surely is. Most of the form seems to ask questions about farming – and then when I put the figures in it’s so ludicrously vague that I don’t understand how this can possibly work.
A box for income and a box for expenses and that’s pretty much it. Thanks to earning not alot in that tax year and paying a lot lot lot to go to gigs and pay for Edinburgh they are now telling me they owe me money – which is only mildly terrifying. I am expecting a knock on the door by the taxman himself imminently.
I think the tax fairy should just ask “are you rich or poor?”, if you are poor you pay no tax, if you are rich then you employ an accountant to ensure you look poor. Of course, that is half how it works anyway.
Of course, the most taxing bit of the whole process was logging into the website in the first place. I’d lost/forgotten/eaten my details and spent two hours trying to remember, find bits of paper, search my computer then getting the website to tell me the user name (which is what I thought it was) and then reset the password and it still didn’t work.
I finally succumbed to ringing the helpline who helpfully told me that I had been locked out on my third unsuccessful attempt – and so the fourth through to the one hundred-and-thirteenth didn’t count.
Moira Stewart can fuck right off and I’m now going to change the batteries in my smoke alarm. So ner Julie Walters… ner.