The Inland Revenue, Again
I seem to have a cursed relationship with the Inland Revenue in the UK. When I was working other people would tell me that the Inland Revenue were OK but to watch out for the hard men working on VAT. My experience was totally the contrary; I found the VAT people helpful and the Inland Revenue at times impossible to deal with. Now I'm trying to file my tax return for last year.........
It all started in the late 1980s when the Inland Revenue decided to stick me with a demand for £7000 for tax on “director's emoluments” which I had never taken/received. They had no evidence for the demand but they can do that and it was my job to prove them wrong (prove a negative? .....never mind). As it happened, I had always been in favour of the Inland Revenue having draconian powers provided they could be relied upon to use them sensibly, e.g. to get at money laundering, etc. But can you ever trust a government department to act sensibly? Clearly, they were after all the money I was making from gun and drug running, prostitution, etc, despite the fact that the sums involved were pocket money in their terms.
After over a year of replying to requests for information and piles of correspondence they sent bailiffs to my house to collect their dues. I, with the help of my accountant, appealed to my local MP. He extracted from the Inland Revenue a letter which closely resembled the type of signed confession extracted by tyrannical regimes before they stuck someone against a wall and shot them: “failure to carry out instruction, failure of internal communication,” apologies, etc. All this went on of course with the Inspector of Taxes. I then received a letter from the Collector of Taxes demanding payment of interest on the tax that was now agreed never to have been due in the first place. I pointed out that the tax had never been due and the Collector replied that he operated independently of the Inspector of taxes (as he does) and was entitled to collect the interest he demanded. At this point my accountant stepped in as I could not be relied upon to reply coherently or without uttering threats and simply said that if the Collector of taxes persisted then the matter would again be referred to the MP and, if necessary, the Ombudsman; and he asked for written confirmation that the Collector would cease to pursue the matter. The Collector did cease to pursue the matter but I never got the letter of confirmation.
I applied for tax residence status in France when I left England, completing and signing a form P85 which is supposed to do the job. Dream on. There is much more documentation to be supplied, including an intriguing form R85. This my bank asked me to sign in order to receive (pitiful) interest gross. It's obviously intended for the job but states specifically that it cannot be accepted from anyone resident outside the UK. Catch 22? Anyway, this year (two and a half years later) I had my French resident status for tax purposes accepted by (now) HMRC in a letter which said specifically to fill in on my next tax return only the tax paid on my private pension. Which I duly did, returned the form and duly had it rejected on the grounds that I had filled in only the tax paid on my private pension. I notice that the rejected return had been stamped “SA Stockton Group”. So I'm assuming at the moment that this is a case of outsourcing with, in time honoured government tradition, little or no communication between government and outsourcer(er). If not, here we go again................
lundi 29 novembre 2010
Intimations Of Winter
Intimations Of Winter
We've started having serious frosts. They've pole-axed the begonias and french marigolds that were the last vestiges of colour in the front of the house and brought down the leaves that were providing an autumn display. The top of Mt Ventoux has had its white winter bonnet for 3-4 weeks but now the snow has descended to around 1500 ft, spreading across Mt Bluye and the hills behind Buis. That's still 1000 ft above the village but here the weather has been overcast for longer periods than usual and it has drizzled with rain quite frequently. In principle, this part of the world doesn't do overcast and drizzle other than for an occasional couple of days but this year has been an exception.
So, no boules for a week now. At the same time, the local cinemas have produced some very uninspiring programmes so social life has been limited to conversation while eating and drinking. One such occasion last week gave me the opportunity to try six people altogether in my kitchen, which actually worked quite well. I didn't think that many would fit in comfortably but they did. On another occasion last week I got to know Robin and Jill rather better. Robin (Marlar) is an ex-Sussex and England cricketer and former president of the MCC and was one of the earliest of the English contingent here. He owns a patch of land on the other side of the river that he'd hoped might become a cricket pitch but there's not a lot of cricket potential around here. I'd said to the boules team at the national tournament that if we won they would have to learn cricket (since I'd learned boules) but there was never much danger of either of those things happening. Robin and Jill had been coming out for just a couple of months in the summer but are now spending much more time here, which is good news as, apart from their both being excellent company, Robin is a fund of information on happenings in the village over the last twenty years or so.
And I received my first Christmas card. The French don't really do Christmas (or birthday) cards: the variety is limited, the quality poor and they are very expensive. So I now rely more on email and do any Christmas posting when I arrive in England before Christmas. I plan to spend two weeks there this year as my mother is increasingly fragile. That will also give me more time to get around and see friends while I am over. And I shall fly rather than drive this year, hiring a car at the other end; a 2500 km round trip on winter roads definitely lacks appeal and I shall have nothing that won't fit in a suitcase to bring back.
And today the Christmas street decorations went up in the village. QED.
We've started having serious frosts. They've pole-axed the begonias and french marigolds that were the last vestiges of colour in the front of the house and brought down the leaves that were providing an autumn display. The top of Mt Ventoux has had its white winter bonnet for 3-4 weeks but now the snow has descended to around 1500 ft, spreading across Mt Bluye and the hills behind Buis. That's still 1000 ft above the village but here the weather has been overcast for longer periods than usual and it has drizzled with rain quite frequently. In principle, this part of the world doesn't do overcast and drizzle other than for an occasional couple of days but this year has been an exception.
So, no boules for a week now. At the same time, the local cinemas have produced some very uninspiring programmes so social life has been limited to conversation while eating and drinking. One such occasion last week gave me the opportunity to try six people altogether in my kitchen, which actually worked quite well. I didn't think that many would fit in comfortably but they did. On another occasion last week I got to know Robin and Jill rather better. Robin (Marlar) is an ex-Sussex and England cricketer and former president of the MCC and was one of the earliest of the English contingent here. He owns a patch of land on the other side of the river that he'd hoped might become a cricket pitch but there's not a lot of cricket potential around here. I'd said to the boules team at the national tournament that if we won they would have to learn cricket (since I'd learned boules) but there was never much danger of either of those things happening. Robin and Jill had been coming out for just a couple of months in the summer but are now spending much more time here, which is good news as, apart from their both being excellent company, Robin is a fund of information on happenings in the village over the last twenty years or so.
And I received my first Christmas card. The French don't really do Christmas (or birthday) cards: the variety is limited, the quality poor and they are very expensive. So I now rely more on email and do any Christmas posting when I arrive in England before Christmas. I plan to spend two weeks there this year as my mother is increasingly fragile. That will also give me more time to get around and see friends while I am over. And I shall fly rather than drive this year, hiring a car at the other end; a 2500 km round trip on winter roads definitely lacks appeal and I shall have nothing that won't fit in a suitcase to bring back.
And today the Christmas street decorations went up in the village. QED.
lundi 15 novembre 2010
Remembering
Remembering
Tonight's pizza evening was especially good and welcome. Rain returned (we seem to be having an usually wet autumn) and so there was no boules afternoon to distract me. But there were a dozen of us at the Bar du Pont for pizza (four English and eight French) and that seemed to be a perfect number for chatting in our usual “franglais”.
A point that came up in conversation was the distinction, if any, between recall and remember in English and rappeler and se souvenir in French. Friend Jo thought there was a temporal distinction between the English words, recalling being more instantaneous than remembering but I couldn't quite see that. In French, according to René and Ahmel, se souvenir applied more to intangible items and rappeler to concrete objects (despite the common “rappel” signs which remind you of speed limits, which aren't exactly concrete). And, they said, se souvenir was tending to disappear in common usage in favour of rappeler. That made the distinction in French clearer but didn't seem to have much light to shed on the English equivalents, except that the nouns recall and remembrance are quite well separated, somewhat along the French intangible/tangible lines. You may recall departed friends/family doing or saying something but you don't recall them in the abstract; you remember them.
For some reason this made me remember (recall) a conversation ,many years ago with a journalist colleague who trained as a psychologist. He pointed me towards an article in a Canadian psychology journal about response times. A project team of psychologists had been investigating response times in relation to stars in “reaction sports”: tennis, cricket, baseball, etc. A good sample of the stars in these sports at the time had been tested to ascertain their reaction times, which were generally believed to be way above normal. In fact the tests showed that their reaction times were within the normal range, albeit at the high end. What was even more surprising was that, in matches, these players were timed at responses much faster than their tested reaction times. So, back to the blackboard on response time tests? Apparently not; the tests were sound. The explanation that was agreed on was a distinction between what happens in the cerebrum and the cerebellum, in the brain. The former is responsible for what we popularly call instinctive reaction (although psychologists won't accept the validity of the term instinct) and the latter for reactions requiring prior thought. Since a tennis player can't know where a fast serve is going to land (or a cricketer where a fast ball is), the part of the brain involved should have been the cerebellum. But the reaction times indicated that it was the cerebrum that was involved. So what must have been at play was a kind of pattern recognition, with patterns stored in the cerebrum that would forecast where the ball would land. In better players, this pattern recognition was better developed than in poorer players.
This explanation also went some way towards explaining why, for instance, tennis players receiving a simple shot over the net, with their opponent sprawling on the ground, sometimes fail to make the simple shot back into the other half of the court and put the ball out. To make the correct shot, the player has to switch from cerebrum working to cerebellum working and, quite frequently, fails to make the switch. The problem is confusion.
Tonight's pizza evening was especially good and welcome. Rain returned (we seem to be having an usually wet autumn) and so there was no boules afternoon to distract me. But there were a dozen of us at the Bar du Pont for pizza (four English and eight French) and that seemed to be a perfect number for chatting in our usual “franglais”.
A point that came up in conversation was the distinction, if any, between recall and remember in English and rappeler and se souvenir in French. Friend Jo thought there was a temporal distinction between the English words, recalling being more instantaneous than remembering but I couldn't quite see that. In French, according to René and Ahmel, se souvenir applied more to intangible items and rappeler to concrete objects (despite the common “rappel” signs which remind you of speed limits, which aren't exactly concrete). And, they said, se souvenir was tending to disappear in common usage in favour of rappeler. That made the distinction in French clearer but didn't seem to have much light to shed on the English equivalents, except that the nouns recall and remembrance are quite well separated, somewhat along the French intangible/tangible lines. You may recall departed friends/family doing or saying something but you don't recall them in the abstract; you remember them.
For some reason this made me remember (recall) a conversation ,many years ago with a journalist colleague who trained as a psychologist. He pointed me towards an article in a Canadian psychology journal about response times. A project team of psychologists had been investigating response times in relation to stars in “reaction sports”: tennis, cricket, baseball, etc. A good sample of the stars in these sports at the time had been tested to ascertain their reaction times, which were generally believed to be way above normal. In fact the tests showed that their reaction times were within the normal range, albeit at the high end. What was even more surprising was that, in matches, these players were timed at responses much faster than their tested reaction times. So, back to the blackboard on response time tests? Apparently not; the tests were sound. The explanation that was agreed on was a distinction between what happens in the cerebrum and the cerebellum, in the brain. The former is responsible for what we popularly call instinctive reaction (although psychologists won't accept the validity of the term instinct) and the latter for reactions requiring prior thought. Since a tennis player can't know where a fast serve is going to land (or a cricketer where a fast ball is), the part of the brain involved should have been the cerebellum. But the reaction times indicated that it was the cerebrum that was involved. So what must have been at play was a kind of pattern recognition, with patterns stored in the cerebrum that would forecast where the ball would land. In better players, this pattern recognition was better developed than in poorer players.
This explanation also went some way towards explaining why, for instance, tennis players receiving a simple shot over the net, with their opponent sprawling on the ground, sometimes fail to make the simple shot back into the other half of the court and put the ball out. To make the correct shot, the player has to switch from cerebrum working to cerebellum working and, quite frequently, fails to make the switch. The problem is confusion.
lundi 8 novembre 2010
Autumn Watch
Autumn Watch
The autumn colours this year are really doing us proud. It's not an obvious area for autumn colour as there must be at least one evergreen tree for each deciduous one; the vines make the difference. They turn every shade between light yellow to gold, brown and red. Interestingly, I would have thought that the hue they change to would probably depend on the vine variety. Indeed, blocks of vines do change all together to the same colour but, in a sizable minority of cases, there is considerable variation within one block of vines. I've no idea why this is. The whole panorama is enhanced with the many pyrocanthas in the hedge rows. I've been meaning to take my camera out and get some photos but autumn colour is one of those situations where I find getting a really good photo difficult. The problem seems to be that a panoramic view, for one reason or another, doesn't really work and getting a good focal point, with a panorama behind to get the variety of colour, is absurdly difficult.
The weather we have been having is unusual in that it seems to be changing in slots of four days. Ten days ago we had three days solid rain (unusual in itself) followed by an overcast day and then 3-4 days in which the midday temperature reached 24-26 degrees in the sun. I was eating outside at lunchtime and playing boules in just a T-shirt in early November! Now the rain has returned, albeit not as intensely as before, and is predicted to last for the next three days. Anyway, I got the last of my spring bulbs planted, the blue pansies are in place, and the roses have had a dose of slow-action fertilizer so that's about it for the front of the house until next spring. There's still some work to be done at the back.
One of the part-time English residents here, a guy called Alex, turns out to have been at Bristol University at exactly the same time as I was. He was doing economics whereas I did modern languages so perhaps it isn't surprising that I never knew him at Bristol, amongst some 4000 other students at the time. Also, he went there from a public school whereas I did from a state school and there was a very noticeable public/state divide in social life there at the time. Bristol was a dumping ground for public school kids who didn't make it into Oxbridge, so nearly half the students were from public schools, which lent itself to a tendency to a class divide in social life. That was also partly based on how much money one had to spend but that tended merely to reinforce the divide. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that, given our proximity in the past, we should meet up subsequently in a small and somewhat remote French village.
And another interesting statement from the book The Discovery of France (Graham Robb). Around 1860 the average life expectancy from birth of a French person was 38 years, increasing to 55 if you lived through your first five years. That's probably not too different from other major European countries at the time. However, the biggest single cause of death then in France was not starvation or disease but a kind of death wish. In the winter here social life tends to seize up unless you are determined to be active. As mornings and evenings become darker, there are fewer people on the streets and they retreat behind shutters for much of the day. So it's not difficult to perceive that in earlier and harder times this isolation would be accentuated; apparently, inactive peasant farmers rarely sought out an alternative form of labour (e.g. making artefacts) during the winter months. There's even a suggestion that there was a biological reason for this. Inactivity slowed the body's metabolism and made winter stocks of food last longer. However, if a member of a peasant farmer family got sick, they would apparently take to their bed and expect to die, perhaps even as a relief from the hard life that they led. This kind of death wish was reinforced by the family's understanding that a mouth less to feed would make the winter supplies go further. It all sounds rather fanciful in our times but it seems to have had a powerful effect. Assuming that that went on for centuries before 1860, it would have become ingrained and would help to explain some underlying attitudes in the peasant farmer population now.
The autumn colours this year are really doing us proud. It's not an obvious area for autumn colour as there must be at least one evergreen tree for each deciduous one; the vines make the difference. They turn every shade between light yellow to gold, brown and red. Interestingly, I would have thought that the hue they change to would probably depend on the vine variety. Indeed, blocks of vines do change all together to the same colour but, in a sizable minority of cases, there is considerable variation within one block of vines. I've no idea why this is. The whole panorama is enhanced with the many pyrocanthas in the hedge rows. I've been meaning to take my camera out and get some photos but autumn colour is one of those situations where I find getting a really good photo difficult. The problem seems to be that a panoramic view, for one reason or another, doesn't really work and getting a good focal point, with a panorama behind to get the variety of colour, is absurdly difficult.
The weather we have been having is unusual in that it seems to be changing in slots of four days. Ten days ago we had three days solid rain (unusual in itself) followed by an overcast day and then 3-4 days in which the midday temperature reached 24-26 degrees in the sun. I was eating outside at lunchtime and playing boules in just a T-shirt in early November! Now the rain has returned, albeit not as intensely as before, and is predicted to last for the next three days. Anyway, I got the last of my spring bulbs planted, the blue pansies are in place, and the roses have had a dose of slow-action fertilizer so that's about it for the front of the house until next spring. There's still some work to be done at the back.
One of the part-time English residents here, a guy called Alex, turns out to have been at Bristol University at exactly the same time as I was. He was doing economics whereas I did modern languages so perhaps it isn't surprising that I never knew him at Bristol, amongst some 4000 other students at the time. Also, he went there from a public school whereas I did from a state school and there was a very noticeable public/state divide in social life there at the time. Bristol was a dumping ground for public school kids who didn't make it into Oxbridge, so nearly half the students were from public schools, which lent itself to a tendency to a class divide in social life. That was also partly based on how much money one had to spend but that tended merely to reinforce the divide. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that, given our proximity in the past, we should meet up subsequently in a small and somewhat remote French village.
And another interesting statement from the book The Discovery of France (Graham Robb). Around 1860 the average life expectancy from birth of a French person was 38 years, increasing to 55 if you lived through your first five years. That's probably not too different from other major European countries at the time. However, the biggest single cause of death then in France was not starvation or disease but a kind of death wish. In the winter here social life tends to seize up unless you are determined to be active. As mornings and evenings become darker, there are fewer people on the streets and they retreat behind shutters for much of the day. So it's not difficult to perceive that in earlier and harder times this isolation would be accentuated; apparently, inactive peasant farmers rarely sought out an alternative form of labour (e.g. making artefacts) during the winter months. There's even a suggestion that there was a biological reason for this. Inactivity slowed the body's metabolism and made winter stocks of food last longer. However, if a member of a peasant farmer family got sick, they would apparently take to their bed and expect to die, perhaps even as a relief from the hard life that they led. This kind of death wish was reinforced by the family's understanding that a mouth less to feed would make the winter supplies go further. It all sounds rather fanciful in our times but it seems to have had a powerful effect. Assuming that that went on for centuries before 1860, it would have become ingrained and would help to explain some underlying attitudes in the peasant farmer population now.
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