Reminiscenses

Reminiscences In England
I had a good festive season in England with my mother. Carl stayed from Christmas eve until the 27th and Natalie came on Boxing Day. There was not a lot to do, though, other than shopping and I thought the selection of TV programmes on offer even worse than usual. So, I read a lot of John Le Carré, did the mind games in the papers and shopped.

Going into the village general store shortly after my arrival in Chiddingfold I noticed a pile of China News among the newspapers. Chiddingfold is hardly a hot-bed of interest in China so I asked the store keeper what they were doing there. He laughed and said his distributor had delivered them and that he'd asked for them to be taken back. Glancing cursorily at the front page I could easily see that the paper was a publicity sheet for China. The papers were still there when I left a fortnight later so the distributor had obviously been paid to leave them there. Presumably it was a PR exercise on the part of the Chinese.

However, it reminded me of my school days in the village. The only village school was C of E affiliated, which meant that every Thursday morning in Lent we had to attend a church service. The vicar at the time was a former missionary in China and known in the village as Old China. He was incapable of speaking in words of less than three syllables and so his sermons passed right over the heads of we school children (I was 9 at the time) and most of the villagers. I remember once being ejected from the church in disgrace for playing marbles behind the pews.

I enjoyed my time at the school but was removed by my mother after she found me, one sunny afternoon, watching cricket during school time on the cricket green adjacent to the school. She wanted to know what I was doing and I said that the headmaster had told me to go and watch the cricket. She accordingly went to see the headmaster who explained that 99% of the kids in the school were going to end up as farm hands and I was so far ahead in class that he thought I might as well get some sun. In retrospect, that was a Summerhill moment for me. My mother was desperate for me to get the 11+ exam and so decided we had to move back to London. I duly got the 11+ a year later in Mitcham at a school called Bond Road, which I thought for ages was called Bombed Road because of the bombed-out houses all along it.

The Inland Revenue
As I remember, last year I reported writing a letter to both Ihornaby and Glasgow offices of the IR to sort out exactly what they wanted me to declare on my self-assessment forms, to avoid a repeat of the misunderstandings of that year. I received no reply, of course. And so attempted a full declaration over the Internet this year. It cannot be done directly by British nationals resident abroad but nowhere is this stated. The first hurdle, as last year, was the requirement for a UK postcode, which I was informed had been fixed. In fact, if the postcode is left blank, the system still flags an error but allows the rest of the form to be completed. However, it refuses to allow the return to be submitted unless the error is removed. I phoned and was told to tick the “foreign” box. There is none. I phoned again and this time was given the following instructions: double-click on the postcode entry and hold down the backs-space key until the box is highlighted in blue, then hold down the delete key until the error flag disappears. I asked where this was explained; the answer (with a giggle) was “nowhere but that is what you have to do”. It worked. The assessment then came up with a large sum of tax due, which, considering the IR had accepted my tax residence in France and repaid me tax paid since 2007, was something of a surprise. I phoned again and was told that this was because I had made a full declaration but not submitted form SA109 for foreign residents. Form SA109 is in PDF format and thus cannot be submitted electronically. This was acknowledged although I was told that it was possible with the purchase of commercial software (which I don't otherwise need). They say they will accept the completed form through the post. The respondent was not in the Glasgow office which I had phoned but in the Liverpool office and the form has to be sent to the Cardiff office.

I still don't know what I should declare and what not. I asked for precise clarification and was told to put “what reflected my circumstances over the year”. How precise can you get?

The IR has clearly given up any hope rectifying its own system and resorted to semi-privatisation to sort out the mess. In fact, I am now convinced, despite the many offices to which I have been referred, it no longer resides in the UK at all but has fled into the imagination of George Orwell.