Miscellaniae

Summer
We seem to have gone from winter through spring to summer in a matter of a month. The past week has seen seen midday temperatures in the mid-twenties and I've been eating out at lunch-time in shirt sleeves. Rain is forecast for next week when I shall be in England and won't care. Anyway, we need the rain; I had to water the pots out front for the third time in about ten days as they had become so dry. The narcissi are now coming into bloom and, with the all-blue pansies in full flower, the front of the house is beginning to look as I hoped it would this spring.

The World Of The Olive Tree
Somehow I'm going to have to teach Daniel version control. He has printed out the text of the film on olive trees because he decided we needed a printed copy; fine. But he has printed out the last version but one. When I hit the roof he airily said: “that's OK you can put in the corrections by hand and also any further changes we make”. And then, when we want a final, final printed version? Well, we can add in (again) all the changes we have made on paper, which will mostly be the changes I have already made to the electronic version. (And then presumably print off an earlier version again.) Tagging each saved file with a version number is apparently beyond him (a former university professor!). It's driving me bananas.

The text has however taught me a few things I didn't know about olives. To me an olive is an olive but there are over fifty named varieties of the things and it seems that those good for eating are not generally good for making oil. An exception is a variety called “la tanche” which is the one grown around here and is good for both eating and making oil. In the late 1950s the good people of Nyons, around 20km from here, decided to make a thing of their special olive and applied for an AOC label which was duly granted (the first such). In Nyons, moreover, there is an Order of The Knights of the Olive Tree and an annual festival during which the Knights dress up (in all seriousness) in olive coloured robes, stick olive tree twigs in their hair and parade around the town initiating new Knights by slapping them on the shoulders with olive branches. Only in France........

The World of the Inland Revenue
I say “only in France” but dear old HMRC seems to be trying to get in on the act. Not entirely unexpectedly, I received notice a few days ago of a £100 fine for a late tax return for fiscal 2009/10. I have written a reply stating that, firstly, I believe my original paper return was rejected in error (as I have already told them) since it conformed exactly to the instructions I received in a letter from them in July. Either that or their instructions were in error, so either way it's their fault. Secondly, I posted an online return in January which was accepted by the system. Thirdly, the lovely form on which they notified me of the fine states specifically that the fine cannot exceed the tax due and, since they have accepted my French tax residence back to September 2007 and given me a tax code of NT (not taxable), there can't be any tax due.

I'm waiting to see if, this time, they are going to try to extract interest on the tax not due. It'll be six months before they decide on that so there is a slight chance that one of my communications will get noticed by them before then. Maybe, like olive trees, there are over 50 varieties of HMRC (and Knights........though Heaven knows what they would dress up in; the mind boggles.