A bureaucratic sort of day

I managed to get some work done on a Street Carers' Forum website last night, but the texts and information will need a lot of editing and re-presenting to make them right and effective. The design won't be very exciting, but content is my priority. Someone else can take it on and improve the look, once we are confident about what we have to say using it.

This morning I did my 2009 tax return on-line, two months early this year. It's the last 'easy' return I'll submit, as next year it'll be four income streams from the various pensions great and small which I've received, plus lump sum investment income, all new scary stuff, but stuff which can be put off until the New Year.

After lunch I drove over to Dinas Powis for a chat and a stroll through the woods  towards Michaelston-le-Pit with Russell Evans, husband of Clare's eurythmy colleague, and a lifelong teacher of anthroposophical thinking and practice. We always have deep and interesting conversations when we meet up, about art and life, about spirituality most of all. He's lived in the village for sixty years and known it for even longer. He has a great love for the hidden treasure landscape of this area, having seen it grow, decline and renew itself in many changes over his lifetime. A real pleasure in an otherwise bureaucratic sort of day.

It's been the best part of a month since I wrote to the authorities in Monaco to ask for a police record check on me their archives. It's the last little requirement that has to be completed in my application for a Permission to Officiate in the Diocese in Europe. The Swiss police record check I was able to request on-line, and have it delivered within a week. This one has been more difficult, because of the need to pay in Euros, so my friend Julia wrote a cheque and sent it for me. The Monaco authorities have been in contact with her, but not with me, requesting I send proof of my identity. I've done this, but ages have passed and nothing has happened. 

Tonight I collected copies of the documents and correspondence to re-send by email and post, with a letter asking what's lacking in my application (rather than why the delay). Who knows, maybe they didn't understand my French before? This time I had Clare's extra patient help - bureaucratic phraseology and politesse is a world of its own, far removed from the casual demotic of everyday speech.