A warm breezy day with rain clouds driven away to the south east and bright sunshine at 21C. I woke up from a good long night's sleep feeling clear headed for a change, determined to shorten my to-do list. After breakfast I wrote another biblical reflection in advance for the week we're cruising on the Douro.
Cruise documents from Rivera Travel arrived by email yesterday. I downloaded them for printing. We both like to have paper copies of everything, even if the digital version is more immediately accessible on a working phone. The digital cruise brochure runs to thirty pages, with an alarmingly wasteful amount of empty space on each page. It seems they no longer run to the expense of posting such documents, which is disappointing considering the cost of the trip.
My HP lazer printer is almost out of ink but works after few taps and shakes of the cartridge to release the last micro-grams of ink to get it to print evenly. I forgot to do this and twenty unreadable pages came out. After doing what I should have done beforehand, copies of vital selected pages including boarding passes were produced as intended. Then it was time to cook lentils and veg with rice for lunch while Clare went out for some exercise.
Then, after we'd eaten, I finally got around to making my tax declaration for the past year. I've been doing this on-line for the past twenty years, and am familiar with navigating my way through the process as my income streams aren't many and change little. This year there's an exception, as there's tax to pay on some of the income from the Aviva bond I cashed back in March. I had the info about it ready to use but couldn't work out where to enter it on the form. I was under the impression that it was taxed under capital gains, but couldn't find a category. Google helped with a suitable explanation that it was an insured bond. Then I found the right place immediately.
HMRC's on-line tax declaration has improved greatly over the years. I'm proud to know that Owain is one of a team of hundred if not thousands working behind the scenes to deliver precise and clear explanations of every conceivable aspect of taxation in many hundreds of drop down help menus on the website. It's an unending task, as tax legislation changes happen with every new government budget. Hereafter I may no longer need to fill in a tax return at all. Since retirement some locum duty fees I've received have not been taxed at source, and the information needed to be added at the end in a box provided for other information about income. There's now a box within listed streams of income listed just for this.
Next year, it's unlikely I will have any occasional income from locum duties to declare. I'm no longer doing funerals, and offers of European long locum duty stays have ceased as the diocese has become more risk averse about making use of clergy my age. Needless to say, I'm very sad about this. The last fourteen years of occasional spells of service abroad have been a great and unforgettable pleasure.
In future my income will be predictably static, travel limited by what we can afford. The Douro cruise is a one off pleasurable experience both of us felt we'd like to spend savings on. I've been fortunate not to need a joint replacement like some men of my age suffering from the long term impact of youthful sports injury. Clare's savings will pay for her hip replacement. A two year wait with such pain would deprive her un-necessarily of quality of life if not mobility. By then she'll be at the head of the NHS queue to have the other hip replaced, and already she's on that list.
It took me two hours to complete and submit the tax return, then I went out for a long walk until supper time. We watched a BBC Proms concert of Bach's Concerto for Orchestra in D Minor and Mendelssohn's Lobegesang Symphony. Stirring stuff! Then a breath of fresh night air before bed, feeling pleased my to-do list is a little shorter tonight.
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