Tax return day

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.

International day

We slept late and then enjoyed our usual Saturday pancake breakfast. I pottered around with my new PC for much of the morning, trying to figure out why it seemed not to accept my Microsoft account identity. Then I stumbled across the correct sequence, calling for the account PIN number after entering a blank enter key press. There's no indication this is what is required to complete the process. I seem to recall that I stumbled across this before when setting up the new laptop, and had forgotten.

After one last check of the little HP mini, I initiated the reset process, a clean wipe and re-installation of Windows 10 from the Cloud. I thought this would be OK to do as we have a faster broadband connection, and thee weren't any glitches downloading and getting started. Even so, the reset process took five hours to complete. How different from a Chromebook Power Wash, which resets the device in two minutes.

Owain arrived at two for a late lunch, and then we watched the Wales v Scotland rugby match on telly. It was an exciting game which Wales just won, thanks to a drop goal. It finished just after the day's Winter Olympic broadcast began - spectacular aerobatic half-pipe snowboarding and down hill racing. We then went out for a walk in the park for an hour before dark, on a drab afternoon, perhaps accentuated by seeing all that snow and blue sky on telly. Then Owain left us to visit friends before returning to Bristol.  

I finished tomorrow's sermon, and delayed printing it out until I we'd watched this evening's new French crimmie on BBC Four, called 'The Promise' set around Bayonne near Biarritz in the beautiful French Basque Country. When it came to printing it out, I had to find and re-install the printer drivers. The operating system had correctly identified the printer and automatically downloaded the right management software to go with it, but didn't automatically look for the drivers to make it work. 

Fortunately the HP desktop app was easy to use and linked to the official download page, from whence it was possible to install the relevant drivers. Installation took ages to complete, so that I wondered if the machine had stalled. It was nearly midnight by the time I could print. At least it's still working well at least ten years since bought it. I should have anticipated this earlier in the day. I could do without this kind of annoyance before bed.

One more step on recovery road

Sunshine and showers today, and it's a bit warmer, more like May is expected to be. I uploaded today's reflection, audio and text to WhatsApp shortly after eight. After breakfast, Clare went off to Cowbridge with a friend for a study session in a group member's garden. A pleasant outing for her. I went to the GP surgery with my prescription request and collected Clare's eye medication from the Treganna Pharmacy before cooking lunch. 

I drove to Llandough Hospital for an ultrasound scan this afternoon. On my way back I went to PC World at Culverhouse Cross to buy a new cartridge for my lazer printer but found the store no longer stocks lazer ink cartridges, so I'll have to order one on-line instead. The Currys PC World in the city centre closed for good during the pandemic. Now they only have superstores on the eastern and western sides of Cardiff. So much of their business has moved on-line in the past couple of years. The superstores are in effect giant showrooms for all kinds of consumer goods, and are not well frequented by clients. I wonder how long they will last? Interestingly enough there are dozens of ink-jet cartridges available in store. These truly are money spinners, as they don't last long. In contrast, a lazer ink cartridge can deliver ten thousand copies and last several years. Anyway, there was an Aldi next door, so I bought a couple of bottles of wine to take home instead.

For the first time since last summer the Fountain Community Choir in which Clare sings met to practice at St Catherine's, following all the covid secure requirements which the Parish sticks to religiously. Also the Parish Brownie pack met again, in the church grounds rather than in the hall, but these small steps are welcome hopeful signs of return to normality. Once my last operation is done, I'll consider a return to singing again. I've not felt able to sing with others this past few years. It calls for a certain energy that I have lacked, whether its physical or emotional I don't know, but when the time is right and the Spirit moves, it'll be possible.

While Clare was out I watched the last episode of the second series of New Amsterdam, which finally showed up on the More Four home page, and then a long episode of 'Inspector Falke', dealing with a case that involved asylum seekers, covert gay relationships in a homophobic setting, drug dealing and police corruption, not to mention the murder of a woman during a police hunt - very complex and a last minute twist in the revelation of which copper was corrupt. 

Duties line up

I spent this morning preparing a sermon for another set of Sunday sermons in Radyr. I heard from our Area Dean that I'm to be put to use at St Germans for the coming months. Peter Cox rang up and asked if I could cover a service for him in All Saints' Penarth tomorrow morning. Quite a while since I've been there. I also heard from Nerja that not only am I required from early April to mid May, when Clare and I go on our Danube cruise, but also for three weeks when I return. Cover has been secured for the weeks I'd be missing in a normal three month spell. 

I also heard that I might also be asked to offer cover in February and March down at St Mary's Cardiff Bay, in the first few months of my friend Father Graham's retirement. He moves across the 'Southern Arc' of Cardiff as the communities fronting the Bristol Channel are called, to Splott. No doubt, it won't be long before he gets called on for locum duty. I hope he takes a good long rest first however, if only to realise how hard he's been working on the front line for so long.

My Swedish friend Sara emailed me to express her shock and horror at the murderous assault made on teachers and students at a school north of Gothenburg, not far from where she lives. It had only just been reported in the morning news. It looks like the work of yet another right wing extremist, and not a deranged would be jihadi. Whatever next? in a world so tolerant of violent fantasy that it's become part of popular entertainment in such an unprecedented way.

After lunch I went out shopping for an all-in-one printer/scanner, not for home or office use, but for the Alcohol Treatment Centre, which makes good use of one of the RadioNet pro bono issues. A.T.C. is a great health care initiative which cares for drunken revellers from the city night time economy in situ, and minimises the number of A&E admissions at the already hard pressed Heath Hospital every weekend and festive occasion of the year. Its funding is being reduced, and offering a necessary piece of equipment is something well within our remit that we can do.

Finding the right piece of kit was less easy than I thought. A hard wired network monochrome lazer printer was needed for cost effectiveness. Almost every lazer printer on offer in Staples and PC World had wifi and colour print but no network port. In the end, I found just what I needed among the end of line bargains, and returned triumphantly to the office to deliver it. Then home for supper and another night avoiding work (namely filling in my tax return) in front of the telly.