It had been a taxing day when I decided that taking a walk was vital. Formerly, someone helped me with my accounts. I write for a living and garden as a hobby. Processes and statistics are not my forte.
However, the excellent accountant now has a PAYE job, so I’m on my own with the numbers. This was always going to be challenging with PAYE, redundancy, self-employment and other elements to include.
Now, HMRC has decided that it wants quarterly reports with specific software. I signed up for a webinar to learn more.
You know those dreams where you turn up for an exam and find that you haven’t studied for it? The webinar was like that.
By the end I hadn’t learned anymore about the software but had discovered that though I had phoned HMRC to explain my situation, I still had to go online to do so again. I was two steps back rather than one forward.
So, I headed out for the short walk round the village to see if it could lift my spirits.
It did entirely, because I bumped into lots of other people and changed my perspective on what was going on.
I had decided to take a book to the ‘library’ in the old phone box in which people swap books.
First, I met the rector, and we chatted about the squirrels which have taken up residence in the church bell tower. The local councillor drove past and waved, as did the young lady who runs the zero-waste shop. I felt seen and befriended.
When I reached the phone box library, a young man was mowing the grass. We fell into conversation not just about mowing, but about engineering, sheds and village life.
There wasn’t a book that I wanted, but I returned home uplifted by the very ordinary experiences of chatting to passers-by and belonging.
This stood in marked contrast to my old city life. It had been a very friendly city, but times change, and the sense of community altered. People hurried on their way, not making eye contact, let alone chatting, and there certainly wasn’t a library phone box.
Moving from the city to the village was a wrench. I felt that I had lost my community and my sense of belonging. But in that 20-minute walk to and from the library phone box I realised that I had found a new community and a new sense of belonging and realised how lucky that makes me.
As to the tax situation, I will have to work it out somehow. What’s the worst that can happen? (Don’t answer that!).