You Win Some, You Lose Some

Back when I was temping, I had to set myself up for self assessment on my income tax because some of my employers didn't deal with that on my behalf (which would mean I owed money), while some dealt with it in the most basic way available (which meant I was owed money), and it generally worked in my favour to get it all evened out. The last year I worked as a temp, for example, I was owed a few hundred quid because my main employer that year did my income tax at the emergency rate - 20% on everything. For the tax year 2015-16, since I took a permanent position within a company right at the start of April, I should have taken myself off self assessment as it was no longer necessary. I couldn't do so for 2014-15 because one of my empoyers back in 2013-14 neglected to pay me (claiming eventually that they'd 'lost' my invoice, but never bothering to query it with me, or respond to my enquiries until my agency got involved), so that money only materialised (untaxed) in the 2014-15 tax year. I also put off dealing with my tax return until yesterday (a whole 8 days before the deadline) because I'm very good at procrastinating, and I find the experience of filling in my tax return somewhat... ahem... taxing.

Annoyingly, had that late-paying employer given me my money at the correct time, its impact would have been negligible. That is to say, the rebate I got was so unexpectedly large, the reduction caused by the additional money I was owed would still have left me with an unexpectedly large tax rebate. Unfortunately, due to my change in circumstances, my self assessment for 2014-15 revealed that I owed basically 20% on those late earnings...

Now, because I neglected to take myself off self-assessment, I have to file a return for 2015-16 in April... but at least I now have plenty of time to sort out taking myself off self-assessment for 2016-17, and this year's tax return will be far more simple. I'll aim to call them tomorrow evening, to get it out of the way... This is one thing I really don't want to put off. [EDIT: Having called them, they've taken me off self-assessment and I don't have to do one for 2015-16 after all... Starting the year off with a pleasant surprise (except for having to pay extra on 2014-15, that is).

In other news, I've had a couple more weird dreams lately. The first, from last week, was basically a Doctor Who story: the Doctor (Capaldi - nice that my dreams are keeping up to date) and companion (not one I recognised) arrived on a space station which, to cut a long story short, was operated by androids who didn't know they were androids. Think Blade Runner-style Replicants. I don't recall what the resolution of this story was, but there seems to have been some grand controlling intelligence running the space station and rebuilding its staff as androids without actually letting them know. Whether they were replaced after their lives ended naturally or through accidents, or whether they were being deliberately killed and replaced, I don't know... But I do recall there was some element of reconstructing some additional characters based on the memories of others so, for example, if someone died and got replaced by an android, that android might suddenly find their childhood pet was aboard, or an old flame, or a child who had died... So there was an element of benevolence to the grand controlling intelligence's machinations, whatever its overall game plan.

However, when the Doctor tried to leave, and found himself in what seemed to be a new location, it was actually just another section of the same space station (or perhaps a newly-built section just for the Doctor). Before this became apparent, however, he ran into River Song, already investigating the location with a companion of her own (or just hanging around with someone who lived in the station). Since the details of this dream have become a little vague - and I'm still not sure whether this bit was a continuation of the same dream on the same night, or whether the previous part happened some other night - all I can really remember is that this River Song somehow revealed herself to be an android built out of the Doctor's memories of her. This evidently upset the Doctor on a number of levels, as he ended up dismantling the River android and throwing the pieces out of the airlock, before announcing to the grand controlling intelligence that he was coming for it... at which point I woke up.

Last night's dream wasn't a Doctor Who story, but it easily could have been. Taking place on a version of Earth that had been conquered by aliens, I was wandering around with a couple of other people, and we happened upon an alien equivalent of frogspawn in a sewer/river overflow pipe. It transpired that one of the greatest strengths of the diminutive alien invaders was that any we killed were immediately replaced... So finding their egg sacs was hugely important, as it meant we could kill off the potential replacements before killing off the mobile aliens, and thus reduce their numbers more effectively. Of course, we needed to determine how best to destroy the eggs - gunshots would only take care of one at a time, and blades or bludgeons would take too long. We eventually determined that fire was the most effective weapon, as it would spread naturally throughout the collection.

Weirdly, we went into a nearby hotel's bar, and I convinced the barmaid to hand over a cigarette lighter. One of my companions revealed that she and the other companion already had cigarette lighters I could have borrowed but, treating the barmaid's disposable lighter with somewhat undue reverance, I told her I'd not only get it back to her, but that I'd try not to use it in the first place, as fire (and lighter fluid, evidently) were going to be critically important to the efforts to reclaim our planet from the invaders. We went back to the egg sac in the pipe and set about preparing to destroy it, only to be discovered by a group of the (surprisingly cute-looking) aliens, and I don't remember anything more before waking up.

2016 is off to an interesting start at work, with my boss now keen to pass on to me a lot of what were her responsibilities. From what we've discussed so far (not much) it almost sounds as though it will soon get to the point where our overall manager is manager in title (and propensity for telling people what to do) alone, while I'm actually doing the day-to-day management. We were supposed to have a meeting about it last week but, following my extended absence, she seems to have decided that she's due some attention/sympathy and, despite sounding and acting fine, is claiming to be very unwell. After skipping the meeting for the three days she was in last week because we were all so busy, she suggested phoning me on Friday to discuss it all... but then didn't. Still, there's plenty for all of us to discuss next week, with a big project fast approaching its deadlines. Somehow, I doubt it's going to go according to plan...

New Year, New... Something

I'll grant you that it's not absolutely necessary to blog about Christmas and New Year, but the whole point of a blog, surely, is to document things that happen (as well as things that don't happen, things you wish would/would not happen, etc.), and my last few weeks have hardly been uneventful. I'm not quite sure what's happening here, but this particular blog just doesn't feel as 'relevant' anymore... when I'm in the mood to write (which isn't as often as I'd like), my efforts tend to go on other blogs (though the new one I started a couple of months ago still hasn't received its inaugural post). By the time I feel like writing about something personal, I can't remember all the details...

Anyway...

It might be considered ironic but, shortly after a health-related post at the end of November, I became quite ill. Since I'm normally almost ridiculously healthy, I thought I simply had a persistent cold/cough, but it turned out to be a chest infection. While this didn't cause me to miss out on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I did miss out on another couple of other events my girlfriend and I had bought tickets for - Casablanca at the South Bank with a live orchestra, and some ballet at an almost-local arts centre, the latter attended in our stead by my parents - and was off work in the run-up to Christmas.

Due to a mix-up, my girlfriend and I spent Christmas at home, while my folks went to my sister's for a few days (though staying at a hotel rather than their home because my father has grown attached to a particular hotel chain for some bizarre reason). Well, I call it "a mix-up"... what actually happened was that my girlfriend and I planned months ago to go to her parents' place after Christmas, and to return home for New Year. The offer of going to my sister's place only came up a couple of weeks before Christmas because they rarely plan very far in advance.

In a way, it was a good thing... I was still unwell when we went off to my girlfriend's family, and still unwell when we returned (perhaps moreso, as the few days were quite stressful, not least because the weather left us pretty much housebound). In fact, when I tried to return to work at the start of the New Year, I was so unwell that I ended up taking another week off. A fourth GP appointment resulted in a brief - but thankfully only precautionary - visit to my local hospital for an X-ray, which left me in a bit of a state because, while I've had X-rays in the past, none have been for anything as potentially bad as a lingering chest infection or pneumonia. When I finally returned to work properly last week, I was quite behind (while I would tend to cover as much of my colleague's work as I can, he doesn't seem to have done so for me... though it's not impossible that he was instructed not to), and found that a large project had been unceremoniously dumped on my in-tray.

Office politics are getting a bit weird... it feels as though I have been granted a degree of autonomy on this project, but I strongly suspect my boss will leap upon it at any moment (as she had with several other projects during my extended absence, with varying degrees of success). My employers have given me plenty of reasons to stay but, at the moment, I'm feeling particularly uncomfortable there. Things have clearly been happening "behind the scenes", and some of it appears to be for the better... but the feeling that there are things happening of which I'm not aware is never a happy one... It's something of a figurative minefield, though I'm not sure if it's actually that bad, or if it just feels that way because of my past experience in offices.

This last weekend, my girlfriend and I attended the Museum of London and their Crime Museum - the latter previously only open to the Police. We had timed-entry tickets to the exhibit of ephemera and accounts from some crimes 'investigated' by the UK's earliest Police forces, up to about 1975. Its layout was rather odd in places, and it suffered from the problem experienced by almost all timed-entry events (that is, timed-entry does not equate to timed-exit, so it got very crowded in places), but it was certainly very informative. One thing that struck me was the frequency with which people have killed someone (deliberately, in general, but accidents were not unheard of), then gone on to dispose of the body in some horrific way (dismemberment came up quite a bit), only to claim when caught that it had been an accident, and that they felt that disposing of the body in such a way that it should not be found was of paramount importance. I discussed this with my girlfriend later, and we agreed that what we'd most likely do - the thing that no-one ever does in TV shows - would be call emergency services and admit everything. Then again, one of the common threads in the exhibits at the Crime Museum was a singular lack of remorse... As far as the exhibit goes, personally, I'd have recommended they either include an audio tour (in a variety of foreign languages) or send people through in timed groups with a guide, to minimise the loitering which made it next to impossible to read certain texts accompanying some of the exhibits. The other option would be to simply reduce the number of people admitted... but that, of course, reduces their income.

After exiting the Crime Museum, we headed out for lunch in a pub we passed on the way - very nice stuff, and fairly quiet when we got there - before walking back to the museum for a wander round the main exhibits.The Museum of London is quite a fun experience, too, covering the development of London from a tiny village on the Thames to the Roman city of Londinium, and all the way through to the vibrant city we know and love today. It has some amazing historical items, lots of cool models (one forced perspective diorama of some people walking down a twig road toward a wooden jetty particularly impressed me) and a lot of very pertinent information. It might amuse those who are against immigration that London would not exist without immigrants... though, on the flipside, we also owe our system of Government to immigrants as well... So... Swings and Roundabouts, eh?

I'm not sure if this is actually the first weird dream of the year, or simply the first I can recall in any detail but, last night, I dreamed the sort of ghost story that turns into an American TV movie... in fact, the whole dream seemed to be formatted that way. There was a Protagonist, her best Friend/Partner, and the ghost story they found themselves tangled up in through some bizarre coincidence that would probably make no sense whatsoever when properly examined. The gist of it was a variation on the old theme of "ghost haunts the stretch of road where they were killed", only this particular stretch of road was haunted by a family of four ghosts (Mother, Father, Daughter and Son, as far as I can remember... though there may have been two adult males rather than just one, and only one child) who would stand in a line across the road and, evidently, cause lots of accidents. The weird thing was, they'd be standing there, looking like ghosts of specific people, then their faces would disappear leaving blank masks, and they'd suddenly be lying down in the road... only to rise up slowly, back to a standing position as the next vehicle approached within a certain distance. The setup at the end of the dream was this: Protagonist was standing nearby, able to see the ghosts, and staying in contact - by radio, rather than (for example) cellphone - with Friend, at the wheel of a van. Friend was driving down Haunted Road in an attempt to 'free' the ghosts, or something. He announced that he could see the ghosts ahead of him on the road and was reluctant to continue since every other person driving down this road under these circumstances wound up dead. Protagonist uttered the words "You owe me one," referring to something that actually happened earlier on in the dream, but which I no longer remember, and Friend... switched off his radio. After a significant pause (during which, no doubt, Friend weighed his options carefully), when it started to look as though he wasn't going to go through with the plan, the van's headlights came on and it started moving down the road again. The ghosts shimmered slightly in the headlights, their faces evaporating like smoke... then they were lying in the road... slowly rising in unison, returning to the upright moments before the van would have struck them, had they been real... only Friend had steered off course, just a touch, at the last minute, and avoided the ghost of a child... Who suddenly found himself not just corporeal, but alive again. In typical fashion, my alarm woke me up just as the boy (Simon something) was announcing his resurrection to the world, and I have no idea what happened to either the Protagonist or her Friend. All the more annoying, I didn't have to wake up quite so early today as I'm not going directly to work...

My appointment with the GP today confirmed my suspicion that my cough is gradually fading. I was told that there had been - and here I quote - "a surprising number" of cases where someone with a chest infection later developed another infection while still fighting off the first, so I consider myself very lucky... Since my throat is still a little gummy (mostly in the evenings, occasionally in the early mornings), I was told to come back in two weeks if it hasn't cleared completely.

...So it seems I'm still ridiculously healthy, comparatively speaking... but human, and susceptible to illness like anyone else.

No promises on blogging this year... Call it a New Year's Resolution if you wish. I'll post when I have something to say, I guess...