OhMyGod, she’s back again and it’s only been 2 days since her last Blog. Well, dear reader, now that the cleaning is done I have my tax return to avoid so here I am blogging instead, procrastinating away. Yes, I know it’s almost 31st January deadline for tax returns and no, I am not a lazy-arse about financial matters. The fact is I didn’t know they were expecting a self assessment off me until 2 days ago, when a letter arrived that had taken a whole month to find me as it went to my French address first – that re-direction service was well worth the money, non?. You can imagine the celebrations back in April last year when Nobby’s annual notice arrived but mine didn’t, for the first time in about ten years? I don’t see much point in me doing the darned thing anyway since I haven’t earned a bean in seven years (well, maybe one or two beans but hardly a tax-worthy amount.) Then this letter plops into the mailbox reminding me that I will be fined £100 if I don’t cough up by the end of the month. One call to the tax office later and I find out that they did indeed send me a notice and the fact that I didn’t receive it is no excuse. I am welcome to appeal - after paying the fine – or I can knuckle down and get it done. Chuffing brilliant.

So I cut Tiggy’s walk short this morning to get back and crack on with it. Although I would have cut it short anyway without the tax cloud hanging over me on account of a) the ice and b) the smell. Our usual route near to the school has been under snow for about a month now and unfortunately the thaw hasn’t reached that high up yet. So now it is all compacted ice and rather treacherous. There were moments when my pirouetting around in an effort not to land on my bum would have given Jane Torville a run for her money. And still the joggers huff on by! Are they mad? Do they have special spiky shoes? No they don’t, they just run at the sides of the path where it’s not so icy. Unfortunately for them, that is where all the doggies do their business and I saw evidence that at least one jogger had come a cropper with a trail of prints that went nike trainer – splat - nike trainer – splat – nike trainer – splat all along the lovely crisp white trail. (By the way, I pick mine up, my conscience is clear) But dog poo isn’t the source of the smell. I don’t know what’s going on up there but the overwhelming reek of sewage is getting so bad I have to wear three scarves round my face to be able to breathe. I can only imagine that the solitary ‘sport’ hotel there has a manky menu and dodgy drains because the poo lorry is up there all the time and it’s not yet clear if he’s sucking up or dropping off. (Of course, I mean ‘sewage truck’, but you must understand that I spend the majority of my day with either a dumb dog or small children so I’m in the habit of keeping it simple.)

Anyway, I suppose I should get on with the number crunching now, but first let me tell you about our little Columbo escapade this morning. Both Pickle and Poppet are nuts about DS at the moment and they even want to play it before school. Oh horrors! you cry. Oh joy! says I because it is the perfect lever to get the little monkeys doing all the pre-school-run preparations I have been begging them to do all these years in double quick time. They ate their breakfasts unaided, cleaned their teeth, put their clothes on and got themselves ready and into the car with 15 minutes to spare this morning, such was the pull of Mario & Sonic and My Simms. But then we could only find one DS console. Pickle had left the black one on the table last night but it had moved, and not back into it’s Designated Storage Area which is where we found the pink console. As it happens, I went to bed disgustingly early last night leaving Nobby in charge of things so we assumed he may have moved it. So we all turned detective and a quick check for clues revealed that the Mario & Sonic game was back in the box and Professor Layton and the Curious Village was missing. Seeing as that is Nobby’s current DS obsession it was a fair bet he’d been playing on it before retiring. So where had he left it? We checked the computer, where we knew he’d been watching the Man Utd scores. Nope. We checked the bedside table in case he’d gone as far as substituting it for his bedtime book. Nope. We couldn’t find it anywhere, so we came up with a plan for the pair of them to share the pink one and headed for the car wondering where on earth the black console could be. It wasn’t until I decided to check my hair before departure that it finally turned up – when I popped into the downstairs loo to use the mirror… and there is was on the shelf by the toilet. Gotcha Nobby!!