© Julia Welstead

Death and taxes: the two certainties in life, one of which I definitely want to avoid, so I guess I’d better focus on the other.  Today I must stay indoors, avoid getting run over by a bus, and drag out a year’s worth of bits of paper that reside in my ‘Tax Return’ folder. Oh joy.

To my mind the self-assessment tax return is about the only down-side to self-employment. It should be easy and straightforward – is easy and straightforward, really – yet I dread it with a vengeance. It is close to the top of my list of reasons for wishing I had a partner (not that I’d expect him to do it for me, of course, just that it would become a shared chore*). Why does filling in a tax return bring on such strong emotions of dread, hatred, helplessness, fear, foreboding, doom, gloom, persecution and guilt? Especially why the guilt? (I’m squeaky clean and honest about everything). Aha, of course, all guilt stems from my Catholic schooling.

Before any attempt at filing a tax return everyone should watch the first episode of that most wonderful of British sitcoms, ‘Black Books’. If you don’t know it, then find it and watch it. Episode one is called ‘Cooking the Books’ and memorably features a dodgy accountant leaving rapidly through the fire escape, and Bernard the bookshop owner resorting to attempting his own tax return. He opts for increasingly desperate delay tactics, including turning his year’s receipts into ‘a rather fetching jacket’, pairing all his socks, inviting in the doorstep evangelists for many drinkies, and getting the local skinheads to beat him up. Starring the deranged and sozzled Dylan Moran (whose other claim to fame is that he lives in the house I grew up in ;’), the brilliant, off-beat Tamsin Greig and the whacky and ethereal  Bill Bailey, this is compulsory pre-tax-return viewing, and you may want to re-visit it whilst sock sorting etc.

Fortified with Black Books, I head for the dim, dusty recesses of the under-croft of my desk and fish out the required folders: ‘tax returns’, ‘income’ and ‘receipts’. The former is a bulging, unruly affair, whilst the latter two are sadly slim and under-visited. With folders assembled next to netbook on the kitchen table, it’s definitely time for a coffee (de-caff of course, my heart rate is high enough already).

Mug in hand, I flick through the tax return folder. Every year I solemnly swear to keep all my paperwork in good order for the following year. Every year I fail. This folder has all and sundry stuffed into it, including no less than three letters from HM Revenue and Customs informing me of my tax code for the year – all with different tax codes on them. Is this normal? I did have three different jobs last year, so perhaps it is, but it’s enough of a confusion to allow for a break to hang the washing out in the beautiful Spring morning sunshine (yes indeed, I’m one of those annoying people who do their tax return in April, as soon as the tax year has ended. No moral high ground here, it just worries me too much if I don’t). ‘Aye there’s a fair druth the day’ I agree amiably with my neighbour, also hanging sheets, ‘these’ll be dry by dinner time I doubt’.

Focus, Jules, focus. The next task is to see if I can remember where I hid my user ID and password in order to gain access to the online tax return facility on Government Gateway. Just remembering it’s called Government Gateway is a cracking start and, remarkably, I find the dratted codes lurking within my ingenious password hideout (but if I tell you where that is I’ll have to kill you) and gain access to my account. This brings on a nauseous wave of panic: if I’m in to the programme I may actually have to start entering details. Time to peel a banana.

Looking at the bulging folder in my moment of banana-calm, I spot a vital job (aka distraction activity) and head off to find some A4 envelopes. Drawing a blank on these, I resort to my pile of used envelopes that I keep for making notes, lists, drawings etc and select the best of these for my task. Next I wade through the unruly papers and sort them into year groups and an hour later I have five envelopes, marked 11/12, 10/11, 09/10, 08/09, and ‘pre-08’, each stuffed with papers. Oh what a delight – an old envelope system has emerged. I can’t possibly go wrong now. Must be lunch time. For the next half hour I happily chop veggies, to the reassuring murmur of Radio 4, and simmer up a delicious soup.

Right, this is it. I only have two hours before the boys get back from school and this has to be done. I log on and begin to fill in details and answer questions. At the appropriate moments I dig out payslips, P60s, P45s and book sale invoices and find a boy’s calculator in the dresser drawer to tot up the paltry figures. What with no off-shore accounts, no pension schemes, no stocks n’ shares and indeed no significant income from anywhere, it’s a pretty straightforward calculation. Yet again I have failed miserably in respect of saving up receipts that I can legitimately call expenses, but yet again I don’t need to claim expenses in order to limbo-dance my way under the tax bar. That traditional image of poverty stricken writer in rat infested, Baltic garret remains true today: unless you hit the bestseller list, writing ain’t gonna buy you an Aston Martin or your very own island any time soon.

Oh, so close to the finish line do I stumble. The final hurdle is a requirement to state how much interest I have gained through bank savings. Normally this would be an easy zero, due to chronic lack of savings. This year has been different. It’s a long story involving death (and hadn’t I hoped to avoid that today?) and some money from a Will, which eventually came through this January, two and a half years after said death. The money belongs to my children, but was sent to my bank account and we didn’t shift it quickly enough for me not to have gained some interest. How much, I have no idea. I phone the bank and they say they can get that information to me within five working days. I ponder, I tread the house boards, I pace, I phone a friend. He reckons I should just put a guesstimate in the box, but my guilt-ometer forbids it. All I can do is press ‘save and return’ and await the bank letter. I feel helpless and gloomy and unfulfilled. 

Death and taxes, there they both lie, like a pair of yellow-eyed black pumas languishing idly along the limbs of the great tree of life, nonchalantly waiting to pounce.

(* who am I kidding? Of course I’d expect him to do it, it would be top of his to-do-list!)