So I am definitely getting old. Or maybe I am just tired. I hope I am not old and tired.
I got a letter from the taxman the other day, which I've been meaning to send to my accountant. Oh yeah, I have an accountant - I earn so much money that it takes a professional to be able to count it all, though I do insist on being paid in 1p pieces. I find it makes it easier to cover a bed with the cash I have earned that night, when I am trying to impress a lady. A twenty pound note on a bed just looks like some kind of tawdry tip, but 2000 one pence pieces cover a Travelodge bed no problem. Though they can be a literal bugger when you try to frollic around on top of them. Still it looks good and so far any woman that I have shown my 1p covered bed to has been so impressed that they don't want to disturb the piece of art that is in front of them, so they make their excuses and leave. I think it's a shame to waste all that effort though, so I leave them on the bed whilst I make my own amusement and sleep. When I wake up I look like Robin Williams in
Bicentennial Man. Then I pluck the soiled pennies off my sweaty body and post them to my accountant. The postage usually costs more than the contents, but I don't care. All I am interested in is making a trained professional be forced to count up tiny coins covered in sweat and whatever over nocturnal emissions might have landed on them. It is a satire of capitalism and I don't do it because I get off on thinking about an accountant touching pennies that have previously lodged themselves in one of my bodily crevices and anyone who says I do get off on that is lying.
Anyway I opened the letter from the tax man a few days ago. It claimed some form hadn't been filed and that I might be punished in the future if such a thing happened again. I have an accountant to avoid such unpleasantness and if there was any mistake of oversight it would have been on his part (though I have given him no reason to resent me or to try and engineer a situation where I would be sent to prison and unable to earn any money). Because I've been busy the letter has been lying on the floor where I left it since Monday, but today I thought I'd better just send it off to my accountant (be a nice change for him just to get a letter). So I picked it up to take upstairs to my desk so I could stick it in an envelope and send it on. I made myself a cup of liquorice tea at the same time. I was absent-mindedly thinking about a few other things, got to my desk, realised I didn't have my tea and so went back downstairs to get it. Then I came back to the desk to put the letter in the envelope, but I couldn't find it. I looked all over the desk, lifting up my laptop and the other detritus that litters the surface. I knew it couldn't feasibly be under anything. I just had it. If I had put it down here it should be on the top of the mess. But I couldn't see it.
Maybe I had left it down in the kitchen. I went downstairs and checked everywhere I had been. I even looked in the dining room where I hadn't been. It wasn't there either. I am quite glad. It would have been a bit scary if it had been.
I came back to my desk and looked all over it, but the letter was not there. I looked round the house for a good fifteen minutes and the letter had vanished. Where had it gone? How was this possible?
So I emailed my accountant instead - attaching a photo of some sticky looking coppers just to keep him going (I know he loves it).
Hours later my accountant's PA replied and asked me to post the letter to them. I was about to reply that it was missing at the moment and then I looked up to my left to the top shelf of my two shelved desk and saw the letter sitting there. It wasn't underneath anything. It wasn't hidden at all. It was in plain sight on top of my desk and yet somehow I hadn't spotted it in all the time I had searched.
Now unless there is a ghost or a mischievous illegal immigrant in my house then the letter was there all along. It wasn't even partially hidden. It was just there, in one of the most likely places that I could have put it. How could I have lost it?
I am old or tired or old and tired. Welcome to middle age. I suspect a lot of entries will be like this one in the future. Unless my memory fades even further and then I won't even remember having forgotten where I have absent mindedly left something.
