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I got a phone call from a London number today. It was a recorded message, supposedly from HMRC warning me that I had been found to have committed tax fraud and that if I didn’t press 1 to talk to someone I would be arrested.
I have to say it was nice of HMRC to give me fair warning. I have been dodging up to 25p of tax a month by occasionally putting a Mars Bar through as a business expense. I don’t know how they found out. But they had luckily given me time to make good my escape and I am writing this on a plane to Rio.
In hindsight that may have been rash as the plane ticket has cost me much more than my tax liability and also I have nowhere to live in Rio. But that’s what you get HMRC for using an automated service rather than just sending the police round by surprise.
What gullible idiots they are.
Taskmaster episode 2 tonight and I attempted another watch-along, but it’s mainly just watching me watching the show and laughing. Spoilers ahoy. The takeaway image from tonight’s show is probably of me trying to row a boat on land with the top part of my arse on display. My memory of this is that it involved a lot more piss-taking in the studio than you got to see in the show (and I wouldn’t be surprised if that is released as an extra), so I actually felt like I’d got away fairly lightly tonight. I think there is stuff later in the series that will eclipse my moon, but it will be the talking point and the giffing point for a week or so, I am sure.
Weirdly I couldn’t remember too much about this show or who won what or even what was coming. I think Daisy and I were a little lucky to be given 4 points for the treasure hunt task, given we were beaten, but even I was impressed with my ability to identify the sound of two blunt objects being hit against each other. For the second week out of two I ended the show with the most points, even if I was beaten in the tie-break so didn’t officially win this episode. I don’t care about that. The series leaderboard is all that matters and the important thing is that I am at the top of that right now. And so we might as well just wrap things up now. But both episodes have been incredibly tight and it’s shaping up to be an exciting contest. Which I am currently winning. Never forget that. Whatever comes next.
And a fun day of prepping for Twitch of Fun, though the show itself never goes to any kind of plan and is at its best when Ally throws me a curve ball that I am not expecting and I have to deal with it. My daughter was straight upstairs to join in and created a voice and character for her fluffy rabbit, who basically just blew raspberries. To be fair it’s more inventive and sophisticated than anything I have put into the show.
You know that I hate to talk about all the amazing work that I do for charity, but I have been incredibly fortunate this year in terms of still managing to earn a living and to (so far) having remained healthy. I am going to dedicate as much of the rest of the year as possible to helping others. No one should be profiting (or profiteering) from this situation and the country should be viewing this in the same way as they would a war. Not by seeing this as a battle against a virus that has to be addressed by macho behaviour, but in terms of us all coming together until things are more settled. So Ian Amazon, be nice to see some of your Covid profits going back into the community.
But all of us can do a little bit of something, even if it’s just a donation of some of our time. But money is good too, if you have some.
So we’re going to give all our money from Twitch and monthly badges in November to Movember (which I am taking part in this year) so if you want to give some of Ian Amazon’s money to charity and are with Amazon Prime, you can do that by
subscribing to my Twitch channel next month. Here’s how to
link your accounts.
We are also going to raise money for Refuge by asking you to donate £8 to view RHLSTP #300 (where I am interviewed by John Robins) before anyone else, including a bonus 30 minutes of listener Emergency Questions that won’t be available when the podcast comes out on November 4th (monthly badgers will get this free in their extras).
The download should be available on Friday here.
And as a bonus we will be selecting one person who pays for the downloads at random and they will get a box of RHLSTP kickstarter march, including T shirts and the super rare and coveted RHLSTP Rubik’s Cube. All the money (aside from PayPal fees) will be going to Refuge.
