Not Doing Taxes

My God. It has been ages. It's not that I haven't thought about it. Of course I have. It's just that thinking about it leads to the question of what to write and then it all gets complicated and my brain wanders off for a little cup of Earl Grey and a lie down.

Why now, then? Well, it's mainly because I have a 'to do' list in front of me, and right there, in my own lovingly-crafted biro scrawl, are the hellish words "DO TAXES".

Wow, I suddenly really want to write a blog post.

And clean the bathroom. Oh, and paint my toenails. And write a song and practice my cello and clean the cupboards and call my sisters and put some stickers on my face and plait the neighbour's cat and see what I look like with writing on my eyelids and sit under the stairs.

(You may have noticed that only a couple of things I use for procrastination devices are actually productive in any way. I win.)

I want to write about all the stuff that's been going on, and there has been loads and most of it has been exciting and cool and some of it has involved lying on the floor of an old mill clutching people's ankles, being dragged along as they try to kick me off with genuine force and feeling. But when I tried to start writing about it all I wrote the sentence "last week I did a thing", which is factually accurate but would not score many points in a French Oral examination (not least because it is in English).

It is grey and miserable outside. We have a new sofa. Well, it isn't new, it is second- (or possibly third- or fourth-) hand, but it is new to us. It is massive. About the size of our entire flat. It is blue leather, but nicer than it sounds. It is squatting in the middle of the room, daring anyone to sit on it. It is a monolith, and I can't shake the feeling that it disapproves of me.

The old sofa, the tiny, uncomfortable red corduroy abomination with its cat scratched arms and frankly hideous odour, is cowering in the back of the room. I feel sorry for it. I feel like it is keening plaintively at me, wondering what it has done wrong and why we don't love it any more.

I have got to stop anthropomorphising furniture and get on with my tax return.

Annoyingly I have already planned my workshops for this week, although I could spend an hour or two re-doing it, although that would no doubt send me into a panic and I would then have to relegate it to the towering procrastination pile as well.

I have spent a bit of time ensuring the lighting is exactly right for the task of taxes, and making a cup of coffee which I won't drink because I am already feeling jittery from the first one and it's making me feel weird about the sofa.

The thing is, tax returns aren't even hard. All you have to do is sort stuff out and write it into the form, so actually I don't mind doing it, but I did just suddenly feel that I couldn't possibly do it without writing a screechingly-tedious blog post about it first.

Which I have done. Well done me.