One of Shadow’s little brothers has a heart murmur. It’s not a serious one, but it’s too early to know whether it will affect him very much. I sent him a message of encouragement to say that it can happen to the best of us and if you play your cards right, you can use it for extra sympathy and an excuse for being lazy. Mine doesn’t seem to make too much difference to my life, except that I maybe don’t want to walk quite as far as I would do otherwise and every so often I stop, put my paws up and say ‘Can I have a carry?’. Mind you, the answer is never yes, something to do with being thirty kilogrammes of solid dog!
You have to worry about the Inland Revenue or whatever it is they are calling themselves this week. Now I can understand that it is important to them to collect the revenue from late tax returns. I can see that having penalties is the only way to encourage people to get their returns in on time, but how much must it cost them to send out each of the letters to say ‘Your tax return is overdue, here’s your penalty’. Now don’t misunderstand, when there is a £100 fine involved then I am sure that the letter is justified but why oh why would they send one out that said ‘Your return was later arriving, please pay £0’. Yes that’s right I did mean zero. What a waster of your and my money, well yours anyway, I don’t actually pay them anything, to send a letter like that to my master and probably several thousand other people! These are the kind of things that keep the Post Office in business, that and all the brochures my Mistress has sent for!