No one speak to me...

...I am filling in my tax form. This is one of the really irritating things about being self-employed. Each time I do it I have to face up to the fact that I can't do paperwork... and also, these days, that I am a kept woman.

I thought you were keeping a ledger, says Hodmandod Senior (I know he doesn't mean to sound smug, but he does), so then I have to confess that somehow I stopped doing this approximately two weeks after I'd started - in the general turmoil of getting things done.

Anyway, I have just unearthed a pile of bills from the drawer of my desk (which is where I stuff bits of paper that seem like they might be important), pulled out a couple of files from my filing cabinet (just in case one or two things happened to land there in one of my rare fits of opening boring-looking envelopes), unloaded the overloaded in-tray and summoned up the on-line bank account and the (unsorted) in-box of my email.

Then, having amassed this mass of real and virtual paper, I enter Her Majesty's Inland Revenue 'portal' (ah such an evocative term for something so very dull) and click through the pages with mounting consternation. What exactly is a tax loss, I wonder. Does it mean overpaid or underpaid tax or the state of my (hypothetical) ledger sheet? In the end I make a guess and hope for the best...