mostly david ephgrave

Kicking a pint glass of water over a pile of receipts wasn’t the most auspicious start to pulling together my records for my tax return this morning, but it was a start nevertheless. I actually managed to get a surprisingly large amount done, after stopping briefly to carefully hang the receipts over a clothes airer one by one. This was my second attempt at drying them out, which was more successful than the first (taking a hair-dryer to them resulted in an improvised leaf-blower effect). The fact I had to cancel a casting today as my vertigo was playing silly beggars may have made for a less potentially lucrative end to 2017, but it did at least allow me to make a self-assessment head-start; HMRC would be proud of me (if I’d had my records in order in time for the end of the tax year last April). One thing I hadn’t accounted for was the Cat Effect; no sooner had I sat on the floor to go through my receipts in more detail than I felt a paw tap me ...

My wife made an illustrative prediction of the scene she’d come home to when she finished work yesterday evening, which was unsurprisingly spot-on. A Study of Man with Cat (© 2017 ‘Her Indoors’)   We have a running joke between us based on the episode of The Simpsons when Bart gives a drawing to Lisa in a sealed envelope, prophesizing the carnage they’d stumble on when they returned home from a Sunday drive with Marge, while Homer cleaned out the garage. “Time to open the envelope I gave you”, Bart says as they pull up to find Homer being repeatedly crushed by the garage door; Lisa does so to reveal a perfect representation of the scene with ‘THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN’ scrawled across the bottom of it. Thankfully, the situation my wife expects to walk into is a lot less catastrophic, though it does involve a cat. Pretty much every day, about an hour before my wife's d...