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[drownthefish]

Aaaaaaaargghhh Computer says no! I have spent the week trying to file my annual income tax return. It started badly with getting locked out of the auto-entrepreneur website to check my husband's monthly declarations for his business. Despite several phone calls and emails I'm still locked out but I did manage to get an annual total. A few clicks later on the "impots" site and I find out that the change of situation that I requested in November has still not been actioned and I cannot enter both my husband's income and mine on the same return. I have 7 days to sort it out, 5 if you don't count the weekend. There are over 5.5 million civil servants in France, that's 1 in 5 of every working adult. With 24% of GDP spent on these "fonctionnaires" who on average work fewer hours, get more holiday (42 days instead of 28), better sick pay, early retirement and better pension packages, you'd think they would be the most helpful, delightful bunch of people, oiling the great machine that is the French bureaucratic system. Alas, no. Stay tuned for (hopefully) a positive result next week.

[drownthefish]

Every journey starts with a single step......

Think of this as the Queens Tennis tournament compared to Wimbledon.... my first foray into blogging before I take the leap into vlogging! At the ripe old age of 50 I should know better but I guess its one of those now or never moments. A bucket list item. A "Do it now before you're too old" moment. A middle-aged mother of 3 with her prime behind her, living in rural France. I've just survived 3 years as an estate agent and now moving on to new adventures..... A new "nuts and bolts" business, creating virtual tours and 360 video with some drone photography thrown in as well as a side-line as a YouTube content creator, neither of which came up on my potential future career printout back in 1983 when I was at Spalding High School for Girls. If nothing else, I hope that this will go down to posterity as "Mother's mid-life crisis" and even if I don't become a Youtube millionaire this will be read by my grandkids when I'm long gone. As Benjamin Franklin said "You may delay, but time will not". There, I've started!