An overdue update
I am conducting an experiment and trying to make this blog post from my mobile phone. I think that it will work in so far as I know I can log into my site, paste the text and press post, but I’m not sure how it will work in terms of the formatting. It may be that this ends up as very ugly plain text, for which I apologise. The reason there have been no posts on my blog of late is that it has been infected by a very persistantly recurring virus. Not a particularly dangerous virus, I hasten to add, just some weird lines of script which want to redirect people elsewhere, but highly unpleasant all the same. If you want some advice, never ever choose to host your website with 3ix. My knowledge of computers is not sufficient to launch the sort of detailed attack on them which they deserve, but the fact that my website keeps contracting a virus is most definitely their fault and when I get around to it I am going to write to Watchdog about them. Because I still don’t have a computer of my own, I usually use my work laptop to make my posts. Having contracted the virus on this machine twice already, however, I feel I daren’t risk the wrath of my IT department for a second time, and so I have managed to restrain myself from clicking on my site for well over a week. I’m not intelligent enough to sort out a new web hosting company myself though, and my boyfriend can’t do it because his laptop refuses to connect to the internet, and being the internet junkie that I am I couldn’t restrain myself from blogging any longer, hence this desperate attempt with the phone 
Quite a lot has happened since my last post. I spent five long and tedious days at the Manor on a training course entitled “Overseeing Client Service”. It probably rates as the worst week of the year so far. The course was deathly boring, the other participants rather standoffish and unfriendly, and I contracted a cold which meant I spent the long evenings sleeping rather than learning French as I had planned 
The quality of food at the place was as ever appalling, and I subsisted almost exclusively on biscuits and rice. For reasons which are obscure to me, the kitchen staff seem to have an objection to serving carbohydrate. That is to say, there is no toast for breakfast. There are no sandwiches for lunch. There is no pasta for dinner. At best you get rice and at worst you get boiled potato, but for the most part you are required to eat slices of cold meat and vegetables. I have my suspicions that this is some sort of corporate decree, that someone way up on high has decided that this diet is the one best calculated to bow us down into corporate submissiveness, but I have as yet been unable to prove anything.
It was a shame that the social side of the week was so tedious. Normally it’s great fun to go to the Manor, either to spend some time with people from your own office or to meet up with old friends from other offices, but this time around there was no one on the course who I had met before and I didn’t manage to get beyond polite conversations on deferred tax with anyone apart from a Swedish girl with startling good English who told me some things I didn’t know about Scandinavian languages.
It was just my luck that, ten minutes before I was due to leave, with my taxi already ordered and en route, I randomly bumped into the one person in the entire company who I most wanted to bump into. He’s a friend I made during my very first course at the Manor, a traumatising introduction to bookkeeping which has scarred me for life, and the only person with whom I have kept in touch on a regular basis since, despite the fact that he has spent the last twelve months touring the world. Coincidentally, he is not only one of my favourite people ever but he also happens to work at the Leicester office, to which I am soon hoping to transfer, so my reasons for hoping to see him were twofold. We managed a hug and ten snatched minutes of conversation, before my taxi appeared to whisk me away to the station, and I was supposed to email him this week but I’ve just remembered that I haven’t 
As to whether I learned anything during the week, I’m not sure. The first day was quite useful because we had some IT trainers in who taught us some useful things about how to deal with page breaks in Word. I had never fully appreciated before the difference between a section break and a next page continuous section break, and have tended to delete them from our standard templates rather indiscriminately, in the process probably committing grave transgressions against our very important corporate style. Far too much of the rest of the week seemed to revolve around tax. We practised performing corporation tax computations, a wholly pointless exercise on the grounds that firstly we all learnt to do this at college and secondly we’re not permitted by Ethical Standards to deal with a client’s tax anyway. We then spent a day thinking about how to audit a corporation tax computation (check it adds up) and what to do about deferred tax (pretend you haven’t seen it and hope your manager will sort it out). The final day was spent in the throes of a VAT quiz which I didn’t particularly enjoy (why try to pretend Tax can be fun? It can’t, by definition 
) but during the course of which I did learn some interesting facts.
Everybody probably already knows the battle McVities had with the Revenue to convince them that Jaffa Cakes were a cake (not VATable) as opposed to a biscuit (VATable). I at least, however, was unsure as to the grounds on which they won the case. It turns out that the tax definition of a cake is something which, when left out overnight, will go hard. Whereas the tax definition of a biscuit is something which, when left out overnight, will turn soft. I haven’t had the willpower to try it with any of my Jaffa Cakes yet, but apparently they do indeed turn hard and for this reason are not standard rated
There were a few other fascinating facts like, for example, the fact that rabbits are not subject to VAT even when sold as pets because they are classed as an essential food source. If you buy a Guinea Pig, however, you will be paying VAT because they are classed as a luxury item. If you want to buy raisins you should always buy them from the baking aisle of the supermarket where there is no VAT as opposed to the confectionary aisle of the supermarket where there is. There are several other things I could tell you but I am going to stop here, lest you come to the conclusion that I am unbelievably sad
Luckily for me, the course only lasted four days and due to a spot of brazen stubborness on my part I had managed to acquire a suspiciously convenient 7.5 hours of TOIL from working in Wantage, a job for which I had previously been told I would be unable to claim any overtime at all. It just so happened that I wasn’t booked to anything on the planner for the following Friday, and despite the fact that no one is allegedly allowed a single day off between January and April, I managed to talk my manager into letting me have it off
And so it was that after the end of the VAT quiz I hared back up to Birmingham as fast as the terribly slow Chiltern Railway would take me for a date with my boyfriend. It was our first overnight stop together for absolutely ages and I had booked a rather nice Premier Travel Inn on Broad Street. After a slightly overpriced meal in the attached restaurant, we headed back to the room for something I had been desperately looking forward to all week … the third episode of Star Wars!
It wasn’t the scariest film I have ever seen in my life but it is certainly one of the most disturbing. The scenes where Anakin turns into Darth Vader were quite shocking, despite the fact I was already aware it had to happen by virtue of having seen all the other films! It was terribly sad though and I was kind of glad I’d had a glass of wine to help me through it :cry: I was looking forward to a lie in the next day but ended up getting rudely awakened at six am for reasons I won’t detail. Still, I was able to enjoy the the very extensive Premier Travel Inn breakfast which as far as I’m concerned ranks within the top five hotel breakfasts in the world, since it includes Coco Pops, and then since we didn’t actually need to be out of the hotel until midday, we went back to the room for my induction into wrestling.
I have to confess that I was a little apprehensive about this, not being a person who either approves of violence or generally understands sport. It turned out to be better than I expected however; it’s much easier than football to tell who’s won and the violence is actually too laughable for me to object to. In a weird sort of way, something in the slapstick nature of it is reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy. I can imagine that wrestling might be very popular in Germany, where they still seem to think Laurel and Hardy are the height of comedy, but I have no idea if it actually is. In any case, I survived it and am all set to go and watch wrestling live in the middle of April
After a spot of lunch, we caught the train to Bournville. In my slight desperation of trying to figure out how we could spend an afternoon in Birmingham without becoming terminally bored, I had booked rather expensive tickets for Cadbury World. Cadbury World is, I think, a bit of a rip off despite the free chocolate but if you only go once every ten years it seems somehow justifiable. The best part is probably actually the walk through the suburb to the factory itself, when you turn a corner and get the sudden, unexpected whiff of chocolate. But some parts of the attraction itself are also worth seeing: I like seeing the packaging go round in the factory and my boyfriend sitting on the kids’ ride Cadabra and glaring at all the smiling beans who were waving at him was also quite a sight to behold I was glad, actually, that my boyfriend made it to the end of the experience because towards the beginning I was worried he was going to either expire in the heat of the enclosed audio visual display room, or punch somebody out of frustration with the queue
Later we headed back to Birmingham and sat in a coffee shop talking for long past the amount of time we ought to have been thrown out at. It was a very happy day, one of those days which seem in your memory to stretch on forever and can be plucked out and relived again and again whenever you are feeling melancholy and need something to cheer you up It was so nice for once to not have to think about work, and to be able to think about the future instead. The future is something I am very much looking forward to
Tags: cadbury world, courses, VAT