"The Book"

In 1991, just a few weeks after Charlie was born, I took my first contact job. I didn’t know much about working freelance, only that it paid better than permanent work and that it was less secure. But, in the three years since I’d graduated, I’d already had three jobs, so the fact I was only signed up for a year didn’t trouble me too much. I was just glad to have some money coming in.

In order to work as a contractor, I needed to set up a limited company, which my new accountant helped me to do. It cost £150 ‘off the shelf’ and went by the illustrious name of Sarncase. This accountant - a Mr Brian Hoban -  also registered me for VAT and explained how I had to keep my books. 

Reader, it was 1991 and I did not own a PC. My first, a Windows 95 machine, lay four years in the future, when the man I bought it and a 14.4k modem from would inform me that he loved the Internet and had stayed awake all of the previous night downloading the personnel records from Starfleet Command. For now, though, all I had was a pencil and ledger. And a calculator and, crucially, a rubber.

At the end of every quarter, I was obliged to complete a VAT form - a dully green sheet of A4 - and submit it, along with a cheque, to whatever the relevant bit of HMRC was called in those days (Customs? Customs and Excise?) before the month was out.

Well, you probably won’t be too surprised to hear that I would often delay this process until the last minute. The return had to be in the post on the penultimate day of the month. Hence the evening prior to that was the one when you would be most likely to find me sat at the kitchen table with my calculator, pencil, rubber, and ledger, a pile of receipts, and copes of my invoices to the agency through whom I was operating.

Today I had reason to go ferreting through one of the grey filing cabinets in the office looking for a life policy which the mortgage company, in their intrusive way, wanted sight of. Opening drawers at random, I saw a hanging folder with a label that simply read ‘The Book’. And here it is, a tome from the pre-digital period of Pearson that, as I took it into my hands, transported me back to that large kitchen table at Underley Farmhouse. Now that’s something about which I don’t feel nostalgic.