Today I learned

 that my line-manager has never heard of KPMG.
He finds it most odd that they might be trying to unearth the facts about some material used to construct the basal lining of a landfill cell some twenty years ago, now buried. It seems that we accidentally paid landfill tax on it, which we ought not to have. He doesn't understand why this person from KPMG needs this information NOW! And not in a day or two.

So for those of you who do not understand landfill, anyone wishing to chuck garbage into one pays a vast amount of tax to the Inland Revenue for that liberty. But the stuff that the landfill cell is actually made of is not garbage, not by any means, it is a very expensive specialist infrastructure investment and as such, is tax free.

The amount of tax paid in this one instance, in the relative scale of the entire property portfolio, is the equivalent of pennies down the back of the sofa, but when KPMG is searching for pennies down the back of the sofa you can be sure that very big trouble is not far ahead.

I have tried to explain gently to my lovely boss how it works;
First you are told that you are not profitable enough and therefore you must sell some assets – let's pretend it's a bus company and the quickest way to make a fast profit is to sell the wheels off the bus.
Then you have to tell the passengers that they must disembark because the bus cannot continue its journey and oh! By the way, they'd better look sharp about it and not stop to collect their belongings because the bus is in quicksand.

Lovely boss stayed late at work trying to rescue the company, failing to understand that liquidation is exactly what our owners have been aiming for, and it reminded me of King Louie in Jungle Book holding aloft one final stone of the collapsing temple.

2007: We had the cottage built. The eldest son produced a daughter and we had our very first visitor. Mima came from DownUnder to stay with us for a couple of weeks. Mima is very fond of dogs and took this beautiful portrait of Homer while she was with us.