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It’s 10.55 according to the computer and a mournful Ben Webster is on the stereo. Today is Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year, according to the mental health charity MIND.

The Brother Who Must Not Be Named should note that psychiatrists say looking out of a window can help lift the mood. They obviously don’t come from Cornwall, where dawn has not yet broken. It is bleak and black again, and I’m feeling bad for throwing two stir-crazy animals out into the sodden wasteland of mud that used to be our garden.

This is because they were driving me insane. It’s not their fault. The cat, the Ginger Ninja, wishes to be outside decimating the wildlife, but does not like the rain and mud. Because his brain is pea-sized and incapable of retention, he keeps yowling to go out, and then yowling, immediately, to come back in. Once in, he’s bored out of his tiny Michaelgove (and a tiny Michaelgove is very tiny indeed), so pretends that anything in his immediate orbit is wildlife to decimate – my shins, my toast, ornaments, toys, CDs. This is what has irritated me and precipitated Ginger’s catapulting into what was once a garden, from where he sits in a tree outside my window, glaring balefully at me.

The dog has been walked, squelchily, for an hour in the woods and on getting home I spent quite a long time drying and brushing her so she could have a snooze in front of the burner without walking mud all over the place first. But the wretched animal has refused to snooze, preferring instead to gallop around the house after the cat and play slipperpitch – clasping an old slipper in her gob, shaking her head vigorously and timing to perfection the moment at which to let go and fire the slipper into something filthy, like the fireplace, soft, like my dangling areas, or fragile, like Management’s ornaments (which is not, Brother Fiddle, a euphemism). This has irritated me and precipitated Belle’s catapulting into what was once a garden, from where she sits under a tree outside my window, glaring balefully at me.

Oh dear.

Still, there was a reward for all this. For me, anyway. Is there anything finer on a dawnless day than that first sip of a fresh-brewed pot of good coffee? I’ve just toasted the animals with my steaming mug. They curled their lips at me.

Agreeing with David Cameron

It has already been an interesting morning, for I found myself agreeing with David Cameron. Yes. Interviewed on Today this morning about Europe, he insisted that we would have a referendum on membership of the EU because politicians couldn’t keep promising one without delivering.

The idea of politicians doing what they say they will do is breathtaking and revolutionary, of course, but he is right: right or left, they cannot keep waffling on about one day having a vote on Europe. Let’s get it done with.

Heart attax

The fucking Inland Revenue.

Last week I spent a day filing my pitiful tax return on their website. A day.

I think HMRC’s online service is brilliantly worked out – simple, easy to follow, a model of clear English.

But given that they have a rush every January, can’t the HMRC make sure their miserable server is up to the task? After all, we’re doing the revenue’s job for it, we’re handing over the money – surely the least we can expect is to be able to do so without suffering critical blood pressure rise while we wait, wait, wait, wait, wait for each page to laboriously clear?

Of course, the rush is intensified owing to the shocking phone system reported in the press as costing us poor tax-payers yet another fortune. Nobody in their right mind would ever phone HMRC.

A system that takes massive, massive amounts of our money has persuaded us to go through the agonising misery of working out just how much ourselves (with the proviso that somebody with a cold hard stone for a heart will punch a few keys on the calculator and come back to ask for more, of course), while putting itself virtually out of touch by phone unless you’re very rich and very patient, and making its electronic service just slow enough to be annoying without actually collapsing and saving us all the effort.

It makes regular horrendous mistakes, persecutes the less well-off and the small businessman (we ourselves are still locked in an argument about a few hundred quid of tax credit money the Revenue wants us to pay back) and lets the rich and the corporate squillionaires waltz off tax-free.

It has one rule for us (“pay us by January 31 or we’ll fine you hundreds of pounds”) and another for itself (“if we find out we haven’t sorted out your affairs by January 31, no matter – we’ll still come after you. In fact, we’ll come after you years after we insisted you finalise your tax affairs. Irritating, isn’t it?”)

The call centres, the bureaucracy, the stifling regulation and the Orwellian demands for more and more money: you can’t avoid the conclusion that HMRC is a masterpiece of bureaucracy, the very quintessence of Englishness distilled into one monolithic monster.

And finally on this subject, if any Brothers or Sisters living abroad attempt in any way to gloat or otherwise be smug on this subject, let the record show that I know where you live and will visit you with my baseball bat.

Linkage

I don’t much like soccer, as you know, but I do recommend the way Will Hutton uses the sickening excuse for sport that is our Premier league as a microcosm for what’s wrong with our economy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/football-everything-bad-about-britain

And talking of excellent links, thanks once again to Brother Fiddle for this, to the superb Fleet Street Fox and a salvo of righteous indignation about our MPs: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/fleetstreetfox-dear-mps-your-employers-1529477

And finally…

And finally…. Where are you all then? I asked for some guest contributions to this blog, and Sister Wizard Woman, bless her pretty little head, has offered to write a few words about knitting or recipes for the little ladies, and Brother Hamster, I think, could be persuaded to give us a ‘best of…’ Hamster’s Top Tips. But the rest of you? Come along, shake a leg. Or I’ll write about the taxman again. I mean it.