I haven’t posted anything in a while as I’ve been in a fairly bleak mood. I don’t think I’m alone in that.
It hasn’t been helped by the fact that, once again, I find myself dealing with the government. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid being a member of the “gig economy,” which many of my generation have fallen prey to, then you really cannot believe the Kafkan bureaucracy that is involved in having a series of different jobs.
A few years back, I was working as a shop fitter for Sports Direct. Except, of course, I wasn’t, because working for Sports Direct would have entitled me to various legal and contractual protections. I was, therefore, working as a sub-contractor for a company that was itself sub-contracted to Sports Direct. I only ever worked for that one company, and that one company only ever worked for the sporting goods mega-chain, but in order to save Sports Direct from legal responsibilities if I were to, say, saw my arms off or split my head open on a steel bar, I was legally classed as being “self employed.”
I did actually do one of those things, by the way, although the fact that I’m able to type this should tell you it was the less-serious of the two.
Anyway, because I was “self employed,” I had to pay my own taxes. Except I didn’t, because my employer (the company that I was sub-contracted to, which was itself sub-contracted to Sports Direct) took my taxes out of my wages automatically. Problem solved, right?
Nope. I ended up having to pay a hefty fine to the tax office because I hadn’t declared the taxes that I paid.
HMRC, the UK tax authority, didn’t dispute that I’d paid my taxes, you understand. They fully accepted that I’d paid them. I just hadn’t filled in a form telling them that I’d paid the taxes that they accepted that I’d paid. So I got fined.
Recently, I got a letter asking about my current employment status. I’m not working. I’ve taken a couple of months off, started a podcast, written a book, and started this Substack… none of which pays me anything. So I’m unemployed.
Unfortunately, during the period where I “didn’t” work for Sports Direct (and “didn’t” pay the related taxes) I also started a degree with the Open University. I didn’t finish it. I’ve never been good at formal education, due in no small part to my then-undiagnosed ADHD, which is another story. But I’m still on the books as having taken out a student loan for a degree which I never finished, meaning I never really used the money. I have no idea where it is. I certainly don’t have it. But this doesn’t stop whoever is responsible for loaning it from wanting it back.
Fortunately, my life is a string of terrible and under-paid jobs (see above) so as long as I don’t cross a certain wage threshold, they can never ask me to repay the loan. To make sure I’m not secretly a millionaire, they’ve sent me a letter asking me what I’m doing for work. To which, as I’ve said, the answer is “nothing.”
In order to prove I’m doing nothing but still around, they’ve asked me to provide proof that I still live in the UK.
If you’re paying close attention, you’ll notice that they asked me to prove I still live in the UK by sending me a letter. The fact that I’ve responded at all should be pretty solid evidence that I still live here, but no, I also have to show them utility bills or bank statements.
Doing this requires logging into the government website, which is every bit as well run as the other parts of this system. I’m currently digging around in old paperwork trying to find my “customer login details” from the last time I had to deal with the government website, three years ago during the tax debacle.
It’s also frustrating that they call it a customer login. I’m not a customer, I’m a fucking citizen and a tax payer. I’m not here to buy anything.
In frustration at this whole situation, and because it’s Christmas and I’m certain no office workers in a government department will be doing anything for the next few days, I decided to take my mind off things and go and see a movie.
I went yesterday, the 31st of January, when new regulations kicked in in Wales meaning I had to download an app to prove I didn’t have Covid. Not the already-downloaded Test & Trace app, which cost thirty-seven billion pounds and never worked. There’s a new, separate app that you have to download onto your phone to show your vaccine and Covid test status. It involves signing up with your NHS details (I don’t know mine, I doubt many people do) and then uploading a negative test result, which I can see hitting a snag pretty quickly:
In a rare piece of good news, I don’t have to somehow find a non-existent testing kit in order to upload a result to an app so that I can watch Spider-Man punch things for ninety minutes, because the app - which had my full name including both middle names, date of birth and postcode - couldn’t find me. I apparently don’t exist within the National Health Service’s records, which comes as a surprise to me, the doctors who delivered me, a long string of GPs, at least one psychiatrist and a half dozen nurses who have been sticking me with needles for the past year in order to vaccinate me for a virus I can’t prove I don’t have because apparently I’m not a person in the first place.
The upshot of this is that I haven’t seen the new Spider-Man movie because the woman at the ticket booth, who wasn’t wearing a mask, wouldn’t let me in.
In other news, Boris Johnson (a man who has also failed to prove he is always in the country when he says he is) has been acquitted of any wrongdoing for somehow getting two hundred thousand pounds worth of wallpaper put up in his flat for free. This was announced the same week that a Conservative party donor and former peer, worth an estimate fifteen million pounds, was caught stealing three hundred grand from a fund to help under-privileged communities so that he could fill in potholes on his estate.
I’m not big on astrology, but it’s January 1st and I’m already feeling like maybe, just maybe, 2022 is going to be the Year Of The Molotov.
But first I have to try to log in to the government website and fill out some forms to avoid another fine for money I haven’t taken. Which is going to be tricky, as I apparently don’t live here or even exist in the first place.