by Kitty keeps changing her happy place. Right now she has two. One is my bed. The other is the well of the printer that I got fixed recently. Yes, it’s got a Kitty-sized pit. This weekend I’ll take her for a test drive – an hour in a box to see how she copes. My guess is not very well, but you never know.
It’s hosing it down right now. Much rather that than 35-plus. So I’ll be probably driving to my upcoming lesson. It’s nice to have that option I suppose, although I did manage perfectly well for over seven years without it. This morning I had a two-hour lesson with the girl who once wrote that she was bored. Two hours. An aeon. I resorted to giving her a 100-question test that took up most of the session. She got 77%, a commendable effort considering she was visibly tired by the end of it. (I rarely give tests, but when I do, they’re nearly always harder than what the kids get at school. Often these kids are used to perfect or near-perfect scores, so I can have a job convincing them that they haven’t failed calamitously.)
On Monday I had my weekly Romanian lesson. I’m not sure how much it’s really helping. My Romanian has stalled, at best. This time I asked the teacher about a sign I’d seen at a market stall: Avem mațe. Hmm, mațe means intestines, doesn’t it? The sort you make sausage skins out of. We have intestines. Nice. I guessed that because the stall sells mainly booze and tobacco, it must mean something else. Cigarette papers or something. But no, my teacher assured me that it really does mean intestines for making sausage skins, and those visiting would know the stallholder personally. Stuff like this, or the clatter of the backgammon pieces if I visit the market on a Saturday, makes me feel more alive.
My brother and I have been in contact with our aunt. Partly we’ve talked about her and our uncle’s recent house move, but the hot topic has been our parents. That’s great because we all agree on our parents’ urgent need to downsize and simplify the heck out of their lives. It’s also great because Mum respects our aunt a lot. I’ve been telling our aunt to badger Mum about the seeing the doctor when my parents get back ten days from now. There’s also the matter of Mum’s cataracts when she’ll need to get removed. Right now she’s as blind as a bat. You can point out a bird on a branch a few feet away and she won’t see it. Though both our parents are remarkably fit physically for their age still, a lot of things have come to a head quite suddenly, and my brother and I will have get far more involved.
Mum said something recently which made it clear that our attitudes to money are poles apart. She was talking about the verges – berms, as Kiwis might call them – in and around St Ives which the council had left unmown. Example 574 of how Britain has gone to the dogs. Fine. But then she specified. It was the verges beside the most expensive houses that bothered her. Their owners pay massive rates (or council tax) bills, she said, so they should be the ones that the council prioritises. The verges near the cheaper houses can basically go hang. Her idea might be a really common one for all I know, but it’s not one that’s ever crossed my mind. Owners pay rates based on the value of their property, then all that money gets pooled together and spent on libraries and playgrounds and rubbish collection and mowing (or not mowing) verges. Across the board throughout the area in which the council operates, irrespective of the proximity of a particular service to high-value properties. Isn’t that how it works, or am I being hopelessly naive? I wonder if Mum thinks that access to treatment for, I dunno, stage 3 cancer, should be based on one’s earnings to that point.
Council tax (i.e. rates) in the UK is weird. And unfair. Even though I’ve never owned a UK property, I know about council tax in some detail because my student, that one who’s getting a divorce, tried to get his bill lowered. It went to court, he didn’t win, and it set him back £10,000 in court costs. Not great for their marriage, I imagine. The weirdness and unfairness are twofold. One, the big one, is that council tax in England is based on the value of your property in 1991. Unless some government decides to change the law, that 1991 date is set in stone. In perpetuity. For anything built after that date, they estimate what it hypothetically would have been worth then. As for extensions and so on, don’t ask. Of course prices haven’t gone up uniformly throughout the country since ’91. They’ve skyrocketed in London and the south-east but have risen more slowly in the north. So if you’ve got a house worth £700k in some fashionable suburb in London, you’ll be paying a lot less tax than someone with a £700k house in a less swanky part of Yorkshire, because of its much lower ’91 value. Absurd, isn’t it? The second problem is that council tax has eight bands, A to H, with A being the lowest. Once you’re in H, you can’t go any higher, so someone owning a house worth many millions in London doesn’t pay any more than that owner in Yorkshire. (Some very expensive houses aren’t even in H anyway.) There really should be bands stretching into the middle of the alphabet at the very least. Oh, and for rental properties, it’s the tenants that have to pay council tax, not the landlords. The whole system needs a huge overhaul. Maybe it shouldn’t even be based on property value at all. They should probably hammer AirBnBs and second properties left vacant. Someone far cleverer than me could dream up a fair and workable system. What they have now clearly isn’t it. (New Zealand’s, with its rateable values updated every three years, is certainly better.) By the way, this all came about after the ill-conceived poll tax (a uniform tax per adult, brought in at the end of Thatcher’s time) which resulted in riots. Anything is better than that, which I could tell was appalling even though I was ten years old.
I hadn’t meant to write so much about bloody council tax! Mum and Dad often talk about the UK going to the dogs. Dad is worse than Mum in that regard. It’s not great, but I wouldn’t say it’s quite as bad as they make out. (Dad would feel better about his homeland if he stopped reading the Daily Mail.) Part of it is just a general negativity about the present. We’re all guilty of that, especially as we get older. I know I am. This week I saw a news presenter (a bit older than me) interviewing an aviation expert about last month’s Air India crash. He said, it seems there are more crashes now than there were in the past. I was practically shouting at the screen, even before the expert replied. Flying is far safer now than say 40 years ago.
