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| St. Mary's Well in Viragospuszta |
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| St. Mary statue by the well |
Tesco was the next stop, and the shortage of retail staff was palpable. Hardly any checkouts open, several sections totally unattended, like the poor chap who was commuting between the meat and the fish counters. Dreadful, but totally understandable. Who wants to work for pittance in a miserable, downtrodden country heading for fascism? Retail sales staff is much sought after in lots of countries and most of those that could, had already left. Rats and sinking ships come to mind, don't they?
The weather was gorgeous and we were home by 1pm, so we unpacked quickly, I had a couple of rolls with some salad and took off to place the two moving caches that I have had for a week. I started with the one that has to be placed at wells and/or springs. I drove up to Viragos and walked 600 metres to the recently built St. Mary's Well in the forest. I knew that it had been there for about 2 years, but not being of the religious persuasion, didn't bother to hike to it before. It is in a lovely bit of the forest and placing the cache was not too difficult. This one has a clever hide in that it is surrounded by a little structure that looks like a bird box. You fix it to a tree with a pressure belt and it really is invisible, it fits its environment so well.
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| The Lutheran church in Ber |
The next one was the cache that travels to medieaval churches or church ruins. I found out that our Lutheran village church, which looks like it was built in the 18th century, is actually a 14th century church. Obviously, with renovations, alterations and rebuilds, it doesn't look like it must have 700 years ago, but it is archeologically and historically proven that it originates from the 14th century. I hid the box under a rooftile on the ground at the NE corner of the church.
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| The XIV. century tower, enlarged in XVIII. century |
While up at Viragos, I went and checked the third part of my 3 parter multicache, because someone told me it has been missing for a while. Unfortunately I couldn't find it either, so it looks as if that particular hillside is far too vulnerable to thieves and/or vandals. I changed the status of the cache to "sick" on the website and promised to deal with it later in the week.
On Wednesday we had the planned, and expensive, visit from the chimney sweeps. Do not imagine a jovial little fellow with brushes on his back! No way Jose!! These guys (there were 2 of them) come at irregular intervals to check your chimneys on behalf of our benevolent government. As long as you are at home when they come, it is free, (although who knows for how long?), but if you happen to be away, as we were twice in the last couple of months (once to Toronto and then to Hassocks) and missed both their visits, you have to pay for it, even though it is compulsory, because that counts as a special trip out. Do you get my feeling that the country is sinking towards totalitarianism, even in the smallest particulars of one's everyday life?
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| The forest above Viragos |
A week or so ago I had some debates on the phone with them about how much it would cost and every time there was someone different at the end of the phone it was a different sum. Some guy said its about £13 a chimney (we have 6), then a little woman said, don't be silly it is about £1 a chimney and so it went. Well, these guys stayed 75 minutes, they had some up-to-date equipment to check for carbon monoxide with and talked a lot too. At the end of it, we were about £26-£27 lighter, which is reasonable, I suppose. They were flabbergasted when after their amazement on how clean our chimneys were, I told them that Roy cleans them himself with his own brushes. The one bit that annoyed me excessively (apart from the incessant prattle of one of them), was the fact that the chimney that they could not check in any way whatsoever (the turbo boyler's one) was the most expensive. But then again, you're an idiot if you expect logic in these parts, aren't you?
Once the chimney guys were gone I set about putting together Roy's and my tax returns for the year 2015/16. Normally this takes me about a week, first getting all the paperwork together, then entering everything into my master spreadsheet and then filling in the forms on line, first mine and then Roy's. This year it took me an afternoon, in spite of the fact that in my old age I am getting so scatterbrained that half the paperwork was missing. Thankfully, I can always resurrect the figures from the net.
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| The panorama from near the cache |
The main reason for the short time is basically the fact, that we no longer have any form of income that is not taxed at source. No rent, as we sold the house, no dividends, as we are no longer directors of Stephen's company, and while we still have some savings in the bank and the building society, that is also taxed at source. Except, of course, in their bloody wisdom, the Tories have introduced an allowance for savings interest being tax free up to £5000. This has started just this April, so thankfully I will only come across what that actually means while doing next's year's returns. But, in spite of obviously saving a bit of money, this is also bloody annoying on several levels:
1. The bloody government just brought this measure out without having given any thought to how exactly they will administer it, so no amount of spending hours on the net, including on their own bloody website and/or anybody else's brought me any illumination on what exactly is going to happen next year. The actual how, as a question, has obviously never occurred to them, so how they are going to collect it is anybody's guess still.
2. I was hoping to be taken out of the necessity of doing tax returns in future, as there is no point just entering figures into a bloody form on line which tells them nothing that they do not already know. And anyway, they usually brag about taking up to 40,000 tax payers out of having to do a return yearly, so I was thinking of writing to them and asking to be taken out. Now, they have a perfect excuse why I will have to carry on and for how much? A few quid here and there, although having found that the automatic, computer driven calculation for this year came up with rebates, rather than us paying anything, perhaps that might be the case from now on and then HMRC will definitely take us out of doing a return, I should think.
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| The lovely Nograd countryside |
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| Sheep at Viragos |
We are off to town on Saturday and I will post again (hopefully) next week.
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