A different sort of weekend was had in our household. Having spent a few rainy days decluttering – boxes of old toys, clothes and a host of ‘why do we still have that’ – it just left a good old clean up to be done.

Now I don’t know about you but I’ve noticed my mind is restless when the house is a mess and needing cleaned. The physical chaos manifesting in my brain cells like a neurological mind map of tasks to be done. I had made my ‘to-do’ list – always the first job to be done when household chores are required to be tackled. But before I could fire my starters pistol, metaphorically speaking, we received “The Bill”.

I’ll give a very brief background to “The Bill”, without getting too personal and hopefully too boring – it is financial stuff after all. The basics go like this:

My husband has a lot of health problems so I look after him. In fact, I have to help my husband with a lot of things, which I don’t mind doing – at all. However, financially, we’ve become accustomed to living on fresh air – look for future posts along the lines of, “how to create a banquet for 12 using dandelions, out-of-date sandwiches and late night bargain meat from Tesco”.

Skipping over all the ‘Welfare State’ intricacies – we were recently able to improve our financials a little when husband’s health problems and my need to look after him were finally taken seriously. We’ll never be rich but its better than we were. Heres where our local council come in.

They get informed before us when our financials are getting changed and so they knew before me that I’d be getting a slight financial boost designed for people in my situation. So what did the lovely local council do? Well, they decided they wanted their cut, of course (33% on a weekly basis to be precise). Over here, we have whats called ‘council tax’ where we pay for ‘services’ like street lights, getting 1 bin a week emptied and sewerage etc.

I’ve had 6 bills this year for it instead of the usual 1 and I’ve had to challenge them all. The latest one says instead of paying £29 a month, I now need to pay £99 a month. ‘Why’ I asked. Because apparently the money I get to help me live while I look after my husband, is classed as income (which is taxed).

Income implies ‘job’, does it not?

It implies ’employer’, ‘terms and conditions’, ‘hourly rate’ and ‘salary’.

Taking all this into account, my ‘income’, for which I had to prove I look after my husband for a minimum of 35 hours a week – I get paid less than £2.20 an hour – and the council wants a big chunk of it.

Not one to take this sort of demand lightly, I made several calls – one of which was to said council. The ‘woman’ on the end of the phone kept saying things like: ‘well, you’ve got an income now’, ‘thats the rules’ and ‘you’ve got a non-dependent living with you’

Eh? What? Pardon?

“Excues me”, says I, “what does that mean”?

She replied, “Your son is over 16”.

Me: “He just turned 13 – what are you talking about?”

‘Woman’: “Oh, I read it wrong”.

Now, I’ve picked up quite a few dead rats that have been caught in our traps or by our dog (see previous posts), and I’ve never sniffed any of them. However, I’m pretty sure any one of those rats would have had the same aroma as this telephone conversation.

After that I put out the Bat signal – so its being dealt with next week.

That took a lot of time and energy to deal with but by Saturday evening the car was full of boxes of unwanted ‘stuff’, all the washing was done, rooms had been tidied and cleaned and enough time was left to watch a movie!

We have Amazon Prime for a week so tried to find something new on that.

Oh my.

It was impossible.

The good ones – we’ve seen.

The new ones? Well, since we didn’t fancy an unhealthy dose of social engineering with our movies, we ended up skipping these and looking for something older.

Turns out, if you want to actually enjoy a movie today, you need to go back a few years!