Dan Tunak

Holy Taxation Batman!

My daily commute to work consists of driving around six miles a day and also consists of driving into pot holes that even a Challenger tank would struggle to get through. And year after year the roads get a cheap repair and subsequently end up as pot holes again within a few short months. And this in turn has me a) on the verge of a cataclysmic mental break down as my spine is shattered by what appears to be a meteor crater , and b) makes me wonder what the council’s authorities for our area are doing with our cash.

And so, upon arriving at work today on ungritted roads I made a few quick calculations as to how much of my monies have been taken from me.

So, here we go.

Okay, my yearly Income Tax payments work out to a staggering £3423. I’ve earned a pretty similar wage for the last ten years, which tells me that over the last ten years I’ve paid approximately £34,236 in Income Tax. It also tells me that after ten years of the same wage that I’m probably due a pay rise.

Then I looked at my National Insurance contributions. In a one-year period I paid £2073. Over ten years this comes in at a princely sum of £20,730.

So after spitting some tea over my desk as my calculator returned these numbers I then looked at my Council Tax bill.

My council tax for the last 10 years has been over £100 a month, but I rounded off at £140, the actual number these days is £159 but with fluctuations over the years I’ve rounded off to a more suitable number to accommodate the rises. My calculator returned a number of £14000 for ten years. Tea was then sprayed out of my nose and a meek cry squeaked from my throat.

Now, basing the above figure of £14,000, I then looked at the number of houses down my road, forty-four, and as all the houses down my road are the same, minus the occupants, the ten yearly Council Tax payments return at, and this made me pretty much launch my cup across the room, at £616,000. Remember, this is forty-four homes over ten years and I’ve been pretty generous in rounding off to the lower denominator.

Where I live, Wikipedia has the 2001 census as showing 14,732 residential homes. I appreciate that perhaps 60% of these homes either pay a lot less in Council Tax or get some form of support in paying it, yet still, if for the sake of being generous subtract 60% off we are left with 8,839 residential homes; now let’s be even more generous to the Council Tax that the remaining households pay and let’s say that they all pay £90 a month, quite a large deficit but I’m being generous, but now we are left with a monthly tax to the Council of £795,510.

Then over a ten month period of tax, as they so kindly allow us two months free of payments, we reach the figure of £7,955,100.

That’s the year done.

Okay, so 10 years?

Add another zero to that figure my friend. £79,551,000

And this is for a small town where the Christmas tree that the Council put in our town was dubbed by tabloids nationwide as “The Worst Xmas Tree In Britain” and now small businesses are rallying other businesses to put some of their earnings into a kitty so they can provide the next Christmas tree!

So where does our Council Tax go? Well, a breakdown of the taxation can be found here: http://www.canterbury.gov.uk/main.cfm?objectid=1416

Note that my tax is a touch higher per annum than the example shown on the Canterbury Council website, but do note that section “7” shows that the annual charge on this example is £1307.39 Then scroll your eyes up to section “6” and look at the breakdown of this tax.

And now look out of your window and wonder how on a national scale of taxation that this country can be in recession.

And remember I’ve only used Council Tax as a larger example – to show how this cartel aggressively take your hard earned money yet collects my landfill bin waste every fortnight and only provide enough recycling sacks per year to allow for 4 sacks of recycling waste a month.

I appreciate that the Council don’t just collect our bins, but I’m looking at the big picture. The one where surely the expenditure of Kent City Council cannot be above the cost of the tax paid across our little South Eastern county?

I’m basing all the above figures on a town that probably wouldn’t even be missed if it fell into the sea, I’m not including the larger cities, towns and villages in the area, I’m basing the above on a town with an estimated population of 35,188.

So with this in mind after having my skull smashed into the roof of my car repeatedly I started wondering about car fuel tax.

See the link below of how this is made up. http://www.petrolprices.com/the-price-of-fuel.html

This is ludicrous, how can the tax be over 60%?

Or how the cost of fueling your home so you don’t have to start pulling down your fences and torching them in a metal bin in your front room to keep warm.

Or the VAT on every item you purchase at a 20%.

Car tax. This is a big “Wow” for me, because again, with Council Tax payments and Car Tax payments I still can’t travel from A to B without my car breaking up like the Challenger Spaceship.

Cigarettes and alcohol – you can’t even kill yourself for cheap in this country.

And then you start getting really pissy and start looking at Congestion charges, Travel costs. TV licensing, the cost to use a public toilet, and I’m not talking about the fear of assault or STDs caught off the taps, airport costs, the cost of buying a house and so on.

The cost of living in the UK is now at a point where your wages are gone before you’ve even seen them. Disposable income is something we will tell our grandchildren about as we sit around a fire burning the coffee table and family albums.

Jesus H Christ, where is this all going? Can we smile? Or will that be taxed soon as well? But then again, the fact we are being raped of all that we earn; it makes it difficult to keep turning that frown upside down. It’s a good thing this country doesn’t have the same gun laws as the USA because this country is bleeding hard working folk dry. And there are only so much of us that you can consume before you end up in a revolt.

D.I.Y – Insert Sanity Here

Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of one of the most sophisticated piece of equipment known to man, please unpack carefully.

Sanity is generally a given for most of us; in fact unless your parents are direct blood relatives or the midwife that delivered you preferred to opt for a crowbar when extracting you, you should possess at least some realm of sanity.

But what I often mused on was “So what drives a man insane?” Well obviously you have: repressed childhood, abusive family and such like, which create people like Fred West; it’s an egg timer effect, it trickles away and you’re medically insane.

But that wasn’t what I was musing on, what I was musing on was the notion of why a person of reasonable social stature would go from well-mannered work colleague and friendly smiling neighbour one day and then transform to assault rifle wielding madman that wants to take out as many people as possible before turning the gun on himself the next day.

I have that answer.

D.I.Y . . . the mother of all emotional dispositions that the human mind can cope with.

Regardless of the job at hand, I would rather try my hand at D.I.Y and repairs on my household than pay someone else to do it properly. In fact unless my house is a burning mass or a Boeing 747 has ploughed through the neighbourhood I will generally be found trying my hand at doing the work myself before admitting defeat. I have, however, had some proud D.I.Y moments; I beamed with pride at my laminate floor laying skills, or at least I did until I read that even that fat retard’o Russell Grant can do it.

I even once tiled my bathroom, sure it’s still not entirely finished (three years later) and some of the tiles form ramps which would be useful if you could defy the laws of gravity on a motorbike, but hey, I did it with my own bare hands damn it.
Like most men (and dyke woman) I own power tools. Ok, unlike most men I go for the cheap alternative over the expensive models. I was quietly confident that my Homebase own brand 8 Volt battery powered drill would make mincemeat of any material including diamond.

So putting a roller-blind up was merely child’s play . . . right?

With a childlike enthusiasm and a song in my heart I took to what should have been a relatively simplistic task for even the most ham handed person. So after some basic preparation such as using my fingers to measure the distances out and a few test holes drilled; I was well and truly on my way to enjoying the thrill of new blinds, this clearly was to be a moment in my life to be proud of.

Until of course I encountered the lintel.

For those that don’t know, a lintel is a basically a load bearing chunk of metal that stops your house collapsing onto your beaming head after you open the window to breath in the morning air and wave to your elderly neighbours who are having angry sex in their greenhouse.
I have encountered lintels before, and unless you have the kind of hardware only available to James Bond villains then you’re going to struggle eternally when trying to drill a hole into it.

But of course with alpha male determination I switched my cheapo drill to hammer mode and my reasoning to “primate” and applied a pressure that was almost hernia causing, such was my ambition to get through the metal bastard.

As with all things in life I don’t see the point in spending decent money on tools, food, medicines et cetera, but surely a drill-bit only comes in one variety right? No. Apparently my Argos made drill-bits have the mining qualities of Daniel Day Lewis in ‘My Left Foot’, so what happened when I tried to drill through the lintel should have been expected.

With the hole drilled approximately an inch deep you can only imagine what happened when the shitty Argos drill-bit met construction grade metal . . .
The drill-bit flexed and eventually bent itself into an L-shape, thus gutting the wall as opposed to drilling it. Within a few short seconds I resembled a 9/11 escapee as the plaster broke away in the same manner you’d expect if I had taken a shotgun to it.

Never wanting to admit that it was my fault I took to blaming the wife with a scream of “Why do you always buy such cheap shit?” I was of course blaming the prone roller-blind that lay inanimately on the floor and not my ham-handed self.
By the time I had managed to get the blinds up I was covered in plaster dust and rage; it looked as if I had emerged from a coalmine, when in fact I had only drilled eight holes. A thick spittle had formed into the corners of my mouth and the wife had pretty much packed her things into a travel case. It was at this point I quietly reflected at my previous D.I.Y attempts.

The bird table that strikes fear into the heart of small children and has killed more birds than actually providing a well-deserved pit-stop for our avian friends.

The three legged table I once made, admittedly I ran out of wood, but I thought it was quite jaunty, but you couldn’t sneeze/talk/look at the thing without fear of a catastrophic collapse.

The loft ladder that is such a fucking liability that I often ask the wife to open it whilst I watch with nervous anticipation from behind a Perspex screen whilst also wearing a crash helmet and having 999 on speed-dial.

The skirting board that juts out at a seriously dangerous angle like a crude medieval ankle breaking device.

The simple repairs to my previous shed (R.I.P) that resulted in the windows suddenly being blocked out with liberated pallets and the door opening only enough to slide one hand through.

Anything related to D.I.Y I will always attempt before admitting defeat but I feel I should look back upon these rambling notes before I take on any more homely tasks.

Insanity . . . insert drill here.

Italian Food & The Space Time Continuum

Italian cuisine is always a mixed emotion for me. I married into an Italian family so I tend to find myself either completely maxed out on Italian or pandering for more like a junkie.
I guess there must have been a shortage of Italian food in our home because I was needing a fix.
Enter the restaurant “Ask”. Literally. In we went.
The restaurant was pretty much empty, which should have had me edging towards the door or signalling to the wife to bring the car round. But I didn’t. I must have assumed that the evening rush just hadn’t started. Either way, we were sat in an empty restaurant and looking at a menu with hungry eyes.
We were left uninterrupted by the waitress for a considerable length of time, in fact such a considerable length of time that I was able to read each item on the menu numerous times and even read the small print on the rear of the menu.
Eventually a surly waitress that had all the joy and enthusiasm of a teenager asked to clean their room shuffled over and took our simple order in the manner of someone that was meeting their attacker for the first time.

The waitress then shuffled off and into the kitchen.
And then something unexplainable happened. It was one of those moments that is featured on the Discovery Channel and has speakers such as Stephen Hawking or Professor Brian Cox and almost certainly some profound perspective from a NASA scientist, because no sooner had the kitchen door closed behind our delightful waitress had it burst back open with her holding two plates of food and steering towards me and the wife.
And then it happened . . . the plates were placed in front of us. I looked at my offering for a few moments before looking up to the wife. My lips flapped but words would not escape from my voice box. Had I taken a serious blow to the head whilst in the restaurant? Or had they been pumping monoxide in via the air-conditioning? Because this seemed an amazing speed in which to be served a dish you had ordered less than 45 seconds prior to it arriving. I’ve had slower falls down stairs than this, and the drinks weren’t even with us yet.
I reasoned that this must be some space anomaly whereby everything operates at a speed that the poorly evolved human brain just can’t comprehend and therefore I must have already had my drink – obviously launched at me in the form of protons that were blasted at me as if from an exploding neutron star.
So with a perplexed look I raised my fork and tucked into the pasta.
What was I really expecting? Compliments to the chef? A rolling of my head as I make orgasmic sounds of sheer delight?
Well, I know Italian food well, and this, this pile of jaundice blandness was not even comparable to a petrol station pasta bowl that has sat two weeks past its sell-by-date.
No, this was the offering of a meal that had been reheated for perhaps no less than three attempts in order to sell it.
It was a disgrace to the Italian world of food.
Hell, it would have been a disgrace as a first attempt at cooking by a primate that had been pumped full of sedatives.
I couldn’t stomach more than a mouthful, and I’ve eaten at a Little Chef before.
I hacked at the pasta until it was a pulpy mess – in the hope that they couldn’t reheat and serve this to the next poor S.O.B that enters Ask with a slither of hope of receiving an edible meal.
I covered my plate with my paper napkin, as if covering a victim of an accident that didn’t make it, and pushed the plate away with the repulsion I reserve only for when Jordan appears on TV.
The waitress scuttled over and slammed two drinks down in front of us and then took my road kill dinner away without even asking (ironic) if I enjoyed it. Had she enquired, I feel I would have stood up and fired off a tsunami of abuse about the insult to my taste buds that I had just gone through.
Let us not forget that all of this, the food order, the food serving, the pulping of the food, the drink servings and removal of my plate had happened in less than three minutes . . .
I didn’t even wait for the wife to finish. She too had had a single mouthful of this utter garbage and what with her fiery temper, I thought it best to settle our bill and exit before she went all Godzilla on the restaurant and reduced the building to debris.

So, short of around £18 later, I exited Ask with a feeling of betrayal, confusion and hunger.
One thing I always promise after a bad dining experience is that the establishment that wronged me will never, ever see another penny of my money and with that I will ensure that anyone prepared to listen will know of my woes. It might have been a bad day for the restaurant . . . however, is your stomach asking for sustenance? Then just Ask yourself, do you feel lucky, punk? Well? Do you?