It took me longer this morning than usual to calculate my quarterly VAT return, in part because my accounting software doesn’t easily cater for the differential rates of the Flat Rate scheme, but mostly because the department that sold me on the idea of Flat Rate told me to do it incorrectly (using the net rather than the gross sales figure)… which meant that I had to go back today and calculate additional payments from past quarters. And then work out how to record these in my accounting software! Oh how I truly miss Maurice ‘Tigger’ Dawes!
To add injury to insult, the culpable department still think that they are correct, which meant that I was forced to call the ‘automated queuing’ helpline and endure 15 minutes of a message repeatedly saying that it may be helpful to look on our website while your waiting. I persevered and finally got a real person who confirmed that both my accountant and my colleague in RiVO were correct. Strangely, she didn’t seem to care that one of her colleagues was advocating an incorrect treatment of the figures. I suppose that that a little misinformation in the system could make life more interesting life for some people?
Anyway, fresh from this frustrating and monumental waste of time, I climbed aboard the magic carpet and ran my little legs off.
The downside of having run five miles in each of my sessions last week is that to do three and a half seems half-hearted. So I was forced to do another five and I did it as intervals: slightly faster, elongated ones.
I warmed up at 6mph then alternated largely between 7.5 mph and 9mph , with short segments of 6mph or 7mph. A couple of the the 9mph segments were 800m long which helped to increase the average speed from last week. So five miles in 39 minutes 7 seconds, an average of 7.67mph. And one very sweaty me!