Early in my tax career, in my role as stenographer, porter and punkawallah to the great and the good, I was instructed to join one of the senior partners at a meeting with Roy E. Disney's right-hand man. The conversation was going well (I had a walk-on part taking notes and fluttering my eyelashes, or whatever pseudo secretaries were supposed…
Don’t Mention The War
1/1/14. Typing the date, I am paralysed with fear as I imagine myself, pencil in fingerless-gloved hand, writing home from a rat-infested trench in the fields of Northern France (rats are one thing - but France?). Even the quality press has added to my waking nightmare. Both the New York Times and The Economist got in…
Socking it to Santa
Experience suggests that my telephone conversation with some extremely pleasant folk from Colorado last Thursday will prove one of my last international work calls before Christmas. Although I have never visited Denver or its environs, I am assured that their courtesy was typical of that, and other, Western States. My research suggests, however, that if you ever…
Charge your glasses
The highlight of my year as a young teenager was undoubtedly Summer Camp. It was not really a camp at all. Public (that means private) schools bearing varying degrees of similarity to Hogwarts were hired for a fortnight and staffed by post-pubescent volunteer counselors, hand-picked by the ever-so-more-mature officers of our local youth club. With average pedagogic training approaching…
Stuck Behind Chocolate Bars
Predictably, perhaps, Belgium does not feature prominently in Patricia Schulz's "1,000 Places To See Before You Die". Given my disdain for "Harry, take a photograph" tourism, it was serendipitous that the only foreign place I was taken to see in the ten years after I entered this life was Belgium. And I loved it. My father spent the…
“Keep it short”
"Five score and one posts ago my father's son brought forth on this medium a new blog...." I could continue with the topical parody (last Tuesday marked 150 years since the original), but you get the picture, so I won't. 100 posts is a time for reflection. It was my wife who encouraged me to give…
Dallas, Taxus
According to a study in the influential "British Medical Journal", if you are looking for a safe profession (leaving aside Accountant or Lawyer), you would be better advised to plump for Bomb Disposal Expert or Formula 1 Racing Driver than Soap Opera Star. The BMJ informs us that characters in these B-TV sagas have three times the…
Shooting at goal
I love municipal elections. Two weeks ago the incumbent mayor of my sleepy town (population 70,000 - the locals insist on calling it a city even though they would not fill Wembley Stadium) was lawnmowered into political oblivion by his predecessor, who decided to stand for the only apparent reason that he could not think of anything better to…
Tax that must not be named
Standing in the Great Hall of Hogwarts one day this summer in the company of my youngest son and half of the picture-popping population of Japan, I was the only muggle who, when asked by the Warner Brothers Studio Guide which House I would want the Sorting Hat to direct me to, did not reply Gryffindor. To my…
Brave New World?
When, at 3 o'clock on the morning of September 30 , I flopped, bleary-eyed, into a chair in a Berlin hotel room, activated my laptop and started to write about John Le Carre's Cold War Trilogy, it did not occur to me that the ensuing post was to be the beginning of my (first) trilogy. The story so far: A…
Tax Break 