One of the perennial challenges of the writers of successful soap operas is finding original ways to write actors, who have had enough, out of the script. They can’t all be sent off to Canada, and the public sometimes doesn’t like what it gets. When, broadcast on Christmas Day 2012, Downton Abbey’s Matthew Crawley…
Last month's news from India, that tax residency certificates would no longer be a must for foreigners claiming treaty benefits, will come as a welcome relief to the finance departments of organizations doing business with that great country. Obtaining certificates of residence can be a pain in the neck, especially when they are needed quickly.…
Political fossil Al Gore’s sequel to his Oscar winning environmental documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ – ‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ – may have underwhelmed at the box office this month, but it provided a timely counterweight to President Donald Trump’s announcement some weeks earlier that the United States was pulling out of the Paris Agreement. Despite the…
'History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.' That aphorism, attributed to Mark Twain, has been much on my mind lately. Anybody wanting to get inside the minds of the wrong-headed majority that tragically voted the UK out of the EU (and probably lit a fuse to both those abbreviations) could do worse than read one…
I was at dinner with friends late last year when one of the female guests announced that her husband was taking her skiing 'for her special birthday'. My in-built accountant's abacus went into immediate action calculating the lady's possible age. This took into account the ages of her children, her looks, and the milestones of her…
Bored out of my mind on a bus journey through the northeastern city of Sunderland around forty years ago, I involuntarily tuned into one of the working-class conversations going on around me. Not one word. Not one single syllable. They may as well have been talking Polish (which, nowadays, they probably would be). Forget that…
The spirit of Christmas Present materialized in the wake of the sensational success of 'A Christmas Carol'. Britain which, despite French whinging, was - in 1843 - the world's superdooperpower, had been struggling with Christmas traditions and what-not for years. Dickens's simple short story of a tyrannical, lonely employer mirrored against his put-upon employee (the latter having a loving,…
'In the beginning was the word' might have been the take on things in the Gospel according to John, but by my calculation, the oldest profession has never had much use for words (other than when haggling over price), and the second oldest profession (mine) has always relied on numbers; in any event, some years…
The only thing I am prepared to learn from this Scottish Referendum lark is that, if you give people an overdose of democracy, their brains come flying out of their ears. By the time some of you read this, the whole farce may well be over - decided one way or the other: the only statistical…
By the time you get to my age (I, just about, remember what I was doing when I heard JFK had been shot), there are not many childhood ambitions you have either not fulfilled or not given up on. I made it to the Volvo, but not President of the United States (an early disappointment reading…
Tax Break 