After two weeks of red days on Tempo we are, I think, finally clear! The weather seems to be warming up for the coming week so EDF (our energy supplier) will be saving the remaining red days for February!

My latest Sherlock Holmes short story has been published at Smashwords! Sherlock Holmes and The Bishop's Tie-Pin is a slightly humourous tale involving a wayward Bishop, a Victorian massage parlour, secret papers falling into foreign hands, blackmail and also Watson getting his kit off! What more could any Sherlock Holmes story want? I have allowed folk to read 40% of the story as a 'try before you buy' experience so enjoy! You can find it here... http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/278298

Just as a word of warning to folk in France who think they may in future send in their UK tax return electronically.....you can't! Despite the fact that you will be bombarded with stuff from HMRC about filing on-line, you can't. The reason being that the 'foreign' pages that you have to fill in are not on the HMRC on-line tax reurn pages. We fell foul of this after health probs. and a visit to the UK for a 'BIG' birthday celebration meant we missed the UK submission by post date. We THOUGHT we could submit on-line but no....phoned HMRC as a £100 fine EACH was looming and was told that they knew it was a problem. All they could offer was either to send in a pleading letter and hope the £100 would be waived OR use some 3rd party software for submission that had the missing foreign pages. Hmmm, looked into this, paid £25 for the 'Taxcalc' software, dead easy to use and saved us £200 in fines! Plus, as we send our tax returns by recorded delivery from here in France, that costs us about £16 as there are lots of sheets, the nett cost to us was £9 and we can use it next year! Result!

Have a great day, the sun is out here, the temperature hasn't fallen below zero and we have had no snow at all...even the grass is starting to grow!

Dick xx