Maintenance and Scrounging

The floating refuge - the island where ducks could quack defiance at Mr Fox; the garden so lovely and so loved, perhaps in the Yellow Book, it seemed a proper recipient of our money; the moat - if you have a moat it has to be kept, stocked with pike perhaps. All these are part of maintaining a house if you get landed with that kind of house. And get landed with is more usually the way you do get such buildings and their environs. Your world turns upside down so that the place becomes a reason to work, not a provider of shelter and income. Here it's possible sometimes to set the cost of maintenance/renovation against tax under a provision designed to encourage the preservation of the landscape and its buildings.


These claims have often been quite low, well under possible claims; in the moat affair the moat was merely part of an over all house maintenance bill which the owner felt was so enormous it should not possibly be charged and the officers suggested a tiny percentage of the annual costs payment, so they received copies of all maintenance expenditures among which was the moat.

It's the plasma tellies, the sofa beds, the champagne glasses, the kitchen 'units', the floozie with the jacuzzi, the 'doing it up and selling it on and keeping the capital gain without tax by flipping' that offends Angels.

I don't mind the ducks, the garden, the moat, at all. And I do mind that the scroungers will continue to sit as our representatives while the people maintaining lovely things, that benefit us all, have smiled and left us to it.