Communication.

It’s great when officialdom goes out of its way to remind you of the passage of time. The latest has been the tax office asking me to fill in an “Age-related personal allowance” claim form. You know the sort of thing: as you are approaching yet another significant birthday, send us the information we already have about you and we’ll see if we need to adjust your tax code, no doubt enabling us to claw back even more money. It’s not as if I receive a huge pension to begin with!!! 

Anyway, I duly found the relevant information and decided to get it out of the way a little faster by taking the fill in the form online option. So I found the HMRC webpage and read the following message:

 “If you’ve come to this page to complete an online version of a P161 claim, it’s with regret that the service has been withdrawn.”

 Great! However it did give the option to download another hard copy of the form. What I want to know is why they are still sending out forms which say you can complete online when it just is not so. So much for the age of electronic communication! 

There are schools and colleges where they no longer communicate in any other way than electronically. They call themselves “paperless colleges”. If they can do it, why can’t the tax office? 

Even the cathedral in Santaigo de Compostela has entered the electronic age and you can now buy tickets online. I wonder if it will also manage electronically to prevent theft of holy relics this year. 

Mind you, the paperless colleges must suffer when there’s a power cut and suddenly you need paper copies of the handouts and old-fashioned write-on boards instead of electronic whiteboards. 

 And then some people use electronic communication as a way of hiding themselves away. A friend and I have recently (well, since a week or so before Christmas) been trying to organise a get-together of a smallish group of friends and former colleagues. The first friend and I check our email regularly but it seems that some of the others don’t. You hear from them gradually over a week or so by which time the window of meeting opportunity has gone. They don’t even seem to check their mobile phones for messages. One of them is an ITC teacher so you would think she’d be up to speed. But no, this is not the case. It would seem that the only email address she has is her work email and she doesn’t check that during the holidays. When she gets back to college next week she’ll have a zillion emails to check through. So much easier to have a private email as well and issue it to selected friends and acquaintances. As I said a little further up the page, so much for electronic communication. 

As for me, today I’ve read the papers online as usual, downloaded a recipe form El País and come across a little feel-good story from La Voz de Galicia. Here goes: 

The first baby born in Cangas in 2013, a little girl called Emma who arrived at 1.38 on New Year’s Morning has received a present from the boat company Mar de Ons. She can have free travel on the boat between Cangas and Vigo until her 18th birthday. It’s part of Mar de Ons celebrating 20 years on the ferry business and should save her family a bit of money over the years: the ride form Cangas to Vigo is currently €2.10.