Quizzy Rascal

So it appears that the f**king Tories have clobbered self-employed people in the recent budget by raising national insurance levels to the extent that the average self-employed person will be £240 a year worse off. Brilliant. As if we weren't being clobbered enough by those evil bastards. I would have thought a money-grabbing set of slags like that would traditionally favour the self-employed, but it seems this is not the case. Their point appears to be that they want to bring the rates that self-employed people pay in NI in line with regularly employed people. But let's make one thing clear. Self employed people do not get sickness pay, or maternity pay, or pensions. I've already been reading accounts from some of my friends, who teach a few singing or piano classes a week, who are saying that they simply can't afford to give lessons anymore, if, by giving them, they're going to be clobbered by these extra charges. It's hopeless.

What of course will happen is that low earning, self-employed people will start disappearing under the radar, or simply deciding not to declare certain earnings. I hate the fact that low-earning, hard-working people are being clobbered like this, whilst the multi-nationals continue to pay what they fancy in tax. Personally speaking, if I were trying to raise money to pay for Brexit, I'd halve the pensions of all the baby boomers whose selfish, unthinking behaviour caused this mess in the first place. Frankly, you guys have done alright out of successive governments. You want Brexit? It's time to stop forcing other people to pay for it.

I'm in Farnham in Surrey, in a very charming and ancient hotel which has very peculiar vibes in one of its corridors! I'm going to ask the owners if ghosts have been spotted in those there parts, because I've had mega-doses of the heebie-geebies every time I've walked along it.

To make matters more peculiar, I don't believe I've ever been to Farnham before, but I have dreamed about it. Bizarrely, and don't ask me how this can be the case, I have a recurring dream about being on my way somewhere, with someone, and pulling up in a market town because I have to buy something very urgently from a shop. In the dream I run through the market town on market day. There are people everywhere whom I'm fighting to get through. Eventually, I turn into a side street and find the shop I'm looking for. But that's it. I never find out what I'm so desperate to buy. And yet today, I found out that the place I'm running through is Farnham. Right down to the layout of the streets and the types of shop! How weird is that? I must have been here as a child.

It was a beautiful, spring-like day yesterday. Abbie and I are down in Farnham to do a quiz. In fact, Abbie is actually training me up as a quiz master, and I had my first shift behind the mic yesterday night.

We checked into the hotel in the late afternoon and were able to sit in the garden with a cup of tea, working a little whilst listening to the birds. I'm writing a sequence in the Nene composition which involves church bells. I had my headphones on and was inputting a crazy sequence involving tubular bells but kept hearing somewhat confusing dissonance. It was only when I took my headphones off that I realised a carrillon was ringing not far from where we were sitting. Bizarrely, it sounded almost identical to my computer's sample!

The quiz went well. Obviously these things get better the more confident you are with the material. I probably waffled a bit too much and have to work a bit on my banter, but as of yesterday night I am now a professional quiz master! I wonder how this fact will enhance my quizzing skills?