tidy

We've had 31mm of rain in the past twenty four hours.  That's nearly twice as much as fell in the whole of the first three months that we had the rain gauge.  It's about six per cent of our average annual total.  It's a lot of rain.  Not as much as they've been getting in parts of the West Country and the North, but still a lot.  It lasted until late afternoon.

I decided this meant it was time to tackle the job of tidying my desk.  I am not by nature a tidy person, while being averse to throwing away any sort of documents that might come in useful later, so my desk tends to accumulate paper.  Credit card bills (generally paid on time), wage slips, bank statements, letters from garden clubs confirming the dates of my talk some time in the second half of 2013, letters from friends, handouts about woodland conservation collected at the woodland charity conference three months ago, tax certificates, six month old correspondence with my MP regarding the campaign for libel reform, the schedule summarising what items are collected which week under the new recycling arrangements, postcards from Cornwall and Australia, the vet's bill for putting the cat down, my last garage bill and MoT certificate, my car insurance, passport, it's all there.

Some of it needs to be filed away safely.  The passport, for instance.  I haven't actually travelled abroad since renewing it three years ago, but it comes in useful for establishing my identity with banks, most recently when I arranged to be able to view the beekeepers' account on-line.  Not move any money, just look at it.  Even to do that I had to produce proof of identity in the form of a passport, and they sent me a card and PIN reader for added security.  The passport should not be sculling around on top of my desk where it will get lost, or a wet cat will sleep on it, but safely tucked away in the folder marked 'passports'.  Letters from clubs and societies I'm talking to went in my woodland charity and general talks files, letters from friends were destroyed, so if any of them turn out to be famous I'm afraid I will be a sad loss to their biographers.  The vet's bill went in the bin.  I don't know why we still had that.  The unopened letter from the electricity company turned out to be a nice surprise, since they were apologising for their poor past service and confusing bills, and promising not to raise prices for the rest of the year.  The MP's letter went back in the pending tray, and the schedule of bin collections went back on the pin board.  I think I took it down when I was painting the hall, so that I could get up to the edges of the board (which I did not unscrew and remove from the wall, any more than I took the rug down).  So far we have managed to remember what sort of bin day it is each week, but we'll probably get confused one of these fortnights, and be glad of the aide memoire.

Part of the motivation for Tidying my Desk was to see if any more pieces of paper relating to the beekeepers turned up.  Since becoming Treasurer I have managed to pay the capitation fees to the County association on time, and the premiums for bee disease insurance, which is critical, since I wouldn't fancy my position if I messed up on that one and a member who thought they were properly insured turned out not to be, when they needed to make a claim.  And I managed to pay for some wax we bought for the candle making day, and to coax the chairman into giving me a copy of a bill he'd paid to settle with a speaker at one of the meetings, so that I could reimburse him (though I don't think he's cashed the cheque yet).  However I'd been putting off until a wet day the task of understanding and writing up the transactions that occurred between the start of the year and the point at which I took over as Treasurer.  The last time I tried to get to grips with it, I could not find any of the bank paying in slips the Membership Secretary had given me.  I couldn't believe I would have thrown them away, on the other hand I couldn't find them after going through my box of bee bits several times, and began to have horrible thoughts that I might have accidentally left them in an envelope and chucked that in the recycling, while faintly hoping that they might be on my desk.  Practically anything could have been on my desk.

I did not find the paying in slips on the desk, but in a brown folder in the box of bee bits where they were paper clipped to the membership forms in the batches the Membership Secretary used when paying them in to the bank.  That was the missing link I needed.  The outgoing Treasurer had told me that all of the income up to mid March was subscriptions and donations, but when I looked at it closely there was an odd eleven pounds and something paid in by somebody else, which I think related to a surplus on teas.  It looked rather as though as well as the cost of the biscuits being deducted from the money raised from the teas, so had ten pounds for rechroming two trophies which strictly speaking belonged in the previous financial year, since it was in 2011.  It seemed that the best thing to do with this cost was leave it as part of teas rather than complicate matters.

Then I began to worry that neither I nor the previous Treasurer had paid anything for room hire in the current financial year.  We have definitely had several evening indoor meetings this year, including the AGM, so somebody must have paid for them.  I checked with the person who books rooms, and it turned out that the last Treasurer had already paid her since we have to pay at the time of booking, so strictly speaking there should have been an accrual at the year end.  There wasn't, but as long as the rest of the Committee are happy with that it certainly makes life easier, so I won't agitate to change it.  Who needs to manipulate LIBOR when they can be divisional Treasurer of the beekeepers?

The next time I have to tidy my desk will probably be as the deadline to do my tax return approaches, in the hunt for the one vital piece of paper that isn't already in the box marked Tax.