The gubmint takes great delight in screwing me at every turn.

I consider it fair and just and indeed my civic duty to screw them at every turn.

My screwing campaign consists mainly in avoiding or evading taxes at every opportunity.  Having paid probably many hundreds of thousand in taxes during my working days I consider I have paid my fair dues.

However there is another side to the coin.  I am doing everything in my power to make sure they pay me back as much as I can screw out of them by claiming every benefit I can lay my hands on, no matter how small.

A few months ago I decided to claim a pension for Herself.  Since her little health "episode" last year she has been fuck all use with her heavy duties, and I have had to put her on light work such as scrubbing floors and fixing roof tiles, leaving me to do the heavy stuff.  I consider I am due some kind of recompense?

Anyhows, I downloaded the appropriate forms off the Interweb and filled them in.  There were around 25 pages of the fucking things but I persevered.  I signed her name at the bottom and posted them off.

They came back.

The powers that be wanted to know all my financial dealings and needed bank statements for every account I have.  Now this isn't easy as banks don't send out statements any more so I had to contact mine to ask them to run off a special batch for me.  As it was so much trouble I decided to confine my requests to just two banks, as my other accounts are none of the gubmint's fucking business.

I sent off the statements.

The days and weeks passed, and then one day a letter arrived.  Yes, they were going to pay a pension.  The amount they were going to pay wasn't exactly going to send us on a world cruise, and I calculated that it would nearly pay for one pint of stout per week.  However it was the principle of the thing that mattered, and even if it were only a couple of cents a week it would be worth claiming just to piss them off.

We waited for another while for a letter telling us the details, such as when we could start collecting.

The letter finally arrived but it said that as we hadn't collected the pension, they had taken it back!

Naturally I wrote them a very nice polite letter telling them to stop fucking me about and to stick the fucking pension back where it belongs or else!

In the meantime, they had been sending other letters demanding that Herself go for an interview in order for her to get free travel or something.  As herself has an aversion to buses and trains, we ignored them.

Yesterday I nipped down to the Post Office.  I had a card they had sent at some stage during our transactions and I presented this at the counter.  It worked!  A paltry weekly payment along with a huge chunk of back money.  At last we were getting places.

I got home to find two letters waiting for me.

One was from the pension mob saying that if Herself didn't go to that fucking interview they were going to stop the pension.  Apparently it was more than just a question of free travel but they hadn't mentioned that before.  They gave us a number to phone, but of course it was useless – we couldn't get anyone to answer it.

I'm not that worried about it now.  We have the back money and the pension itself would be no great loss financially, but as I said – it's a matter of principle so I shall persevere.

I said there were two letters.

The other one was for me, say that they noted I was getting on in years and would I like to apply for a pension?

That is a whole different story which I shall leave for another day.