Best laid plans
The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.
Have you come across the expression before?
Lots have but I was surprised to find its provenance.
When it popped into my mind I think I automatically assumed it was a Shakespearean expression – so many are – but I felt obliged to use a well-known search engine.
Out of interest – or just in case…
Rabbie Burns (Robert Burns to us Sassenachs (which obviously isn’t in the spellchecker)) wrote ‘To a Mouse’ in 1785:
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
and buried in stanza 7 is:
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
I defy anyone to read these words without doing an appalling mock-Scottish accent!
But what does it have to do with me?
My best laid plans for this week went totally tits up (I believe the expression is) when normality got in the way…
I’m not at all surprised I didn’t write last week.
With a 31 January income tax deadline and a desire NOT to work Friday – which was of course the 31st – was creating systemic stress.
Exacerbated by the pain clinic session on the Thursday morning – more time I didn’t have in my working week.
But I achieved it. Only filed one return after lunch Thursday even and that was mine!
Wow! Did that feel good.
So all the plans for what I was going to do this week were buzzing through my head.
I was even thinking about a cut down blog for last week – you know, 25 words and a load of pictures of kittens?
With hindsight I should have known.
Put off the mini-blog and carried on with my new-normal long weekend and
went out first thing Monday and an aborted meet up on the way back – differing dates in our respective diaries – then
got back and thud.
Hit a great big mental wall.
It shouldn’t even have been hindsight – I should have known, it happens EVERY year.
I’ve been living December and January on adrenaline for more years that I care to remember and
guess what?
I’ve lived on it again this time.
It’s like Wile E Coyote and the Road Runner. Follow the link if you’ve not come across him.
Carries on running in empty space before noticing the road went around a corner then
plunge…
Splat!
Boom and bust
as we talked about in the pain management class this morning.
And every year I say never again.
So why do I (and thousands of others) do it?
Stupidity mainly I guess…
Cheesy grin emoji. I mean – the solution is in our own hands.
DON’T DO the bl00dy return if the information isn’t received before Christmas.
Or double the fee!
But we don’t. Most of us anyway.
It’s what I wrote about a few weeks ago about swapping your boss for a business run by your clients.
I’m presuming most of us didn’t get up one morning and think “I know. I’m going to start a business where other people tell me what I’m going to do”!
If you did, please look away now.
Part of the problem is the Amazon Prime business model – if you allow people to expect to get their request fulfilled by tomorrow they WILL begin to expect it.
Which is fine if you are selling them widgets and you have them in stock.
That’s just a logistics exercise.
But
If you want me to do a multi-dimensional what if on your business and social life and tie it in to your tax planning for the decade
it AIN’T gonna happen
Not if you want a reasoned answer – to your best laid plans.
So now it’s mid-Thursday afternoon and I could do with a nap.
Which only leaves me to put a kitten picture and sign off for this week.
Posted in ReAccountancy
