Monday, November 03, 2008

Tidy 2

No, it's not another Nooma video, but who knows, one day it might be.

Anyone who knows me at all will know I'm not a naturally tidy person (at least not in the physical environment surrounding me). I enjoy other people's tidiness. I really like spending time in tidy places; I just can't achieve that for myself. There are just a few things I succeed in keeping tidy, such as my CDs in alphabetical order, although iTunes is rapidly making that obsolete.

What I find difficult is that when I invest time in tidying one area (such as sorting out all my financial stuff for my tax return, which I spent some of my leave taken in half-term completing before the 31 Oct deadline*) it means that something else becomes more messy. There's something about maintaining tidiness that means I run out of steam before getting it all done.

Maybe that's OK - it's partly personality type, partly the fact I spend time tidying up chapel / chaplaincy centre, and maybe life was always intended to have some mess. Something we talked about last night was the myth that we have to be 'sorted' before we can have a relationship with God. Messy Christianity - could be my next book, if I ever get my desk clear enough to write it.

* I know about the Inland revenue website. Sadly, ministers of religion can't submit their forms online. We have to fill in some special pages and for some reason that can't be done on the web (yet)

2 comments:

Steve Tilley said...

Mintaplan do my tax and they do it on-line. I guess consultants have access to those special pages.

Mike Peatman said...

They can get software to submit the form.

Peter Chalk used to do my return, but by the time I had collated my (fairly simple) information I had done most of the hard work. The form bit is fairly easy, so that saves over £200 for the two of us.