06 May 2008
Paperwork
At the time the quiet village where the event took place was descended upon by hordes of reporters and camera crews from all over Europe. The girl has never been recovered, and few (except, at least in public, the parents) expect she ever will be.
Journalists have been back to the site with nothing new to say, and so have covered merely the effect on the village one year on, and accounts of what it was like suddenly to be under so much scrutiny for several months.
One expat (if I remember this correctly) running a pub, remarked that the worst thing about having so many journalists around was that they all wanted receipts for everything.
This was bound to make someone who had just been assembling his papers for his accountant so that the annual tax return could be compiled smile rather wryly. The staff journalists and stringers wanted the receipts to claim expenses from their employers. But for freelances proper retention of receipts can make the difference between an unprofitable and a profitable year in this business, and keeping and filing them form part of the great accounting exercise that travel writing represents.
Great mountains of mouldering paper, carefully sorted and annotated, go to the accountant each year. He's used to getting full-form and simplified Chinese characters (and occasionally pulls out receipts at random to ask me what they are and to test that I'm not attempting to mislead either him or the tax authorities. This year he had to deal with Arabic, too, and two currencies sufficiently obscure for the authorities not to provide official average exchange rates: those for the Jordanian and Libyan dinar.
191 nights were spent overseas last year (in Hong Kong, Macau, China, Libya, the UK, Jordan, the USA, and various corners of Canada) a figure I hope significantly to reduce this year, but with still no prospect of two weeks on the couch. Australia and Arizona already...
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3 comments:
I would be interested in discussing the wonderful world of papaerwork and the power of accountants...
Greetings, Peter
This is the only way I know how to get in touch with you and say a big hello to you and your brood(wonderful!). My, it has been a long time and I see that you are now catching up on 'paperwork'. I tried to be cryptic in the previous comment, read it later and wanted to add to it, and then promptly forgot my password. My 13 year old just frowns in dismay... As you are busy on your travels, are you likely to visit the UK soon? If so will you be visiting the Barbican...?
Y
Yvonne (if that's you). Please post another comment containing an email address (which I won't publish here, of course) and I'll write to you.
Much travel and hairy family matters at the moment, so responses are not of the spryest.
Peter
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