I just got into work for the first time this year and found an envelope lying on my desk addressed to me c/o my company, from HM Revenue & Customs. That immediately made me nervous, of course: the imagination can think up plenty of dramatic reasons why they might write to me, and they're all bad news. It's harder to think of nice reasons they might write to me, because ‘you've paid too much tax, here, have some back’ is so improbable and all the other nice or neutral reasons are just so bureaucratically tedious that the imagination shies away from thinking them up.

So I opened the envelope, and it said that HMRC would like my personal details because Royal Mail have been returning their recent letters to me as undelivered.

I have no idea why RM should be doing this. But then, I don't even know what HMRC think my current address is; they didn't bother to mention that in the letter. (Perhaps I should suggest they read ‘How To Report Bugs Effectively’.)

But most annoyingly, I still don't know what they've actually been trying to write to me about, which means that that feeling of nervous anticipation and potential doom hasn't gone away. Of all the things the letter could have said, this is probably the only one which could have left me in this state of mind. Gah.

(I'm also slightly disturbed that the date on the letter says 25th December. Do taxmen really work right through Christmas?!)

I don't seem to have felt moved to write a review of last year, which I think is probably because it was neither interesting enough nor (as 2005 was) boring enough to be remarkable. Roughly, I continued doing the same sorts of things in the same sorts of ways. Towards the end of the year things looked up in a couple of ways, among which is that I seem to have recovered enough energy to actually do some free-software coding for a change.

I'm mostly not one for formal resolutions, but my most coherent general plan for the coming year is to buy a house. (For all the usual reasons: lack of interfering landlords, freedom to mess the place up how I want, the pleasant knowledge that while I'm still paying the same amount per month it's gradually turning into a capital asset for me rather than paying somebody else's bar bill, etc.)

I'm also probably going to have a gloomy mortality moment some time around May, because I'll be turning thirty this year. (I'm currently trying to limit myself to only one morbid mope every five years, and the last one was on my 25th birthday.)