At last, rubbishEnglish has a result! I was rummaging around the Public Records Office web site this morning and the following copy of an email I sent to them lets you know what I found. I am delighted to say that if you go to that page now you will see that the error has been corrected. On this page, at the point at which you suggest forms of identification for presentation at the PRO you include the phrase 'drivers licence'. There are two mistakes here that you will want to correct. Firstly, in this context, drivers is possessive and should be written driver's. Secondly, and much more importantly, the UK has a system of driving licences and it is the USA that has a system of drivers' licences. Please change the phrase to read 'driving licence' and you will solve both of the problems that I have highlighted in one fell swoop. DW Here's a fascinating thing, though. When you look at that page at the PRO you might realise the uncertainties of modern life. The Domesday Book to which that page refers is now over 920 years old and we can still read it, see it, copy it ... the laser disks that were produced in the mid 1980s have already had to be rescued as the pace of technological change almost meant that they were lost in an obsolete technology. Paper and parchment can survive thousands of years even when it is mistreated. Laser disks can survive millennia no doubt but reading them in a thousand years will definitely be a massive problem. Think of the Rosetta Stone, too, and how that has proven to be both primitive and advanced at one and the same time! DW

Ever heard of Tax Freedom Day? Apparently tax freedom day is an estimate of the day in the year when we all stop working for the taxman and start working for ourselves. For example, if we pay, say, a total of 30% of our income to the tax man in terms of income tax, VAT, customs duties and the like, then tax freedom day starts just after 30% of the year has passed: that would be around 21 April. If we pay 50% of our earnings in tax then tax freedom day starts on 1 July. Apparently, despite all her promised, tax freedom day started latest of all recent Government Administrations under Margaret Thatcher's leadership! Well, well, well. Never liked her! Thanks to Accountancy Age for that riveting information. DW

Ever been innocently driving along from A to B when all of a sudden a car comes towards you in which the driver is facing backwards as he winds up the rear window of his car such that he not only doesn't see you coming round the tight bend in front of him but as he is going in a more or less straight line, ploughs right into the side of you? That's what happened to yours truly yesterday. He sustained a bruised bumper and a smashed side light. I sustained major denting and scraping of the driver's door and the passenger's door on the same side. When I get the photo's developed I'll let you see. He admitted liability immediately since we were driving down a narrow lane that both of us know very well and I was being ever cautious: it's narrow, blind and dangerous. I just hope he does the decent thing now and doesn't claim something spurious in his defence. DW

I wasn't sure until I just checked but, steady yourself, I sat opposite Boris Johnson MP in a restaurant in London on Tuesday evening. An Indian restaurant. He dined alone and so did I. He had just about finished his meal by the time I arrived and as he let his dinner settle he read a serious looking tome on market economics. You'll know Boris Johnson as that clottish MP for Henley on Thames who can string very few coherent sentences together in a row despite his Eton College and Balliol College Oxford background. Thought I'd throw that in! DW

Andrew wrote as follows: hello again! I have been struggling to make sense of the college lectures on variance analysis, & am trying to revise for the costing paper of the central assessments for my AAT intermediate module. now I have found your variance trees for materials, labour & variable overheads analysis, & fortunately it is now beginning to make sense! best wishes Isn't that nice to know? The answer should be yes! By the way, the page Andrew was looking at is this one: well worth a look! DW