Quicker

Today Myrtle said I was "doing well", by which she means keeping nearly up to time. It's early days yet, but generally I've been finding that I've been calmer because I feel more in control. Everything was done and dusted by 7pm, which means that I get home while it's still light (at this time of the year) and eat with my family rather than just having a newspaper for company. Ten hours work a day is enough at my age.

April is the start of the financial year, and today I made the traditional pilgrimage to WHSmith to purchase a foolscap manilla expanding folder to hold all the paperwork for the new year. Today's was the fifteenth such folder, which means that I've been using Quicken to record the practice finances since 1992. In the early years I would eagerly buy every new version of Quicken as it came out, but by the time of Quicken 2001 it had far more features than I needed so I stopped upgrading. It still works perfectly well, but Intuit have stopped marketing Quicken in the UK, presumably because many other people stopped upgrading as well. Quicken only provides basic "cash book" accounting, but that is good enough for our requirements. I send the printouts to our accountant every year and she does all the fancy stuff.