One of my alien episodes

I probably should not put this up as it is a sort of boasting and boasting is never wise. But it is too amusing to remain unmentiond.

When I was teaching at the university of NSW, I was also in my spare time doing rather a lot of property renovations. It was mainly a hobby for me. I liked to see how much better I could make a run-down property look. And it did increase the amount of rent I could ask. But it did make some perfectly legal tax breaks available to me. So much so that in some years I paid no income tax

I then did something that most people do not know you can do. I wrote to the tax man and said that I expected my record of having no net taxable income to continue and would he therefore write to the university paymaster and tell him to stop deducting tax from my university pay. And he did so.

So when I got my first pay with no tax taken out I was rather pleased and mentioned it to someone else in the school. The word of course got around and my colleagues were stunned. How the Devil did I manage that? They had never heard of such a thing and could hardlly comprehend it. It seemed uncannily clever to them.

I gather that they were not well pleased to have someone so alien among them