As far as we know, all Time Lords but one were wiped out in the Time War with the Daleks. The details are sketchy; the survivor doesn’t seem to want to talk about it, for reasons of future storylines. However, I can exclusively reveal that some other Gallifreyans also escaped: they toppled through time, took a wrong turning just outside Cleethorpes and are now working at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs as tax inspectors.
My evidence is compelling and confusing. To be on the safe side I am currently inspecting all my photographic prints for missing or faded relatives. I am also naturally on the look-out for DeLoreans containing white-haired professors and thirty-year-old teenagers; telephone boxes containing valley stoners and sundry historical figures; and of course any one of at least ten odd gentlemen in varying degrees of fancy dress accompanied by screeching companions with a propensity for tripping, dawdling and/or wandering off.
Here’s the evidence. I would show a simple timeline of events, but there isn’t one. There are two. I shall present them in handy tabular form.
| Dec 05 |
In my 04/05 tax return, I say that I’m now permie and not self-employed. Thus I’m paying tax through PAYE, and want to reduce my payments on account for 05/06 to nil. (This being a mechanism for getting the self-employed to pay tax in chunks in advance through the year rather than in one lump.) |
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| Jan 06 | HMRC says that’s fine. | HMRC sets the Jan 06 and Jul 06 payments on account for 05/06 to half my tax bill for 05/06, as calculated eleven months in the future. |
| Jun 06 | HMRC sends me a statement. Payments on account for both Jan 06 and Jul 06: zero. Nothing to pay. Lovely. | HMRC sends me an incorrect statement saying I have nothing to pay, despite my clearly having missed the Jan 06 payment on account, and with another payment pending in Jul 06. |
| Dec 06 | In my 05/06 tax return I declare two days of freelance work for the whole tax year, done perfectly legitimately on the side while remaining permie. I pay the tax in full. | |
| Jan 07 | HMRC decides that those two days mean I should have paid half my 05/06 tax bill on account in Jan and Jul, and sends an exiled Time Lord to sort it out. See column #2. | HMRC says yes, well, paying the tax in full is all well and good now, but what about those payments on account? You should have paid up months ago! |
| Feb 07 | HMRC sends me a statement. It thanks me for paying my 05/06 tax bill in full, but warns me that I still owe them money: interest accrued on the Jan 06 and Jul 06 payments on account for which I inexplicably failed to cough up. | |
This morning I phoned them up. A nice old man with a nasty cough performed about three hundred identity checks before telling me that I’d have to write to customer services. So I cranked up OpenOffice.
In the letter I have appealed to the Lord High Council of Gallifrey (Tax Department) that, under paragraph zz9 plural z alpha of the Finance (Alternate Timelines) Act, it is unfair to retrospectively apply charges to a corporeal sentient being without formally notifying that being in all applicable timelines such that he, she or it has the ability to avoid late payment. Subsequently (or is that presequently) I have decided to retrospectively fine them £1, effective 1 Jan 1665, the founding date of the Board of Taxes. I imagine that’s accrued some interest.
Anyway, that’ll teach them. In fact it may already have taught them. Oh yes.
Avaragado's blog 
Where is the boy Heckford?
Is he going for the full year before an update on his blog? :)
Re: Where is the boy Heckford?
He’s still around. I think he may have got bored with blogging.
Exfoliate!
Get hip daddio. Time travel is today’s reality. For example the instructions on my camera’s phone say “BestPic™ takes nine pictures each time you press the button, ranging from just before to just after you press the button”