Many years ago, the British taxman took three grand of redundancy money from me. They’d made a mistake, they took the money, they admitted they’d made a mistake. But it took them three years, yes, three whole damn years, to give me back my own redundancy payout. All I got when I tried to get my own wrongly taken money was silence; my letters were ignored. I *still* haven’t received the interest.

Recently, the Irish taxman wrote to me and said, oops, you’ve paid too much tax. “Oh God”, I thought, “here we go again”. Well, I was totally wrong. The cheque was in the very next letter.

That’s a very pleasant difference of attitude.

Oh, and yes, many years later, I got sweet revenge on the British taxman, revenge they themselves invoked.