For a serial procrastinator like me, deadlines can be equal parts terrifying and reassuring: On the one hand there’s the enormousness of how overwhelming the task looks. On the other hand there’s that indisputable truth, of a date not that far away, when it simply must be done, which holds the promise of a time when you’ll no longer have it hanging over you. This is my torment every year when the shop re-opens after our winter break, and I stare ahead at HMRC’s twin deadlines of the annual tax and VAT returns of January and February like someone about to make their dreaded way down that last section of the Monopoly board with Mayfair and Park Lane loaded with (other people’s) hotels.

The consequence is that the first weeks of the year play out as a discordant concert of adding up last year’s figures, reconciling payments and deposits, rifling through old invoices and bank statements. And then eventually, the process crescendos with the triumphant submission of a balanced set of accounts.

The prize I get for finally attending to this task which I am unfathomably and relentlessly resistant to, is completing it with a profound feeling of peace and closure that only an HMRC Successful-Receipt-of-Online-Submission email can bring.  Profound, yes. But not complete. For maybe my resistance is not so unfathomable after all. Why must this be the way that we state the value of our enterprise and account for what it has done? There’s a part of me that wishes that one day I could file a parallel reckoning of the business with an alternative version of its value: One that showed how much the shop’s advice had added to confidence and skill (times how many knitters, minus any who’d lapsed in the meanwhile), how much respite from anxiety came from how many stitches, how much anticipation was heightened by the arrival of parcels tied up with red string (minus any irritation felt by impatient unpackers), how many stories were rekindled  by mending old sweaters with the right wool, how much smiling went on between knitters and recipients when knitwear was given (minus any disappointment caused by a bad fit), how much love went into thinking about what colour, size and wool to use, how much pride was brimmed with, at finishing, minus how much exasperation was endured when it went wrong earlier on (adjusted for how much one was dependent on the other), how many assumptions were confounded, pre-conceived cliches ditched, and delights discovered. 

But my book keeping software has no automated feed for these items, no tax codes, no metrics for measuring them, no possible way of working out their value.  And yet, I can’t help thinking that these are the real values of this business, the ones that decide if we sink or swim. I don’t have an alt bookkeeper to audit my work on this, but I do have the stories of an amazing knitting community that stretches all round Clapton and far far beyond which seems to show that whatever else is true, I’m happy to say I think we are comfortably in the black with these uncountable values.