I try not to use this blog for whining -- it's tedious to do so all round. But I do try to give people outside the writing business a few insights into how life really works for those of us inside it. Just so you have no illusions.

Now let me introduce you to a truly shocking state of affairs for those writers who, like me, bring in revenue to the British exchequer through selling books in translation. Exports, remember. The kind of thing the UK so desperately needs.

<!--more-->I've been published in something like twenty three different languages over the years. Most of those countries have something called a double taxation agreement with the UK. This means that you don't pay income tax twice on your earnings -- just once in your country of residence. You still end up paying some foreign tax a lot of the time, for reasons I don't really understand. But in general the principle, long-established by international agreement, is that it's unfair for people to be taxed twice over.

In order to process payments from abroad without tax being taken off there you need to get a form -- often just a page or two -- stamped by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Until a few years ago I used to do this by driving down to my local tax office in Ashford, Kent. The friendly people there used to take the paperwork and bring it back stamped in five minutes or so. Then one day they couldn't do this any more. The 'rules' had changed. They were no longer my local tax office. My local tax office was now in Edinburgh, five hundred miles or so away.

The next forms came in and I sent them off. It took a month for them to come back. Then some more came in and they never came back. Not until I remembered to phone after three months and some sleepyhead in the office said, 'Oh right... we actually sent them on to Oxford because we're a bit busy here right now.'

After something like four months they finally came back with that simple stamp -- and I suspect they'd still be there now if I  hadn't called.

I lodged a formal complaint with Edinburgh about that and got a fulsome apology and a promise it wouldn't happen again. The delay went back to a month. Then, in the middle of January, I sent off another set of forms, making a note in the diary that I ought to be nagging around now.

No need. The forms went off to the usual Edinburgh address. They've just come back in a 'return to sender envelope' from the offices of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs with a simple form slip from the Post Office with a tick on the box, 'Sender gone away'.

No. I'm not kidding. Here's HMRC, the government department that deals with individual tax affairs, moving offices and not even sorting out a mail redirection service for the public who pay their wages. So I've lost three weeks on these forms already. There's no clue where to send them now. I'll be leaving all this in the hands of my accountant who says that HMRC are now quoting a waiting time of twelve to sixteen weeks for all personal tax inquiries.

On that basis I will be lucky to get these forms back by early summer, six months after they were first sent to HMRC. And, of course, this is just the delay for the tax form. It can still take months to be paid for foreign income even after that is stamped.

Five minutes in a tax office down the road a few years ago. Six months if I'm lucky from a tax office that 'has gone away' now.

I would try to raise another formal complaint about this appalling service if there was anywhere I could see to do it. But really... I wonder how understanding HMRC would be if, when my tax to them becomes due, I simply put it at the bottom of the paper file for a few months? Or just sent the tax demand back and said, 'Gone away?'

So if you're thinking of being a writer do bear this in mind. Foreign earnings are wonderful. But they can take a very long tine to turn up, even though you're providing hard-earned foreign income for George Osborne too.