The wandering organist

Have just got back after a day in church, rehearsing and then performing Rossini's Petite Messe Solonelle . Worthing Choral Society with excellent soloists and my friends Marcus Martin and Donovan Brown on the two pianos, myself on the "harmonium". The style is pure Opera Buffa, and the concert (with a 30-minute interval after the Creed) lasted two hours. Many thanks to Emmanuel Church, Worthing  f or their hospitality. (They don't have a website, or I'd give a link here.) Rossini wrote:  "Dear Lord, here it is finished, this poor little mass. Have I just written sacred music, or rather, sacrilegious music? I was born for opera buffa, as you well know. Not much technique, a little bit of heart, that’s all. Blessings to you and grant me Paradise." So it was "cramming for his finals", as one irreverent person called it. "Harmonium". Well, yes, the sounds were right, thanks to Al Stepney's laptop and some downloaded sample...

I have spent two-and-a-half hours putting together a dossier of documents from the internet to find out if I and the Revenue have been wrong these last 21 years that I've been filling out (or in? In, I think.) the self-assessment forms. This, together with the other hours I have spent talking with priests and a diocesan employee, has convinced me that the commandment to describe me (and all other organists in the Diocese of Chichester) as employed by every church we play for, is based on a very one-sided opinion . There has been no change of interpretation by HMRC, no new guidelines. I spoke with the employee, who was unwilling to meet or change his mind without a decision in writing from HMRC, something I don't know how to achieve as HMRC only allows you to phone them, and it costs 12p a minute whilst you spend 3 minutes listening to their exhortations to "do it online" and 40 minutes waiting to speak to a real human. Not a postal address anywhere on their site. ...