I hate and detest paperwork; an official form or letter sends me into a flat panic and I’m unable even to read it properly. So you’ll understand why Nick used to deal with all the bureaucracy and why I’ve been having nightmares as the deadline for filling in my tax form loomed.

I told myself it couldn’t be that complicated and spent an evening hunched over the computer, trying to make sense of it; but I didn’t understand many of the questions and eventually gave up when I got into a loop that just took me round in circles.

So I got together all my paperwork and queued up at the France services minibus; but there they said that because I’d moved house, my income is from abroad and the tax office had got Nick’s date of death wrong (only by a few days, but wrong), it was too complicated for them to deal with – I’d have to go to the tax office.

I arrived at the tax office 10 minutes before they opened, but everybody else had had the same idea; the queue stretched from the doors nearly to the road, there were about 50 people ahead of me. My heart sank, I thought I’d be there for hours.

However, it was well organised; we queued up to be triaged, some people’s questions could be answered immediately, others were given tickets to queue at one of the six or seven offices available. When my turn came, I was sent to the computer at the end of the triage desks and told to log in, but when the man arrived to help me, heard my accent and realised my income is from a foreign source, he said he couldn’t deal with me, I’d need a specialist.

Again, I thought I’d have to wait for ages, but he went to one of the offices, turned out the couple who were in there (I do hope they’d finished) and sent me in. The advisor was very helpful, told me that the wrong death date didn’t matter, hardly needed to see any of the documents I’d taken, saying that he likes to keep things simple and within 10 minutes my tax return was completed.

I was amazed! It was so efficient! So un-French! I won’t have nightmares next year; I’ll just go to the tax office.