There’s been a wonderful example this week of exactly the kind of problem we contractors are faced with when trying to get our point across. A government agency, SLC, was having some operational issues, so they brought in an expert to sort them out.

I’m coming rapidly to the end of my current engagement and have been reflecting on what I’ve been doing. Not out of any great sense of sadness or nostalgia but because I have to hand over to the permanent guys that I’ve been covering for while they were off doing more interesting stuff.

January, and the vexed question of self-assessment rears its head again. My accountant friends have said good bye to the family until February and closeted themselves with quill pens and envelopes of receipts. Others have burned the midnight oil trying to complete their online returns.

Start the year as you mean to go on. Not a bad maxim, of course. Except that I’m starting with the prospect of being out of work at the end of the month. Not, I hasten to add, that I hadn’t seen it coming.

Don’t know about you but I usually have that optimistic hope at this time of the year that things are going to get better. Possibly fuelled by an excess of several Christmas spirits, but mainly on the basis that they couldn’t get much worse. But even I might struggle to feel optimistic about 2012.

So this is Christmas, and what have we done? Well, speaking personally, quite a lot in one way and another. But it has been a funny old year in some ways.

You will probably have heard me sounding off at fairly regular intervals about how inconsistent and impossible to judge the average IR35 case is. I’ve looked at many appeal judgements over the years and each one has been supportable, given the vague nature of that which is being judged.

For some reason I’ve seen a whole raft of questions and complaints about that most retiring of professionals, our friend the humble accountant. What is more, the questions and complaints being raised tend to demonstrate why they need an accountant in the first place.

One of the great appeals of freelancing your way through life is the constant change, working in new places with new people, solving new problems and generally getting away from the mundane grind of the usual nine-to-five employee world.

I really must think about writing these jottings earlier in the week. I routinely find myself talking about things that have just happened rather than predicting what’s about to happen.

After a lot of study and reading all kinds of authoritative sources I think I’ve worked out a business idea that lets you build a multi-billion pound business over the course of a few years.

You have to laugh, you know. I never cease to be amazed at the number of posts I see about contractors claiming all sorts of problems with, variously, notice periods (don’t need them, as I’ve said before), IR35-safe contracts (fine as long as they represent reality), the AWR (don’t start me on that one again).