London and that ITIN

Tuesday morning there were only two people in the queue at the American embassy More gunmen than visitors! I explained I wanted the IRS department and was invited into a temporary cabin and told to remove my haversack, shoulder bag, belt and put them in a tray that went through a scanner while I walked through security gates.

Luckily I didn’t beep, but I’d forgotten the battery charger in the haversack. That was hauled out, tagged and put in a drawer. (I knew I shouldn’t have a mobile or any electrical device and had off-loaded them onto my friend.)
Once inside the embassy, I was directed straight to IRS, downstairs. Once in there, I was told to get your stuff ready, ma’am. So I laid out my passport, the completed form, the letter and contract from the publisher, and waited.

That nice man declined to award the ITIN. The letter was dated 2010 and as he genially pointed out, it is now 2011. Plus which the publisher hadn’t used the correct wording in the letter. He handed me some printed instructions and tapped the appropriate paragraph. ‘Read it out.’

Embarrassment, or what? I still couldn’t see what was wrong. Evidently he wanted the whole phrase about withholding royalties cited in the letter. I asked him if the form was OK, and he filled in a section giving passport details, had me sign it and said if I got the correctly worded letter back to him within 30 days, it would go through. Longer than 30 days and I’d have to start all over again.

We’re tightening up on these people, he said, scanning the publisher contract, because there’s a lot of charlatans about. I left, promising to get the package back to him in good time. No sense in wasting a rail fare and two nights in a London Hotel £106 and then what we spent on eating and having fun as well, what with cinema and plays and art galleries and London itself, but even so, I didn’t want to fail in the primary mission!

A trip to London

I must have an ITIN number so that I pay tax in this country rather than America as far as writing royalties go, and the only place to get one is the IRS Dept of the American Embassy in London. Though it will probably be years before I earn enough to repay the cost of rail and hotel expenses, I don’t want tax men of either country chasing me for back payments. Collected writerly opinion suggests a visit is easier than trying to obtain the number via postal methods, so I got the train south on Sunday afternoon and spent the afternoon walking from King’s Cross to Westminster Abbey, and settled down to enjoy Evensong. The service was memorable for many things, including the sun setting through the south windows, the sound of the choir and how much of the responses I remembered from my churchgoing youth.

Caught the tube to Whiteley’s after a swift Chinese meal and saw the film Black Swan. The cinema was full, and most of the audience seemed to have brought their dinner with them. The man next to me came in armed with some heavily spiced food that smelled that he ate very slowly, so that for ages I had the monotonous sound of him crunching his tortilla chips in my ear.

Natalie Portman gave a fine performance as a dedicated dancer going through some kind of mental breakdown. Considering her intense, controlling on-screen mother, was there any wonder?

Much of the time the girl was hallucinating, which fooled the audience (well, this part of it at least) about what she had done and what she had imagined. Being of a slightly squeamish disposition, I got to be very quick at closing my eyes and covering my ears, and because I did, I don’t really know if the disasters I anticipated actually happened. The episode with the nail file and the older ballerina, for one; I saw her staring at the file, and closed my eyes. Judging from the shocked gasps around me, the nasty thing happened as I expected. We’re all programmed to be afraid of sudden loud noises, and the film made ample use of the fact to punctuate dramatic moments so I rocked back in my seat a few times, too.

The film effortlessly held my attention from beginning to end. The make-up and costuming of the Black Swan’s first performance to a paying audience was truly amazing, and the end a total surprise. Because of the mix of hallucination and reality, I wasn’t sure what really happened at the end, but because many people will still want to go and see the film, I won’t say more so as not to spoil it for them.

To be continued.