I always wondered what kind of people would get to a site by typing the full url into a google search box, then clicking on the first link in the results page. Now I know. It is my father. And my little sister.
Oh and my father’s cousin. That phone call was 50 odd minutes of my life I won’t see again. There is little to compare to the sinking feeling you get when the instruction ‘open a new window’ meets the response ‘I’ve got something called system preferences, is that it?’
In anticipation of my apotheosis as assistant solicitor, still some 6 weeks away, I have been assigned an office of my own.
Granted, I had to remove the floor to ceiling costs files that filled the room (42 full storage boxes up two flights of stairs. My thighs and calves are now objects of Olympic quality. Never has a lawyer had a more elegant leg. Bring back hose.).
Also granted that it lacks natural light and that, should the whim take me to lie on the floor, I could only do so in one direction, but nonetheless, it is cool, quiet and mine. Oh yes, quiet and mine alone.
I have shared an office for the last two plus years. Mostly I have been very lucky with my room-mates, but the last few months have established the limits of my usually quite astonishing powers of patience and tolerance. I hadn’t actually snapped, but my god it was close. Rarely has one person wound me up to such a state of tension just by being themselves.
But now I am free, Free! And alone!
Sadly, I was caught by one of the assistant solicitors actually doing a dance of joy around the limited boundaries of my new space. She was very understanding about it…
(I’m not going to describe Nearly Legal’s dance of joy, but you may imagine Graham Norton doing the Riverdance, only with jazz hands.)
We’re all going to die. No flame burns that will not gutter and go out. No day so bright that it will not have its twilight. Our hopes, our loves, our moments of bliss and deepest meaning are all as dust.
Yes, it’s Nearly Legal’s birthday. Never a date met with enthusiasm. I don’t mind being spared the awful responsibilities of being young, as my old PhD supervisor put it, it’s the continually getting older that annoys me.
The intimations of mortality aren’t actually helped by having a heavy summer cold, thus making me old and decrepit at the same time.
Still, I have new toys to play with, which usually is enough to stave off the encroaching dark.
I had orders from my supervisor to settle if you offered 80% of our costs, even though I kept banging on about them being non-negotiable. So it was jolly nice of you to pay them in full without demur or counter-offer.
Part 1 in what may become a series, if enough nice things happen.
After a long day of being legally brilliant, responsive, adaptable and business aware, I am deeply annoyed to find that the two very topics I was toying with turning into coruscating, witty and elegant diatribes have been scooped. Charon QC does the sorry tale of the CPS caseworker scolded for illiteracy by a Crown Court judge. This being the CPS version of Tesco law, we must welcome a future where the supposed legal staff can’t even spell ‘quality’ and professionalism has far too many syllables altogether. And then John Bolch ups and turns in an excellent rant about the insufferability of the demands and suspicions of certain private clients. So, I am too old, slow and busy to make it as the law blogs’ reincarnation of Swift. I’m not sure I could even make it as very late Amis pere.
Never mind, never mind. My weary but oh so amusing observations on the impossibility of dealing with private clients’ mood swings between outrageous insistence and surly refusal to respond will have to wait. As will various stories about bill querying. You’d have split your sides, honestly.
Instead, I merely wish to point out that I am (very nearly) a lawyer and not at all a bad one. As a client, you are free to accept my advice, or to ignore it, but please don’t argue with it on the basis of what a friend told you, second-guess me or tell me to do things that I have already explained are either a) impossible (little rules on the ways to transfer interests in land, that sort of thing) or, b) likely to involve a serious breach of the solicitors code of conduct.
It’s been that sort of week, and it is only Tuesday. By Friday, I will be brilliant. (For clarity, this is not an undertaking).
While I get the new blog sorted out. And to the usual suspect commentors, OK OK, I’ll get onto it. For pity’s sake, I only set this up this PM and I had the big edits and announcements to do on Nearly Legal, and a post on ASB. Charon may be able to pull off 3 or 4 posts a day, but I am merely human, not mythological…
Beside the point 