Search the site

  

Grab my RSS feed | (What's this?)

Tag cloud...

Sponsored links

Recent comments

Recent Posts

Feeds

Categories

Useful links

Archives

Sponsored links

Latest Posts...

The egos have landed

Posted by Judge Mental on October 10, 2007 8:55 AM

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, as Jimi Hendrix sung at his 40th birthday celebrations. But the words of the late rock-god still ring true today. Indeed they apply to the purple haze that is Liverpool crown court.

This week the place has been a hub of nervous excitement as the big important High Sheriff dropped in to mark the start of the new legal year.

Big long wow, you might say in a sarcastic tone. But not me, for I was pretending to be interested in it and rather convincingly too.

In English law, the legal year is the calendar during which the judges sit in court. The year’s divided into four terms: Michaelmas Parkinson, Hilary Benn, Easter Bunny and Trinity Mirror. And in London the legal year commences with a ceremony dating back to the Middle Ages in which the judges arrive in a procession from the Temple Bar to Westminster Abbey for a religious service, followed by a reception known as the Lord Chancellors' breakfast which is held in Westminster Hall.

Its not quite as stuffy as that in Liverpool. From my understanding the Merseyside celebration involves a bunch of over-stuffed middle-aged men loitering round the building dunking biscuits in tea while wearing fancy dress.

All the High Sheriff’s retinue hung around him like a sycophantic stink and we all looked very serious as he mumbled a few words to mark the legal year. I had a particularly serious mien as I was desperately trying to work out seven across in the Times crossword.

My scruffy old mutt Woofley perked up a bit at the sight of all those red robes parading round the court. Dogs love to look up to something, you see. But then again their brains aren’t much bigger than walnuts. I suppose it did brighten up and otherwise dull Tuesday in an Emile Zola-esque hive of misery, alcoholism, violence and prostitution. And that’s just in the judges’ chambers.

All that pomp got me thinking. Is not the blog a vehicle for self-promotion and grandiosity? Am I therefore a hypocrite? Is my rambling not self-indulgent ego-driven drivel masquerading as something of significance? I don’t think so, because I am an important person. But when tedious peasants do it, that’s a different matter. “Ooh my cat’s been sick again. I was opening a tin of dog meat for him this morning and he turned his little whiskers up/I’ve been on holiday to Tenerife/the theatre/the toilet/blah blah blah/belly ache belly ache...” Into the blog it goes.

So you think you’re funny? Write a blog anyway and you will think you are. What a sad reflection on our time that any two-bit nobody can get away with writing all about their sad little lives. It really cheapens the blog that esteemed pillars of society such as moi conjure up from our large craniums.

As my favourite intellectual and economist Milton Friedman opined in his seminal lecture Macroeconomics, Ducks and Dock Leaves: “I see no reason whatever for the human mind to indulge in the pursuit of ego as a drive for their very being. The drive for very being is by definition a definition and as such is as ego-driven as the human mind. By way of contrast, rabbits see only a carrot, or in many cases, another rabbit. Or hare.” Here, Friedman is talking about scale model economies in the 1970s (they did things differently then) but his words have a strong resonance today, I think you’ll agree.

Anyway, I’m off to write another blog. Because I’m worth it.

Tempus fugit, as the Romans used to say

Posted by Judge Mental on September 27, 2007 3:50 PM

When Winston Churchill visited Liverpool to watch the Beatles play the Cavern in 1966, he carried with him a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book by Chuck Berry. That’s all very interesting and it reminds me of the old saying a great deal of laziness of mind is called liberty of opinion. And I’ve got plenty of those.

Talking of non-entities masquerading as something of significance, my old dog Woofley has not been his usual obedient self this week. Maybe he’s dog tired, but he hasn’t even found the energy to fetch a bone, which was still attached to a criminal’s leg. Has his recent torpor been down to age or sheer laziness?

I foolishly found myself in a courtroom this week (looking for a biro) and before I had time to back out again (with a biro) I couldn’t help but notice how young the barristers are getting. One such mite looked like he’d lost his pencil case when I admonished him for his tardiness. I would have gone further, but I didn’t want him bringing his dad in to crack me one on one of my chins.

Ageing, folks, is not one of life’s thrills. As my favourite mathematician Alan Turing said in his 1940 Computers, Spam and Chips: “The later one is, the more likely one if to miss what one is expecting to meat (sic) when one gets there. Time in effect waits for no man and man is not meat after all.” Desmond Morris also had a good line in his book The Naked Chicken, but I forget what that was.

Lazy is as lazy does. I read that on the back of a cereal packet. It continues next week, apparently.

But that is another of life’s great truisms. One judge (let’s call him Judge X this week had a dig at the alleged slack attitude of another. When a barrister asked Judge X to apologise to Judge Y over lunch because she had been held up in Judge X’s court mitigating in a sentence, Judge X said of Judge Y: “Oh he will have gone home by now.” And it was only 1.20pm. Even I don’t slope off to my gentleman’s club until at least 2.15pm.

I have to agree with Judge X. Judge Y lives in Wales and won’t even put his nose out the door if there’s a sniff of cold in the air, claiming he’s been snowed in. When he does come in he lets; defendants go free because he can’t be bothered waiting for a trial to start.

Doesn’t he realise time - like ageing waits for no-one? Albert Einstein had a theory about time - I forget what it was now - but I’ll recommend the old judge gives it a read.

Now how did it get round to 2.15pm? Time flies, according to the Romans.

Blue Is The New Black

Posted by Judge Mental on September 21, 2007 1:50 PM

Now spring has sprung, I feel I should start my annual spring clean in my chambers. I call it “My Annual Spring Clean In My Chambers”.

Yes, court fans, it is time to start carrying a duster round with me and do away with anything looking scruffy and old. And there’s no shortage of dead wood lurking in Liverpool crown court. They’re often called lawyers.

I often think, as I’m doing a particularly challenging Sudoku in court, that there’s no better way of spending an afternoon than clearing out the rubbish. I’m all for a bit of dusting. I often keep a duster under my wig and hope I don’t swap them round when I’m in court. My old sniffer dog, Woofley, often leaves a trail of hairs, half-eaten bones and other unmentionables which need cleaning up.

I am not alone. As Bolshevik Leon Trotsky rather loquaciously put it in his 1919 essay Rubber Gloves and Red Armies, our ultimate aim of world revolution cannot fully take place until we ave eliminated all opponents, inculcated a shift in the State’s political psyche, and tidied the living room.

He is not alone. The powers that do - that’s decorators to you - have decided to give the old courts a lick of paint. They are 23 now (the courts, that is: the decorators are even more decrepit) and need a lick of paint like cheese needs pickle.

They are not alone. The decrepit decorators have gone all Picasso on us. When he had his Blue Period. They bought up the brightest blue in B & Q. Taking my first steps into court 4:1 this week to borrow a cup of sugar from the Recorder of Liverpool, left me fumbling for my Ray Bans. The whole place has turned a strange shade of cornflower. That’s blue to you peasants. Actually a peasant would know that, working in a field all day. Or you might even call it cobalt. That’s Co to you scientists. The oddest thing is the newly carpeted floor no longer ends at the skirting boards. It climbs the wall, casting a vivid blue hue. Is it therefore technically a floor? More sleepless nights to follow as I ponder this important question...

The carpet is not alone. Many’s the time when I have been laid out flat in the courtroom, looking at psychedelic colours and climbing the walls. As Trotsky said (and this was a man who knew his Shakespeare): “Is that an ice axe I see before me?” And apparently it was.

Law and Ordure

Posted by Judge Mental on September 11, 2007 9:02 AM

I was sliding down the banana skin of life just the other day and musing about the way things can happen. Life is like a roulette wheel; you just don’t know which way the cookie will fall.

Take court, for example. You never know what’s going to happen next and it doesn’t pay to think too hard about it. One retired judge thought too hard about it and part of his ear collapsed with the stress of it all.

I don’t like to get bogged down by the minutiae of life. I don’t let the small things fester and grow, like a boil into an abscess. If you do, before you know it, it’s all gone green and you have to have your leg off. Like the old adage says: “the leg has gone, but the foot is real enough”. (I think it was Morrissey who said that, but, being a judge, I am around 20 years behind with this so called ‘pop’ music).

I rather agree with Henri Bergson that we should stay in bed every day and contemplate the meaninglessness of existence. That’s all very well old bean, but once in a while I have to do some work and the odd crossword. And what about when you need the kharzi?

Talking of toilets, the cleaning staff here at court do a sterling job. They inhabit the court cellars working on new cleaning solutions, modelling aprons with mops and coming up with inventive ways of using lemon juice and vinegar. And when these little hygiene beavers are unleashed they make tables so clean you could eat your dinner off them. I, however, prefer to use a plate in the traditional way.

They have a lot of work to do what with banana skins, crumbling cookies and parts of judges’ ears dropping on the floor of Liverpool crown court all the time. They do get a break sometimes and they are absolutely forbidden to go into a jury room while there's a jury sitting in case of tampering or general paper disruption.

One poor jury was trying a murder case which ran into 10 weeks recently and the room they were occupying was out of bounds to anyone wearing rubber gloves and sporting a tabard. The dirty dozen were getting covered with dust and could hardly see each other across the table for the cobwebs and stacks of pizza boxes. So they took time out from their deliberations to ask an usher for a vacuum cleaner, polish and dusters. Beyond the call of duty, I’m sure you’ll agree.

As Rene Descartes put it in his essay Metaphysics and Meat, ‘it is better for the human bulb to flicker briefly in a clear state, than to burn for a lifetime amid ordure.’ I couldn’t put it better myself.

Red Wednesday

Posted by Judge Mental on September 4, 2007 9:15 AM

Work is the curse of the drinking classes, according to the song by Cilla Black.

I have to agree with the old girl, as I often think work is a curse. Perhaps that’s what Her Majesty’s prison officers think, which is why they decided to hang up their keys for one day last week.

All that militant pandemonium got me thinking about Karl Marx and the alienation and exploitation of the worker and Marx’s views on the striking man. In what many consider his best work, Rabbits and other Vegetables, Marx elegantly asserts that when there is not order there is disorder, when there is chaos there is not order and when there is not order, disorder or chaos there is a fourth state that the human brain cannot fully comprehend.

Carl Jung, in his Studeis in Word Association, termed this Das Capital Letter. And the essay he handed to Sigmund Freud in 1905 is celebrated annually in Jung’s native Switzerland is with the Running of the Goat and other festivities. After this Marx gets rather bogged down with modal retardation in adolescent pygmies and in my view does not fully explain his Mushroom Theory.

Talking of mushrooms, that was precisely the effect the prison officers’ wildcat walk-out had on Liverpool Crown Court. It made the Battle of Orgreave look like a Quaker’s tea party, producing nothing short of Marxian chaos. I was forced to leave my Sudoku half-done and venture out to the public lobby where they apparently serve a cup of soup in a plastic cup. Strange, but true.

All sorts of hearings that were supposed to take place didn’t. None of the prisoners was brought to court to be told their fate, no video-link hearings could take place because the prison officers were not inside the jail and were outside waving placards and possibly standing arond a brazier.

So the prisoners literally didn’t get their day in court and it didn’t end there. There was more comedy court chaos on Friday morning when technology let the video-link court down. Once it was up and running the impish clerk said to the impatient barristers: “OK, the judge will be in in three minutes.” One of them said: “Why so long, has he got a limp?”

Woof Justice

Posted by Judge Mental on August 28, 2007 1:34 PM

Never let it be said that I don’t like dogs. I love ‘em. I feel the same way about dogs that most people feel about their partners, minus the fleas. That said, I wouldn’t want a dog to make my breakfast. Bit of a mess, apparently.

As the great Gallic philosopher and author Albert Camus said in his celebrated essay The Rabid Generation, “I love animals, especially canines. And especially canine dogs.” Of course, this comes out much better when said in Albert’s native French while waving a Gauloise, wearing an onion necklace and reeking of garlic. The Absurd-obsessed Camus also went on to write about the meaninglessness of existence in an infinite universe but I am saving this for my Christmas blog. I always save nihilism for the New Year.

Forgive one, for one is paraphrasing but of course you will get one’s point. Yes folks, the last few weeks in Liverpool’s good old Crown Court building (established 1984) have been Dog Week(s). If the animal crackers passed you by, legal fans, worry not and let one explain.

Think of play day at the end of term, only with animals. We were all allowed to bring a pet in so long as it (a) had four legs and a tail and (b) was a dog.

The policemen naturally break the no animals rule and bring dogs in with them whenever they feel like it. They can - after all, who is going to arrest them?

In between games on my Nintendo and important trials, I ended up stroking a nice police dog called Woofley (not his real name). He is nine years old and about to retire (to Southport, presumably) and I was talking to his handler PC Barney McGrew (that is his real name) about why the dogs were in court at the he gave me some guff about it being for a high-security trial and nothing to do with its being Dog Week(s).

Anyway, that was probably the Official Secrets Act gagging him, but it made me recall the trial of a big Manchester drugs baron which was held in Liverpool. Security was tighter than ever and sniffer dogs came in to do their work every day. One of them put the ‘poo’ in pooch by leaving a rather nasty present on the floor of the court. It, and the dog, had to be removed before the judge came in, but when His Honour returned he saw the funny side (and its calling card) and we all howled when he said he might consider sending the naughty mutt down for contempt of court.

The canny canine would have probably ended up being Top Dog on D-Wing.