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.

• add or read comments (0)

• Post to:
•  del.icio.us
•  Digg
•  Newsvine
•  Nowpublic
•  Reddit

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.

• add or read comments (0)

• Post to:
•  del.icio.us
•  Digg
•  Newsvine
•  Nowpublic
•  Reddit

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.

• add or read comments (0)

• Post to:
•  del.icio.us
•  Digg
•  Newsvine
•  Nowpublic
•  Reddit

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?”

• add or read comments (0)

• Post to:
•  del.icio.us
•  Digg
•  Newsvine
•  Nowpublic
•  Reddit