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.

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