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.

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