Well that’s it for another year then. Thank goodness. Christmas isn't exactly the most relaxing time of year. Cooking Christmas dinner for six, including one helpful vegetarian (me) in my teeny tiny kitchen is no mean feat; and then there’s the enduring mess of wrapping paper, boxes, ribbon, gifts without a home and various bits of half eaten food to contend with.
Read more...One of the good things about freelancing is I don’t have to go to an office Christmas party. At first, I thought this was a bit of a drawback, since it effectively means I don’t go to any Christmas parties, being way too old to get invited to anything just for being me.
Read more...It’s time to get festive, and so I bring you the alternative Twelve Days of Christmas, designed especially for the lawyer in all of us. It has been a bit affected by the state of the economy, as you will see. Unlike the traditional version, there is no need to sing this one, I doubt it scans very well.
Read more...It seems some of us have been stressing about Christmas since 12 November. That’s 42 days before the big event. That’s about 11.5 per cent of the year spent worrying about one day. Most of the stress is down to worrying about which presents to buy, closely followed by concerns about how much the celebrations will cost in total.
Read more...Would you rather represent yourself in court or perform your own appendectomy? It sounds like a fairly straightforward question and at first thought, and quite possibly second and third thoughts as well, most of us would plump for representing ourselves in court: there is, arguably, less blood, less pain and less chance of death.
Read more...Any regular readers of this blog, and I guess there must be a couple of you, may have noticed that I have cleverly managed to avoid writing about the Leveson inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press. This is not so much because of a lack of interest on my part, although at times the saturation coverage was tedious in the extreme, but because I genuinely had no idea what I thought about it all.
Read more...Education is a wonderful thing. Yes, at school you have to do fractions and you might have to go out on a wet and cold day to play hockey, but you also get to learn amazing things about the growth of volcanoes and Henry VIII’s appalling record on relationships and try your hand at writing poetry in French and making pretty pictures with iron filings. You might also, ahem, get a snog behind the bike sheds.
Read more...Sometimes I just don’t know where to start. It is Monday and I do have a heavy cold, but this is not why it has taken me so long to start writing this post. Rather, my inertia is born out of an utter bewilderment, bordering on disbelief, as I watch a democratically elected government quite brazenly trash the rule of law, the main thing (some might say the only thing) separating it from a totalitarian state.
Read more...People are not always entirely rational. Of course we’re not. We have a right brain as well as a left brain, or at least most of us do, and for some of us the emotional part seems to dominate quite a lot of the time. Nonetheless, sometimes our actions appear to make little sense whichever part of the brain is in charge.
Read more...Thanks to Nick Clegg (yes really), this month we are all a bit more free. You may not feel any different, although the result of the US election has definitely lightened the mood somewhat, but some quite exciting things happened at the end of October as key provisions in the Protection of Freedoms Act came into force.
Read more...Poor old health and safety, it gets a bit of a bum rap. It should be lauded as one of the great achievements of the 20th century, protecting millions of workers from death and injury at work because of careless or unscrupulous employers. We should cherish it for not only making work a safer place to be but for ensuring that when things do go wrong guilty bosses have to pay up.
Read more...A few weeks ago on a train to Birmingham for the Conservative Party conference I found myself in a heated debate with two fellow travellers, only one of whom I know. I should point out this doesn’t happen very often, but party conferences do funny things to people, of which talking to complete strangers on the train is possibly the least weird.
Read more...‘Trust’ and ‘lawyer’ are not words you would automatically put together, but the incomprehensibility of legal language may leave you no choice. Worryingly, while you would expect consumers to trust lawyers a lot less than they do nurses, doctors or teachers they also trust lawyers less than they used to.
Read more...Should prisoners have the right to vote? It sounds like a simple yes-no question and most people would probably be able to give a yes or no answer, but it is giving the government no end of headaches.
Read more...You should never meet your heroes, there is only one possible outcome. At best you will be disappointed they seem indifferent to your adulation; at worst they will turn out to be shorter, balder or scruffier than you expected, have bad breath or be downright rude.
Read more...I try not to be too political in this blog because it has someone else’s name on it and they don’t necessarily want to be associated with my lefty government bashing. That said, sometimes it’s quite difficult to avoid getting down and dirty.
Read more...As I write this, the sun is setting over the pool, the palm trees are swaying gently in the breeze and the sound of the sea breaking against the volcanic sandy beaches is wafting gently across the terrace. Well, not quite. I am on holiday, but childcare dictates that most evenings I am watching TV rather than enjoying the balmy evenings (and dodgy resort ‘entertainment’).
Read more...There is nothing quite so satisfying as a celebrity divorce. There is a pleasing sense of schadenfreude in knowing that people for whom everything appears so wonderful and perfect can have as miserable and depressing a time as the rest of us. We can also gloat in having known that it would never work because ‘she’s so talented and he’s, well, a bodyguard’ and because getting hitched only weeks after meeting usually turns out not to be the good idea it seemed at the time.
Read more...I seem to have a habit of working for organisations that then very inconveniently change their name after I've left. First it was The New Opportunities Fund (although to be fair no-one knew who they were even when I worked there), then the Consumers Association (now it’s all Which?) and now it's law firm Russell Jones & Walker (RJW to their friends).
Read more...There is nothing like a discussion about consumer complaints to get lawyers’ heckles rising. Argue there is no such thing as an unjustified complaint and you get short shrift. Remind them it was the Law Society’s diabolical complaints’ handling that kicked off legal reform in the first place and you get a glowering look. Mention the Legal Ombudsman (LeO) and you’ll get thrown out of the room.
Read more...Do you have a right to express your religion or beliefs at work? Having trawled through much of the press coverage of the
four Christians who have taken their claims of religious discrimination to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), I can confidently say that I don’t know. As with a lot of the law, what may seem like a straightforward question doesn’t always have a straightforward answer.
Read more...Twenty-three years is a long time. You should be able to get a lot done like, I don’t know, invent new things, build cities, go to Mars and back, grow up. There aren’t many things that actually take 23 years, unless someone in your family died at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. Then you’ll find it takes 23 years to get the truth.
Read more...The Paralympic Games have been amazing and to many people, including me, something of a revelation. Of course, I knew about Dave Weir, Ellie Simmonds and Oscar Pistorius, but I had no idea that there were blind long jumpers, one-legged high jumpers and wheelchair rugby.
Read more...As of last week, it is a criminal offence to squat in any
residential property, including those that are empty or abandoned. Many of the headlines were almost euphoric in tone, lauding the end of ‘squatters’ rights’ and praising a victory for common sense. And who could disagree? For too long lazy, hippie, dropout, scrounging anarchists have been causing ‘untold misery’ by forcing thousands of really nice law-abiding people out of their homes.
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