Author: Moobs

Before 1992, when I first got online, this is how friendships worked: You met people at school or locally. You would have a circle and from that circle and from time to time someone would, without fanfare, come to hold the position of “best friend”. It was never a formal appointment, nor was it permanent. When it came time to move house or go to university, you would make solemn vows to stay in touch but the world would turn and you would move on and start again. Over and over people you were close to – close enough to be able to sit beside and watch the sea without feeling the need to speak – would begin to fade from reality to recollection. That sense of loss has inspired some of my favourite fiction from Anthony Powell to George Lucas. For me, in 1992, that changed.

I had bought a computer and a modem and was determined to try the new-fangled “world wide web”. At that point you could learn the whole of HTML in an afternoon. Once connected, I was smitten.

Within 24 hours I had my first online acquaintances. They were called “Cixen”. They, like me, used an internet service provider called Cix. It had a bulletin board that was full of people who could all be categorised as “Men with beards”; “Men with motorcycles” or “Men with beards and Motorcycles”. They met (indeed still meet) annually for a barbecue and to sup real ale. They knew impossible amounts about technology and had opinions about everything and would generate enormous and super-heated threads of messages about things no-one else cared about. The more I read and the more I wrote, the better I got to know these people. Soon enough they were friends. They were a new kind of friend: ones I had never seen or spoken to but whom I felt I knew intimately.

Next I joined an internet mailing list dedicated to my favourite football team. When I travel abroad to watch my team play, I travel in a group of 10 or so all of whom I have met through the internet. This is the great power of the net: You get to try your friends before you buy. By the time you meet face to face you already know each other surprisingly well. There is a good chance you have been brought into contact by a shared passion or world view.

Two nights ago I got an email from a friend I had last seen in 1985. He was heading off, he had told me then, to join the US Marine Corps. I never expected to hear from him again. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, it’s just that I understood you lose contact with friends and I expected him to be one of them. Now he has emailed me from San Antonio where he lives with his second wife and three kids. Last time he saw me I had a duffle coat. This is great news for me because I am terribly nosey (which is why my bloglines is bursting). I enjoy catching up with the story arcs of my long lost friends.

The Essex Boy turned Texan is a delightful reunion but not all reunions are so uncomplicated. For instance, I have recently been in touch with the first person I ever fell in love with.

I was in my early teens. Young teenage boys are, stereotypically, difficult. Looking back at those times (and reading my stomach-churningly self-obsessed diary) I was like a shaken snow globe. My head was full of contradictory notions; jumbled ideas and fragmented emotions all in Brownian motion. Nowadays I have settled – a realisation that is in equal parts a comfort and a sadness.

At that age I was an ardent socialist who worried as much about acne as the global struggle of the working class. This was partly because growing up in Frinton-on-sea you never met any members of the working class. You did, however, get acne. I understood that the workers were oppressed and that things would be better if I were allowed to seize control of the state. That would also have the satisfying side-effect of annoying my dad.

I had some simple, if naive views about the heart. I knew that God made sure that there was one person for everyone. I sat for hours in my bedroom worried that my perfect partner might be somewhere inaccessible like Peru or Manchester. I resolved that I simply would not let myself fall in love.

Then, on a french exchange trip, I met a girl and fell for her - I fell like a piano going down a staircase. Every time I saw her, my chest tightened and my mind-fogged like glass. At first I simply could not work out what was wrong with me. I struggled to get a hold of myself. It was as if some previously unacknowledged part of me had woken up and was wrestling me for the steering wheel. 

If she talked to me, my thoughts raced. I struggled to think of anything to say simply because I was desperate that whatever I said should be perfect. Since, being a teenage boy, I was convinced that the key to impressing a woman was a keen wit (and wit in the context of my school circle meant a vicious form of sarcasm) almost everything I said was a convoluted spatter of barbed nonsense. I felt like a hypnotist’s stooge – forced by an external will to act like an imbecile. Why, for instance, did I walk down the coach and invite her to sign my shoe?

I was caught in the shy boy’s dilemma – I couldn’t just ignore my sweaty palms and soaring blood-pressure. On the other hand I was confident that actually communicating my feelings would result in me receiving an instantaneously lethal dose of high-energy embarrassment. I discovered I had a rare talent: I managed to remain imapled on the horns of that dilemma for many years. During that time I wrote to her not just daily but at times twice daily without ever actually telling her how I felt. Heaven only knows what she made of it. I fear that, were she to tell me, the bolt of embarrassment I avoided in my teens would find me now, frying me to the soles of my shoes.

There came a time, I cannot pin-point when, when my heart stopped racing. As time passed I fell again for other people in ways that were different but which I at least now recognised as love. Then, one night in late summer, stood by P’s front door, I wondered whether to tell her how I felt or to run away and write an amusing letter. She leaned forward and kissed me. I am different now – transformed, which is what love does to you when you let it.

For the last two weeks I have been in the Isle of Wight dealing with the aftermath of a scandal. I can feel your reel away from the worried that this will be another maudlin piece about missing P. However, this time I was not on my own: I had a “junior”.

As your career as a trial lawyer progresses, the cases that you are assigned become ever more complex and require ever greater quantities of paper to analysed. Inconsiderately, the day never gets any longer, sticking dogmatically to its policy of never consisting of more than 24 hours. At first you are able to keep up because as you acquire experience you become a little more efficient. Then you surrender your weekends. Then you cut back on sleep. Then you start scheduling your working week so that even trips to the lavatory are allocated 6 minute slots. Then you start eating at your desk and missing family birthdays and finally you end up standing dazed on a railway platform with no idea where you are and with ketchup in your hair.

It is at this point that it dawns on you that a junior would be a good idea: Someone to whom you can allocate tasks so as to create time in which you can re-acquaint yourself with the sorts of personal hygiene practices that others supposedly consider essential. It is not always easy to persuade the solicitor instructing you to pay for another barrister. It helps that we have members of chambers who are still, technically, in training and are therefore charged out at an hourly rate that is comfortably less than that of any hairdresser that does not include “demon barbering” as part of their repertoire.

Sat with me on the catamaran ferry to the Isle is R. R is bright, efficient and has a sense of humour that is drier than the Atacama. She has never been a junior before, I have never been a leader. Some leaders are an easy ride. They never adjust to allowing others input and use you to make tea and proof-read. Others go on holiday and phone you from seaside restaurants to enquire whether the case is ready. This week I get to find out what sort of leader I am.  

It turns out I am a “good delegator”. As I hand file after file to R she takes them from me without complaint and sets about delivering what I have asked for. She has yet to learn the first rule of junioring. You should always let your leader down early. Do something wrong. It should be easily remediable but it should be enough to shkae their confidence even if only subliminally. If you do not do that they will keep handing you work until inevtiably you fail spectacularly, irremediably and at the door of the court.

I suspect that if I could read R’s mind what is bothering her is not the quantity ofthe work that I am giving her but another, previously undiscovered character trait of mine. Part of me has apparently decided that since young R is still crawling around in the dewy-fresh morning of her practice, she would benefit from being exposed to my “wisdom”. I find that I have an infinite pool of excellent advice from which to draw. I know that despite her glazed look and her endearing habit of digging her fingernails into the table and gritting her teeth that she values what I have to offer.

Since we are working closely together, I am gratified to discover that there are very many opportunities for me to hold forth and precious few for her to distract me long enough to roll out of a second storey window and make off into the dusk.

We arrive at our hotel. It is late on a summer afternoon. The hotel is close to the sea and, as our taxi pulls up outside we find ourselves in the middle of a regatta crowd. There are men, faces flushed from lunches in the City, their hair slicked back, their bellies resting on top of their belts, calling to their wives. The wives are in their early fifties and have, through a life devoted to sailing, had their skins cured brown. Their faces are like teak with lines scratched in with a bradawl. They too are shouting but in the baritone of a county wife. They are shouting at their children who are darting about in wetsuits and dragging dinghies back and forth.

As the cab door opens and R and I step out, I feel as if we are draining the sunlight from the scene. We are dressed in black. Beside us at the hotel entrance are our cases. They too are black and inside them are our black files in which a thousand pages of photocopied black and white allegations and evidence await our attention. Contented fathers sat on the hotel’s terrace look up from their beer and lose their smiles. All eyes are on us as we walk towards reception. We are Darth Vader striding into Princess Leia’s ship. We are Lee Van Cleef arriving in a small town on the Western frontier. We are buzzkill. We are bad news. Highly paid unhappiness. We have come to ruin someone’s day. Sharing this experience R learns something about the life she has chosen I had not felt up to telling her.

Three days ago I woke up at 5:30 am. It was my second day of less than 5 hours sleep and I found myself scratched by a familiar sensation. My thoughts scattered about, colliding. I could not return to sleep. Nor could I bring myself to open my eyes. I bunched the sheets in my fist and felt the wave break across the bedstead and engulf me: misery.

For two days I have been a chain hotel in Bristol surrounded by my temporary kin. I know that, within the hour, they will all be found together at breakfast. Each of them will be guiltily finishing a plate of bacon that was cooked much earlier and left to warm under serving lamp. They will be exhausted from the effort of kidding themselves and the strain of holding on to hope. They hope that by taking an apple from the breakfast buffet they will fend off the heart attack that their waxing obesity is foreshadowing. They hope that not putting on their ties will somehow allow them to forget they will soon resume work. They hope that by appearing engrossed in a book or newspaper others will not notice that they are alone: or that they will not notice it themselves. They hope that the midnight call to their wives will dull the ache of missing them rather than sharpen it. They hope to get the deal, make the sale, move up, get on and acquire seven habits that will mark the out as highly effective people.On their bedside table are pulpy books written by Americans with middle initials which promise to help them plumb, harness, focus and otherwise leverage their inner warrior/conciliator/facilitor or artist.

My misery is loneliness. To be away from P, sat in my underwear at 3 am typing out paragraphs of law at the cramped piece of MDF that passes for a desk, pulls the joy from my life in a single, shin-cracking, explosive decompression. I love her and the breezy and insincere bonhomie of the reception clerk is no compensation for the the mood that missing her conjures.

The case over, its a trip back home through the disintegrating chaos of our glorious transport system. As I arrive home the sky is pink and hatched with orange clouds. I open the gate and find my niece and nephew running in the garden chasing a football. Little Sam sees me and shouts “Uncle Moobs, we are all in the garden having fun!” He promptly trips onto his face and gets up laughing. My heart is full again.