Author: Moobs

P and I have season tickets at Chelsea Football Club. It has to be said that P’s enthusiasm for the game is not unqualified but, as gesture of willingness and spousal compromise she indulges me. Recently she came home to tell me that an irritating senior colleague (“ISC”) of hers had asked whether he could sit in her seat when Chelsea play his team later in the season. Giving up her seat is no great sacrifice for P so she agreed and informed me that I was going to have to play host. She gave me a stern warning as the last time this happened I chaperoned the son of another of P’s colleagues. He told me, untruthfully, that he was 18, expressed an enthusiasm for all things beer-related and when I delivered him to his mother he proceeded to projectile vomit in front of her before collapsing drunkenly in the backseat of the car. ISC, however, is into his 50s and presumably has the measure by now of his own tolerance for alcohol.

ISC is of an earlier generation of barristers who prided themselves on making submissions laced with theatrically-expressed if oblique put-downs of their opponents. It may seem odd that people ever took a professional pride in being a wanker but it is still surprisingly common. Needless to say, I am not relishing an afternoon at the match with him.

This evening I had a call from P who is in Brighton visiting a friend. I asked her how her day had gone.

P: “Oh it was awful. ISC barely escaped with his life. I was having a tough time with 6 people asking me to do things at once. ISC was representing one of the other parties and rather than help me he spent his time making snide interjections and embarrassing me in Court in order to show off to his clients. I was so upset. Really, I could have throttled him”.

M: “Is this ISC that I am taking to the football?”

P: “Yes”

At this point the work of several hundered thousand years of painstaking evolutionary advancement fell away from me. I actually began to seethe with anger; hair grew on the backs of my hands and I ground my teeth till they cracked. I felt P had more than enough to be dealing with at the moment without one of her own colleagues being a prick to her. Using some very florid langauge I suggested P should inform him that he lacked the attributes of a gentleman, indicate that an apology would be welcome and make it clear that he should put the prospect of attending the game entirely from his mind (I used fewer but more colorful words to convey all this). I went on to point out that if he did come to the game he could expect that there would be one or two things that I would want to say to him.

P asked me to calm down. “It’s just how he is” she said tolerantly. “I’ll get over it soon enough. I don’t want you tackling him over it”.

Tackling him? Thrashing him was more what I had in mind. Fighting a duel, smacking him in his pompous barrister’s face; beating him with a table leg – I didn’t much care as long as it involved ultra violence and his coughing an apology to P from behind broken teeth and swollen lips. This is all bonkers. No doubt in an hour’s time I will wonder how I could have had this reaction. I will return to writing my apercus into my little leather-bound notebook with a fine nib and sipping a medium sherry as I ponder a poem or two. I will reflect that P is a tough cookie and perfectly capable of putting an obnoxious opponent straight without her husband lumbering in mouthing obscenities and empty threats. Nevertheless I am at present flooded with testosterone and barking like a walrus.

Has anyone else ever suffered an unexpected regression to troglodyte social skills?

Today was the day that the new Queen’s Counsel were made up. The Temple was full of shiny black vehicles carrying men and women dressed like this:

The patent leather shoes with silver buckles are, I think you will agree, cutting edge. Each new silk (As QCs are known – after the material that their gowns are made of) holds a party and at this time of the year one’s desk is thick with invitations on heavy card. The tradition is to move from one gathering to the next, politely sipping champagne and liberally doling out the congratulations. As each drink slips down the whole thing seems less absurd and the congratulations become more effusive until by the end of the evening the “big wig” is being dropped on a dog’s head and drunken millionaire commercial silks are recounting their school days to junior solicitors too polite to dart away or lapse into unconsciousness.

At the moment I am engulfed in the most hideous case I have ever encountered. Were it not for the fact that the Bar Council would grate my privates like nutmeg if I so much as breathed a word about it on this blog I would have such stories to tell … I decided, therefore, to attend only one party. It was held in the Sir John Soane Museum (one of my very favourite places) on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Surrounded by leather-bound books and looted Grecian artefacts I mingled and small-talked till I could bear no more. A friend and I resolved to leave and whilst he fetched his coat I stood outside in the autumn evening.

A man approached me, fresh from the soup kitchen in the North East corner of the fields. “So” he said, apparently already in mid-sentence “you must be careful”

“Excuse me?”

“One of de mummers is missink”

“Murmurs?”

“Mummies, de Egyptians, there is one of dem aroun here. It has escaped!”

“Oh dear, well you be careful then”

“Do you know museums?”

“I know some museums”

“I am from Hungary. When I am dere I work in a museum. We have no mummy but we have a giant” He raises his hands dramatically into the air.

“An d’you know what?”

“No”

“He had a two foot long willy! What do you think to dat?!”

“I think I am going to have trouble getting to sleep to night with that image in my head.”

With that we parted company. He seemed satisfied his work was done and I shuffled away to the station and for home.