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Pop music has posed a lot of questions but provided very few answers. It falls to us to fill in the blanks.

Q: “How can we sleep when our beds are burning?” (“Beds are burning” – Midnight Oil)

A: You can’t. Furthermore, you would be well advised to evacuate the bedroom.

Q: “What becomes of the broken-hearted?” (“What becomes of the broken-hearted?” – Jimmy Ruffin)

A: Commonly they form unsatisfactory relationships with rebound candidates or else slide into self-pity and alcohol abuse.

Q: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?” (“64” – The Beatles)

A: No. I intend to leave that to Social Services.

Q: “Should I stay or should I go?” (“Should I stay or should I go?” – The Clash)

A: Your cab is here.

Help me put an end to all this rhetorical nonsense. Leave me some questions and answers in the comments.

Yesterday was spent in devotion to my patron saint: Saint Ferris of Bueller. A belt-bursting lunch in Wodka in Kensington was followed by a gentle amble down to the White Horse Pub on Parsons Green for a couple of pre-match pints. I enjoyed 90 minutes of watching Chelsea trounce Aston Villa and then returned home after another essential detour to the Pub.

Thus, I was to be found, at 12:20 am, stumbling contentedly down the Kingston Road. As I approached number 217 I heard the sound of breaking glass. The house was in darkness and set back from the road. I stopped and listened. Again I heard glass breaking and could see by the downstairs window the silhouette of man. An afternoon of Polish beer and strong Bitter had not dulled the keen edge of the Moobsian mind and I quickly concluded that there was burglary in progress (albeit not a particularly stealthy one).

I toyed with the idea of confronting the burglar but playing the scenario through in head a couple of times always seemed to end up unhappily for me, so I abandoned vigilante justice in favour of calling the Police.

I held my mobile in my hand and tried to decide whether this constituted an emergency or not. “What the heck” I thought and dialled 999. Within minutes, I was told, two “units” would be on their way. In fact, within a minute I was chasing a police car up the street as the eagle-eyed officers had failed to spot a big fat bloke doing star jumps on the pavement in an attempt to attract their attention. Perhaps they thought I was doing some impromptu midnight Jazzercise.

The two policemen and I were joined, incongrously, by a man in a dinner jacket and black bow tie; another passer-by alerted by the tinkle of broken window pane and sucked into the unfolding drama. Together we peered into the darkness and could hear the sound of stumbling about and cursing. The policemen sprang into action whilst we entertained a police sergeant who had, by now, driven up to the curb to join us.

I heard one officer announce that he was arresting the “suspect” and Mr Black Bowtie and I waited in eager anticipation to see the villain brought to justice. The criminal that emerged from the gloom was not, disappointingly, Raffles the Gentleman Cat Burglar. Instead he was a shambling Glaswegian in a baseball cap either leathered on booze or high on drugs. He did not shake his fist at us or say “I would have got away with it had it not been for you meddling middle-aged gentlemen”. Instead he said “greahhnuhfungerhurrugher” and was deposited on the back seat of the police vehicle and driven away. In other words, he was pretty much your typical villain.

When I first decided to become a lawyer I was attracted by the idea of becoming a criminal advocate. I was rapidly put off by the criminals. Most of them were mind-bogglingly dim. I once spent an afternoon with a man who had gone to prison after he had, for a joke, put an alarm clock in a shoebox marked “Property of the IRA” and put it on a table in pub in Colchester (a garrison town).

He told me proudly that he had written a book about his life in Prison and showed it to me. It was a red Silvine exercise book in which he had scratched away with a biro. The title had an endearing directness: “My life in Prisson”. He promised me that it was full of incident. “I write about when I played chess with a child murderer” he said proudly. He then turned to the relevant page and pointed to a short passage of prose: “I played chess with a child murderer” it said.

It was plain that his fight with the law was an uneven battle. Which leads me to the second surprising thing about the clients I encountered: they had all done it. Every single one of them was guilty. That is not to say they all got convicted, but they were all guilty. This amazed me because my expectations had been formed by television. On television anyone who is guilty of an arrestable offence always, at some point, does something of sufficient cruelty that you can be certain that they will be shot to death by a policeman or a feisty potential victim before the final scene. One only sees the inside of a courtroom when an innocent citizen is in peril of a false conviction. The reality was a dreary procession of alcoholic or drug-dependent inadequates, sobered for the day, their hair scraped back by a combination of spit and wrist-fracturing effort with a comb. Their familiarity with arrest and trial was such that they rarely even seemd to engage with the process having to be prompted to stand, prompted to plead and sometimes prompted as to their own identities. If at one end of the criminal food chain are Rolex-wearing Colombians with Uzis, splashing photo-genically across the sea in powerboats, the scaggy prematurely-aged sneak thieves of Colchester represented its shit-encrusted rectal termination. This was not, I decided, the job for me.

“Hello son. It’s your mother”.

As ever, I immediately start to feel guilty without quite being able to put my finger on why.

“I want to ask you a question”.

Mum’s questions are usually along the following lines: “Do you think your sister H is sleeping with her boyfriend?”

“Well Mum, I cannot be entirely certain, but as she is 30 and they have been sharing a house with him for 4 years I’m sure it must at least have crossed her mind. Would you like me to take steps to confirm it for you? What sort of evidence would suffice?”

This time, however, she had a something new in mind – a fresh, invigorating inquisitory breeze to rinse the cobwebs from the conversational rafters.

“Do you believe in the Apostolic Church?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you believe in the Apostolic Church?”
“Yes. It’s part of the creed I regularly recite”

“Yes, but do you believe it?”

“Do you mean, do I stand up in Church and lie my arse off before God and my fellow man?”

“I don’t remember mentioning arses – do you know what it means?”

“Yes I do”

“Do you know anything about the history of the early church?”

“I do, in fact I am presently reading the surprisingly droll ‘A Short History of Christianity‘ by Stephen Tomkins”.

“Well I worry about you you know”.

“Why? Of all your children I’m the only one who could deploy a rosary to see off a vampire with anything like conviction”

“Because you show insufficient respect for the Blessed Virgin”

“Bleh?!”
“It worries me, it really does”

“What the fuck?!”

“She’s appearing you know at Medjugorje and you don’t believe it”.

She had me. I do find it intrinsically hard to believe that the Blessed Virgin is regularly appearing to a couple of people in the former Yugoslavia and, inconveniently for the rest of us, proving stubbornly invisible and inaudible to everyone else.

“Mum, while I enjoy our little chats may I ask what the hell has brought this on?” The answer, it appears, is that it was America’s fault. My mother has discovered an online Catholic TV Channel called EWTN. She loves it so dearly that she has maxed out her broadband usage and, gripped by withdrawal symptoms, had decided to share with me some of the gems from its broadcast schedule.

She was anxious that the next time someone attacked the Catholic Church I would be in a position to rebut their calumnies. No amount of assuring her that no-one had ever asked me to justify the Borgia Popes or launched an all out conversational assault on the Vatican seemed to be able to convince her that it would be better if we could draw the conversation to a close and allow me to return to watching the football on Sky.