Category: Uncategorized

I have become entranced by the present seriesof the Apprentice. Partly it is the contestants. Not only are they self-confident to the point of unrestrained megalomania but they say things like:

“When I was young I used to pray not to be beautiful. Girls used to be nasty to me because I am so beautiful (sob, weep etc). All I wanted was to look ordinary like everyone else”

Who among us has not suffered the appalling agonies of being too beautiful? Or try this on for size:

“Donald and I are so much alike. He married an Eastern European woman and I go out exclusively with Eastern European women”

In truth what has me transfixed is Donald Trump’s barnet. However closely l look at his thatch I simply cannot work out what is going on. I have tried freeze-framing. P and I have watched him stand atop skyscrapers and focused on how the wind lifts his hair in the hope of discovering its secret.

It is nothing as simple as a comb forward and a dye job. There appears to be folding involved somehow.

In the opening credits Trump walks from a building with a look on his face which I think is supposed to say “I am a powerful man and master of all I survey”. However, what it actually communicates is “I have just had a particularly satisfying bowel movement”. He is, to steal a categorisation favoured by one British journalist, not someone you would want to follow into the loo.

What is mystifying is the admiration he commands. As he sits in an apartment apparently produced by Saddam Hussein’s interior design agency, people move about him fawning.

When I was in New York a couple of years ago I took a bus tour with some other marathoners I had met on the flight over. We were difficult customers. We demanded to know how Times Square could be a square when it only had three sides. This won us the unfading emnity of the guide. (As P likes to remind me, no-one loves a smartarse). The guide was in love with Trump. He pointed to an enormous blingfest of a building and told us that Trump had sold it to an Arab Prince for 7 million dollars.

Guide: Do you know what happened next?

Me: No

Guide: 4 years later the prince sold it for 25 million dollars. What does that tell you?

Me: Donald Trump is an idiot?

Guide: No sir, he is not. It tells you that you should never trust an arab.

With this kind of wisdom on offer I really should have been taking notes.

Now I have an apprentice of my own. Barristers have “pupils”. Once upon a time pupils would pay barristers for the privilege of trailing after their “pupil masters” carrying papers, procuring gin and opium and placing their wagers on the 4:30 at Kempton in a smoky bookies’ offices off Fleet Street. Now pupils receive a hefty sum of money from Chambers to finance their year with us and have a book of Pupils’ rights so comprehensive that for the most part I have to follow them around making them tea.

I have cleared a human sized space in my room and now my shiny new pupil is sat tapping away at her laptop and contemplating the long slide down the arc of professional disillusion that, if all goes well, will leave her as battleworn and grumpy as the other members of Chambers. Her year’s training is, though this will not yet have sunk in, a year long job interview and I … well I am Donald Trump. I must just go find myself a nice Eastern European woman.