The living ain't easy

Summertime and the living is not easy. August approaches and gone are the days of the Edwardian length holidays. Time was when everything shut down in the summer. The streets around the Temple were quiet, the Strand was no longer filled with clerks wheeling trolleys with improbably large numbers of files precariously balanced on them, barristers parading across the road in their finery, taxis disgorging solicitors and litigants and the press hovering about and the placard waivers chanting. The whole great stage was left to the tourists and the odd emergency injunction. Tourists with big cameras would photograph these great buildings and wonder where all the lawyers had gone. Not a wig in sight. Where were they? Tuscany '“ that's where they were.

Of course for the very junior end of things, everyone else's holidays are therefore by definition not yours. It is the pupil after all who slogs across London or out into Essex to the magistrates' court on a Saturday morning, or on Boxing Day, and might get £50 out of it.

In the same way when the established cats had fled the house it was the mice's turn to play. Suddenly in August all that going off and fixing dates and PCMHs and other bits and bobs turn into Crown Court trials. By this time you are in a bit of a rhythm and your every day is no longer a daytime nightmare of anxiety about each new brief. That all changes when your clerk says nonchalantly: 'Floating trial '“ Croydon' '“ and you affect ease and then go back to your desk and start to panic. Up all night, at court early, then for some reason the trial is non-effective (police officer on holiday '“ 'Sorry your Honour, bit of a mix-up with the dates to avoid') and you go back to chambers full of relief, ready to resume your less stressful existence of sentences and mentions, when '“ ping '“ five o'clock the clerk chucks you another trial and this time it is in Chelmsford and the whole sweaty-palm thing begins all over again.

Eventually you get on and find that you can do it after all, and you start to get a bit of a practice '“ and so you find your feet, spread your wings, take off and hit the ground running and you are out there mixing your metaphors before juries on a far more regular basis. Summertime then, and the living was not easy but there was a living.

Then one day when you are old and tired it is you who is booking off the summer weeks and the fresh-faced 14-year-old pupils are out going off to Lincoln and Canterbury and Bournemouth and doing their trials and making their way. Summertime and the living is easy at last.

But I doubt things will really be the same again. The junior trials are so much harder to find '“ all those little shoplifters and assaults and burglaries are not finding their way to the junior end as they did. All those little trials that we all cut our teeth on are drying up '“ HCAs are doing them, the CPS is doing them, pleas are accepted, some things don't get charged as they used to be. Summertime and the living is becoming non-existent.

Fashion victims

However, not everything that is traditional about the Bar in the summer has entirely changed. In this particular respect this is not a good thing. The terrible predilection among male silks to wear a pale linen jacket with suit trousers is still rife. Why do they do it? Is it because it is a sneaky way of saying 'silk' as they walk about the place? In chambers and in court we know who the silks are and they know who they are, and everyone else who does not know who they are does not know either that this is a particularly 'silky' thing to do '“ so what, pray, is the point? If they really want an unsuspecting world to know that they are QCs they could just wear a badge, or a t-shirt that says 'Actually I am a QC you know'.

But worse than all these clashing linen jackets, there is one big crime that is prevalent in the summer period. It is not, I fear, unique to the Bar, but crosses the professions in a way of which the government can only be envious. It is the truly dreadful male habit of wearing red trousers on a casual basis. Why, chaps, why? Only old snuff-covered dons who last went out 40 years ago wear this sort of thing, probably because their batty sister bought them as a present years ago. Red trousers! No, no, no. Only lawyers seem to wear red trousers '“ is this another way of covert signalling that one is 'a lawyer'?

Thank goodness that the female side of things does not have this criminal trait. Female silks wear normal clothes and female lawyers wear normal clothes. Female lawyers do not seem to need to express themselves in this peacock way.

So, you see, no long holidays because we are all skint, no work for the baby Bar, but still we are surrounded with sartorial buffoons in linen jackets and red trousers. As I have said '“ and no submission gains by repetition, but this is more emotional '“ summertime and the living really, really, ain't easy.