After over 30 fortunate years at the Bar, I have embarked in my new life as an existential practitioner. Existential practitioners work with four main ‘givens’ of human existence: aloneness; meaninglessness; freedom; and death.

Like many people, I had my first existential crisis in my teens. Aged 15 and choosing my ‘A’ levels, the agony of choice plunged me into a sudden awareness of my own insignificance, of the Earth as (in the words of Scott Stillman) ‘a tiny speck of dust hurling thorough space, in a universe full of infinite galaxies’.

As I struggled with this new perspective alongside making decisions about my own future, I wondered how to give my life meaning in an utterly meaningless world. Unaware at the time that this was a path well-trodden by philosophers over the centuries, I came to the (not entirely original) conclusion that the meaning of life was to help other people – although this of course famously leaves unanswered the question, ‘but what are the other people for’?

My sense of purpose was bolstered by happy evenings and school holidays spent volunteering at the Cheyne Hospital for Children in Chelsea and at one time I wondered about pursuing a career in medicine. But it was not to be – my academic London girls’ school persuaded me to apply to Cambridge University to read mathematics, a subject I was good at… but in which I had no interest whatever.

This lack of interest in my studies left me ample time at university to explore other things and having come from an all-girls’ school to a college whose undergraduate population was 80% male, and in the early third wave of feminism too, I soon developed a passion for equality and broader issues of social justice. The time I should have been devoting to vector calculus, quantum mechanics and number theory I instead spent running the college women’s group, sitting in the Amnesty International cage on King’s Parade and going on Reclaim the Night marches.

On graduating I was lucky to win a scholarship to study in Paris for a year and there again, I pursued social justice in my extra-curricular activities including Amnesty letter-writing campaigns and teaching English to teenagers in hospital.

Emerging from university into the super-materialistic Bonfire of the Vanities world of the early 90s, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to be a banker, a stockbroker or to enter the emerging world of hedge funds. I still had the same desire I’d conceived at the age of 15 – to help other people – but how?

At this point I began to explore the idea of becoming a discrimination and human rights lawyer. I got hold of a directory of the Bar and looked up ‘human rights law’. At the time (in 1991) there was only one entry – the chambers which subsequently became Blackstone Chambers, where a tiny number of determined, principled people were practising in this (then) niche area of the law.

Knowing almost nothing about the Bar, I gamely lined up a mini-pupillage at that chambers and somehow, despite my lack of a first-class degree (too much time in the Amnesty cage and not enough in the computer lab!) I managed to get pupillage and then tenancy. Different times…

My goal from the start was to specialise in discrimination and human rights law and I was so lucky to spend 30 years doing just that, taking a particular interest in sex, gender and disability issues and, latterly, broadening my interest in social justice to cover ecological issues too – fighting to save our burning planet both in work and beyond it (in 2010 I stood for Parliament for the Green Party).

But something was always missing. My original vocation to work in a more direct and hands-on way helping those who were sick kept calling me back through the years. And then, the death of a close relative in 2018 brought everything into sharper focus. I began volunteering in my local hospice in London and, in tandem with my legal work, began to train as an end-of-life doula with a brilliant organisation called Living Well Dying Well who provide death companions or ‘friends at the end’ around the country.

Over the five years that followed I continued my hospice volunteering work, continued practising as a barrister, and wondered about my next step. I knew by now that I was particularly drawn to the spiritual aspects of caring work, and in 2023 the opportunity arose to take that further when I was accepted on to an MA in chaplaincy at the Existential College (New School of Psychotherapy) in West Hampstead.

After a year of chaplaincy studies I was sufficiently qualified to apply for substantive jobs. Honestly, I didn’t know whether I would ever make a living by following my vocation but in the summer of 2024 an opportunity arose at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. This was my dream job in a part of the country I had always loved, and where I had relatives and ancestors. In August 2024, I was selected and subsequently appointed as Cornwall’s first non-religious healthcare chaplain, starting work the following month.

It’s been a whirlwind with so many challenges and opportunities.

Nine months in, when people ask me whether I miss the law I invariably reply: ‘No, but I miss the friends I made along the way’. My colleagues in Chambers have been so much more than people I work with. They have been among my closest friends, they have been the companions of my life for 30 years, in some cases they have been – and will remain – my chosen family. I am so grateful to every single one of them and to the amazing staff, Chambers directors, clerks, librarians, receptionists, post room, housekeeper, IT helpdesk… to everyone who makes Chambers the amazing place to work that it was and is. I could not have made this transition without the support of my wonderful colleagues at the Bar and I miss them more than I can say.

To anyone reading who is just starting out on a career at the Bar, or who perhaps is seeking a new direction after years or decades, I would say this: your experience and expertise at the Bar will stand you in good stead wherever life’s journey takes you. There is a whole world out there outside the Inns of Court, in a universe of infinite galaxies. Get out there and explore them!