William Byfield's Secret E-Diary
Secret E-Diary - October 2014
<p><em><strong>Eerie times in the courts.</strong> </em> </p>
<p>I try to get in all my sitting days as a Recorder of the Crown Court in one go if I can. I quite enjoy the daily routine with no annoying clients, witnesses or judges. Indeed, I am the annoying judge for a season. </p>
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Secret E-Diary - September 2014
<p><em><strong>Holiday plans are spoiled by a dose of reality.</strong> </em> </p>
<p>August is traditionally a time for holidaying, resting, recharging the batteries and cogitating. However, there is always something nagging in the background. Just as I was packing my suitcases with horrific shirts, brightly coloured towels and those dreadful swimming shorts, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was an uncompleted questionnaire lying on my study desk about the future of the Bar. </p>
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Secret E-Diary - August 2014
<p><em><strong>Celebrating an independent judiciary.</strong> </em> </p>
<p>This week saw me chugging along by train out of Victoria to the southern confines of my circuit. I was covering, by part time judging as a Recorder, one of those inevitable periods in the life of a publicly funded Silk that actors call “resting” and we call “working on papers”. Unwisely, I travelled First Class. My efforts to balance a fi le on a Formica table the size of a postage stamp had nearly succeeded when an evil smelling creature boarded the train together with an emaciated whippet. Both stared at me. </p>
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Secret E-Diary - July 2014
<p><em><strong>There comes a time when each person must decide where loyalties lie.</strong> </em> </p>
<p>“No doubt he will pursue the case with the added bitterness of an old friend.” </p>
<p>Oscar Wilde of Edward Carson QC, MP. </p>
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Secret E-Diary - June 2014
<p><em><strong>It has always been my belief that victory is harder to manage than defeat. When human minds are focused on crisis, it may bring out the best outcome possible. Victory, however, is another story. Doubts enter minds. Factions arise. ‘What if?’ becomes the dominant question. The reason is simple: defeat is rarely total or permanent, hence the desire to rescue and reverse; and victory is neither complete nor forever, which ushers in the worries. These truisms were uppermost in my mind when I attended my college gaudy last week.</strong> </em> </p>
<p>Gaudies are held around every five years as a grand reunion party. Few people go to the early ones, because it is time to escape university and get on with life. A much larger group go to those held in their middle years: a combination of growing nostalgia and perhaps a wish to show friends and contemporaries the fruits of success. </p>
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Secret E-Diary - May 2014
<p><em><strong>As a child I was given a short book written by the late Mr Justice Darling – a man who was known for his judicial wit, although his Spy pen-portrait bore the unkind legend “Judicial Lightweight”. I had high hopes of this book of legal gems. Alas, it was the dullest book I ever read with all his anecdotes, quips and aphorisms falling flat. It now lives in our lavatory for what my dear mama, when we were little, used to call “struggles”.</strong> </em> </p>
<p>Darling is not alone, however. With noble exceptions, the written anecdotes of lawyers are deeply dull. The reason is that we live in an oral tradition, whatever those civil practitioners and sillies who dreamt up the Criminal Procedural Rules think: a world where stories are told and retold in robing rooms, chambers and wine bars. A very great character in Silk when I was a young barrister, called Barry, despite it being none of his given names nor any recognised foreshortening of them, once paid me the honour of telling me the story I had told him six hours earlier about a case of mine but with Barry now in the title role – quite oblivious of the irony. The characters in these stories come to life because we knew them or know them still or, at the least, knew or know of them. </p>
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Secret E-Diary - April 2014
<p><em><strong>Battle lines are drawn</strong> </em> </p>
<p>My party political allegiances remained pretty constant until the day I found myself driving behind a car that had a sticker on its rear windscreen. Generally, I fi nd these proclamations very annoying. Top of my hate list is “Drive Carefully! Baby on Board!” Whenever I see this particular command, it coincides with a car that is being driven badly in some way – the last one cut me up having undertaken my car at high speed on the M4 – and has no baby in the vehicle at all, unless it has been placed in the boot. However, on this day of my political metamorphosis, I found the rear sticker not only completely failed to irritate me but actually expressed a thought that had been germinating in my head for some time. It read, simply and succinctly: “Don’t Vote! It Only Encourages Them.” </p>
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Secret E-Diary - March 2013
<p><strong>The Calm Before The Storm</strong> </p>
<p><em><strong>Despite initial skirmishes, the phoney war between the publicly funded Bar and the Ministry of “Justice” continues while we wait for the real conflict to begin. Is the Public Defender scheme the plan B of which my mandarin friend warned me or is it yet another smokescreen to cover even more awful shenanigans deep in the Whitehall bunker? Andrew, our Senior Clerk, who hides a twitchy personality under a mask of assurance and confidence, came upstairs for our weekly Headmaster’s chat. It had long ago ceased to be enjoyable and now is simply a list of actual, putative, impending or imaginary crises.</strong> </em> </p>
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Secret E–Diary – February 2014
<p><em><strong>A strike or not a strike? That is the question.</strong> </em> </p>
<p>Everybody has returned from the seasonal festivities absent the traditional good cheer. The clerks have “accidentally” discovered a working party report from a sub-committee chaired by one or other of the brothers Twist – a committee that I have to confess I had no idea I had appointed and probably never did – that has recommended our staff take the same pay cut proposed for us by a Ministry of Justice that increasingly looks better equipped to be engaged in the used-car trade. </p>
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Secret E–Diary – January 2014
<p><strong>Expect the Unexpected</strong> </p>
<p><span style="display: none"> </span><strong><em>One of the great joys of my life is returning home after a hard day’s gossiping in Chambers: shoes off, feet on the stool and a stiff gin and tonic. Or should I say “some gin with tonic”? </em></strong> </p>
<p>A friend of mine at university once over-reached himself by taking out a girl called Jane, whose family was from the deepest Shires: the sort that disdains titles, never double-barrels and considers the Royal Family to be parvenus. He was invited for a weekend. Jane later told him in the Kardomah Café (she was a girl of simple tastes) that, after his departure, her mother had listed in order the ten social solecisms of his visit. Top of the list was that he had asked for “a gin and tonic” and not “some gin with tonic”. How we laughed when he told us until I next ordered a combination drink and heard myself asking for some whisky with soda.<span style="display: none"> </span> </p>
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