Keeping up appearances part 5
There are also other circumstances in which a barrister's appearance may not be quite what he would wish.
Normally with your wig and gown you wear a wing collar and bands. You take off your detachable collar (or change your shirt). Once when I was a junior I was doing case in the county court in front of a kindly old Judge. Whilst I was chatting with my opponent before the case resumed one afternoon, in error I neglected to change my collar. That meant that I wandered back into court and started cross examining whilst still wearing a collar and tie, despite wearing a wig and gown. The Judge was too polite to say anything. Needless to say when I got out of court that afternoon I felt somewhat mortified.
That was not as bad as the situation that occurred once in a conference. I was seeing clients first thing one December morning. There were a series of other conferences to follow. It was dark and as my then wife was asleep and I did not wish to disturb her, I dressed without switching on the lights. When I got into Chambers I realised for the first time that whilst I was wearing my dark suit jacket, in error given the lack of light I had put on dinner suit trousers displaying a fine shiny stripe down the side. It is difficult on paper to convey precisely how ludicrous dinner suit trousers look with a normal jacket, particularly at 8 a.m. on a wet winter's morning in Manchester. You might not think that they would be very obvious. I can assure you that they were about as noticeable as my head would have been if I had been wearing a coloured paper hat out of a Christmas cracker.
When my clerk had managed to compose himself from the understandable reaction, we had to make plans for conferences. I organised for someone to attend to get the right pair of trousers. (I have never been able to see the Wallace and Gromit film "The Wrong Trousers" without thinking of this incident). In the interim we had to pick the conference room carefully. I needed somewhere with a very large desk that I could sort of crouch across, to shake hands with the clients without them seeing the trousers I was wearing. It was a somewhat odd posture to adopt to shake hands, albeit better than them seeing the trousers. They probably put it down to some barrister' s eccentricity. By the second or third conference of the day I had the right trousers and could relax.
A perennial concern for many a barrister is misplacing their wig. Either in the flush of triumph or the agony of defeat, having left the court room it is easy to put it to one side and forget to retrieve it. You can usually find someone who will lend you a wig until yours is returned, but what that normally proves is that head sizes are very different. Just imagine borrowing a hat at random. It might either swamp your head, or sit uneasily perched on the top. If you ever wander into court and see a barrister with a wig that simply does not fit, it either means that they have had to borrow one, or that they were offered a secondhand one so cheaply that the offer was simply too good to resist.