Driving yourself crazy

If you were to talk to barristers about what sort of stress they have found it difficult to cope with then most people will have a story in which the stress of the car journey to court figures prominently.

A little while ago when talking to another barrister I told him that in my mind one version of hell was to spend eternity as follows: you have a difficult case in front of an even more difficult judge; you allowed an extraordinary amount of time for the car journey to ensure that you could not possibly be late to court, but notwithstanding your best efforts one traffic disaster after another has put you on the last minute; you are now stuck in traffic say somewhere on the M6 approaching Birmingham. You know, as an occasional visitor to Birmingham, that when you are on the last minute finding somewhere to park near to the court will be difficult. The traffic is crawling and you have gone from thinking that you will be hours early to court, to thinking that you will be merely early, thinking that you'll be just about on time, to thinking that you're only just going to make it, and are now at the stage of realising that there is a real risk that you are going to be late for court and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. You know that that also means that when you get there you will have to deal with the aggravation from the judge, the alarm of the client, and without having time to compose yourself will probably be thrown straight into the hearing. Imagine spending eternity with that nervous feeling.

In fact, at the risk of tempting fate, I've never actually been late for court. There have been a few close run things. However many barristers will recognise that churning and dismayed feeling which has been described in the previous paragraph. It is particularly hard for barristers who face a challenging journey. One of the downsides of living somewhere picturesque is that often that means you have already got a significant journey before you even get started. It is also often worse for very junior members of the bar. They will often gets the "graveyard" slot of the briefs in distant courts for not much money that no one else really wants to do. Given the money involved you do not really want to be staying overnight even assuming that the timeframe from the previous day permits that. (I once when very junior decided not to take a chance and so stayed overnight the night before a case: it ended up being adjourned and so I only received the adjournment fee which actually did not cover my hotel expenses). At least nowadays in the days of mobile telephones you are in a position to communicate the problem so that the court can know. When I was a junior barrister mobile telephones had not been thought of (as best exemplified by the cult science fiction film Blade Runner made round about that time, where in the future of automated taxis, and robots indistinguishable from humans, phone calls were still made from telephone boxes, something which whilst it did not look funny then emphatically does now). That meant that when you were stuck on the motorway you really were off the radar completely.

It is astonishing how concern about getting to court can make you attempt things which otherwise you would not. I would not describe myself as practical or mechanical, but many years ago was on my way to court when there was a fault on the car. I looked at the engine and there was a split in one of the pipes leading into the engine which I imagined was causing air to get in. I unwrapped the tinfoil from the sandwiches I had taken, and wrapped that around the split. It worked and I was able to get to court on time and then back again before getting a garage to fix the problem. Desperate situations require desperate remedies.