Royal Courts of Justice

I was recently at the Royal Courts of Justice. Not, thank God, seeking any kind of justice for myself, I have seen the teevee adaptation of ‘Bleak House’ and now know that a) Gillian Anderson is hot no matter what sort of dress you put her in and b) any man who relies upon the law for redress is setting themselves up for mental anguish and possible death by spontaneous human combustion.

Nor was I prosecuting, I’ve seen enough movies to know that the system is not the way to get any kind of justice in this world. No, if you have a gripe with somebody or something, say the flex on a kettle you bought is frayed, then it’s best to cut out the whole official route and go directly to the role of near-lunatic masked avenger who takes down the whole corrupt system of discount electrical superstores with nothing more than a wise-cracking sidekick and a flamethrower. Sounds unlikely? At least 27% of all purchases made this weekend will result in the customer daydreaming about acts of pointless destruction while queuing for their lip balm or whatever.

The fact that I was just there as an observer, to see the wheels of justice grind some poor bugger to mincemeat, was picked up on by the pack of feral journos outside the Courts. These chaps, I think, are just stationed there every morning on the off chance that some disgraced or disgraceful celeb is trying to sneak past them on their way to receive a bit of justice themselves. I don’t know why the journos bother, they could just use stock footage of a bloke scurrying into the court and then stock footage of a standard issue solicitor ‘making a statement on behalf of my client who maintains, despite the finding, that the girl was of the age of legal consent and, despite the evidence put forward in court, loves animals and would certainly never do anything like that to a swan. He has asked for privacy at this difficult time’.

I was there, on the job so to speak, to see a member of the public try to convince a judge that what we get up to in the office was illegal. I was under strict instructions from at least three different lawyers not to speak to the chap, even if spoken to and not to identify who I was. This was, I hope because of the seriousness of the case and the way these things are dealt with and not, as I suspect is the truth, because I’m a liability who thinks a useful way to spend my day is lolling around the RCJ café, swilling tea and waiting for our case to kick off.

The RCJ is a fascinating place. I used to think that wealth and privilege smelled like beeswax furniture polish, or wet dog, or gun oil. Well, it may do, but power smells like marble dust. The whole place has marble floors and wood panelled walls so deep and dark that I think the wood used is actually Ent, and you just KNOW that’s not sustainable. Barristers stalk the corridors like scruffy crows. The rule of thumb is, the more disreputable your suit (cut just so to artfully conceal several long lunches too many, and we all know how game pie settles), the more stained your wig, the more venerable you are.

The actual rule is that the bigger your wig, the more important you are and the biggest wigs of all are worn by the judges – they look like spaniels on steroids.

It was fascinating to watch the judge in action. Even though the ruling went against the chap making his plea for justice (he’s off to the European court of course, to plead his case, along with prisoners who feel their human rights are being infringed if they can’t keep a pony in their cells and so on) the chap still felt he had his day in court.

I think he picked up his flamethrower at the door on the way out, I didn’t see him leave as the view is obscured if you’re hiding in the gents.

She’s in fashion

According to the calendar it’s July. According to my home weather station it’s the Book of Genesis, day three of the Flood.

Home weather stations are the cutting edge of cottage industry forecasting. All over the country, men of a certain temperament make their daily observance at the little cupboard attached to the side of a shed. Surely, this must be the one time when men can have their interest piqued by something outside a shed rather than within!

The Government has, in taking giant strides to become the sort of regime that renames the days of the week after the family members and pets of the Premier or only allows six state-sanctioned hairstyles, banned mercury barometers. This, they think, will make the world a more ecologically friendly place. Quite how they can dictate for that at the same time as giving the go-ahead for the building of new nuclear power stations is quite easy to fathom – nuclear power stations are built in places where people are poor and ugly and so one would never know if there was contamination.

Deprived of scientific instruments that have been around since the enlightenment, I’m more than happy to fall back on methods that have been around since the dark ages.

My home weather station consists of a bit of seaweed, a pine cone and a tattered notebook with a battered stub of pencil attached to it by a hairy string. The pencil is useful for recording information and, when let free to be blown horizontal, twisting and twitching on the end of its bit of hairy string, gauging wind speed and direction. To this arsenal of monitoring equipment I’m gradually adding the ache in my shoulder, but I can’t be sure if that’s dependent upon the weather or doing boxing on the Wii when pissed again.

There are two things that give a surge of pleasure to the amateur weather forecaster. The first is filling in another day’s readings. Once you have recorded rainfall, hours of sunlight, wetness of seaweed and what shape your cone is in, you can go to bed with the sense of a job well done. The second is writing letters that will never be published to national newspapers when you got a forecast right and the Met Office got it wrong.

As an adjunct to this, you can have hours of pleasure talking to people in pubs about the conspiracy between the Met Office and the Government that means your letters never get published. A word of caution, don’t follow this up with a declaration that the Met Office is actually a front for a secret Government project to control the weather, because people may think that this would be quite a good thing, or may even consider that things would be better if the Virgin Group ran the weather too.

Being a bloke, fashion passes me by, occasionally looping around me but never coexisting at the same time and place that I am in. I wear the uniform of my generation, tee shirt and jeans. Actually, that’s the uniform of the generation of the 1950s, invented by James Dean. Pity he didn’t accessorise with a seat-belt. I am dabbling a bit with fashion at the moment, challenging myself to root in the back of the cupboard (past the fur coats but before the snow) and picking out something I bought but have not worn in ages. The trouble is that being a bloke I consider it worth keeping a garment as long as it a) still has most of its buttons and at least bears a resemblance to the colour it was when I bought it and b) fits. Trousers appear to be shrunk by wardrobe elves. But only the waist.

My latest must-have accessory, my umbrella, is proving its worth already. Not because it keeps the rain off me but because it keeps the rain off everyone – it has talismatic properties. – simply carrying it means that it stays dry, or at least never rains enough to put it up. That’s why it should never be stored in proximity to my weather station – confuses the delicate instruments.

Which ‘Wind in the Willows’ character are you?

Quizzes in women’s magazines appear to give you insight into yourself by telling you which celebrity you most closely resemble. Apparently it’s good to resemble Angelina Jolie. I can see being married to Brad Pitt would have its uses – I bet she never has to wait in line at Alton Towers. Being like Madonna is bad. I can see this too, I look ridiculous in a leotard, but then so does Madonna.

I used to enjoy doing the personality quizzes in women’s magazines. Years ago, when I used to go out with a woman who bought magazines that had personality quizzes in them, I would wait until she had left the room and then flick through whatever glossy happened to be at hand, hoping for an insight into her personality to be revealed through sight of a completed multiple choice quiz, so saving all that tedious business of conversation. Such tactics were not without risk – the ‘what kind of lover am I?’ quiz clearly showed the result ‘filthy’, but had been completed by her flatmate.

The ‘Wind in the Willows’ is a great book – it has shown millions of kids how great it would have been to be born middle class in the Edwardian era. These days the middle classes are worried about their mortgages, their kids’ school fees and somebody spraying ‘tosser’ on their 4x4. Back then, all you had to worry about was being broken in by the wrong sort of homosexualist at school and, later on, being machine-ginned to death in the Great War.

There are several key characters in the book. Mole is the stay at home sort who, nevertheless, once he is out and about becomes tremendously enthusiastic about things. If you are the sort of person who prefers the company of a DVD box set on a Saturday night to the company of others, but once persuaded to go to a party has a drink or two to overcome nervousness and then wakes up on a Sunday afternoon with a banging hangover and your e mail brimming with .jpg attachments promising ‘hilarious pictures of you last night’, then you’re the Mole.

Ratty is the typical feckless Edwardian gent. He has his own house, his own boat and a quite a lot of firearms. If you are the sort of person who buys organic and sees nothing wrong in a bit of direct action against new roads, then you’re Ratty. Also enormously loyal to friends, to the point of visiting them in prison when they are convicted of fraud.

Badger. Badger is the one all boys want to be. Tough. Resourceful, a man apart. Lives the in centre of the wild wood and is rarely seen. No mention of infecting cattle with TB. These days Badger would be the old chap who lives in the last remaining house that wasn’t demolished when they built the new estate. His is never bothered and his gardens are free of litter, this is because Badger is active in the community, quietly helping those in need. He is also an active vigilante, using the vast selection of weaponry he brought back from the last war and a new assortment sent to him by chums in Iraq, meaning that his garden perimeter is lined with Claymore anti-personnel mines. No men can actually be Badger, we change our bedding too infrequently.

Toad. Toad is always entranced by the next big thing, in the book he becomes a road hog. If you are the sort of person who thinks that fitting out your mum’s Nova that you were given on your 18th birthday with a plastic body kit and driving it at 90 mph through the village, then you’re Toad. If you made and then lost a fortune in the dot-com boom, you’re probably Toad too.

We want to be Badger, we don’t want to be Toad, we’re worried that others might see us as Mole but, if you have read the Wind in the Willows more than once and enjoyed it to the point where you can recognise yourself in the characters, you’re probably Ratty. And that’s no bad thing.

The thing about an English summer is...

It’s July in England and the rain is coming down with vulgar enthusiasm. For the last couple of weeks it has been Wimbledon fortnight. In recent years this fortnight has extended into three weeks as days of matches were rained off and rescheduled. This time, it just felt like three weeks. I have concluded that it does not matter how tight the top or how short the skirt, tennis is just not a spectator sport. This is partly because the lesbians playing women’s tennis are not, as on the internet, gorgeous and only exercising as a precursor to showering together, but mainly because it’s so dull.

Dull, but not restful. All that grunting, all that thwacking, all that self-conscious banana eating. With a small tweak though, coverage of Wimbledon could remove these unwanted intrusions and become positively medicinal.

There’s a DAB digital radio station you can tune to called ‘Birdsong’. It is, as the name would suggest, not the sound of disturbed giggling but rather the fruits of sticking a microphone in a hedgerow at dawn. The only sounds are the restless twitter of our feather friends and the occasional grumbling of an ill-humoured baker driving to work. This plays on an endless loop and is designed to be a test signal. It also squats on digital radio stations when they go off air. This recently happened to a station and they saw their audience share double when they turned off Jay-zed and turned on starlings.

What digital telly needs is the visual equivalent – the sight of the rain falling on Wimbledon, the gentle hiss, like static from the telly, of rain falling on the covers, ball boys and stubborn tennis-fans who retain their seats in the pouring rain, camped out under one of those transparent ponchos with ‘maid of the mist’ written on it, consuming scotch eggs in a revolting fashion.

There is something relaxing about watching the rain, especially when it is on the outside of a pane of glass, especially if that glass is etched with the name of a pub.

Certainly, I experienced the rain in a far more al fresco and immediate fashion this morning on my walk to the station, which became an undignified sprint to the station and ended up gasping squelch to the station. Odd really that the inferno of anger, frustration and rage directed at the rain, the weather-gods and anyone who happened to be dry did not turn the rain to steam as it approached a ten metre radius of my quivering body.

Sitting damp on the train, I decided that it was time to break yet another personal rule. It was time to buy an umbrella. I don’t like umbrellas, if you attempt to walk past somebody using one, you risk eye-poke or, as the angle turns, having a half-pint of fresh rainwater decanted onto you. If you try to use one then you discover that rain rarely happens without a great deal of wind to go with it, and unless you are lucky enough to have an umbrella that turns itself inside out at a zepher’s breath, you are left fighting something that is capturing the wind with all the energy of a rebelling spinnaker on the Cape leg of the America’s Cup.

Still, I have never had the slightest problem sacrificing my morals for the sake of personal comfort. So, on the way home I bolted into M&S and did a circuit of the men’s section like a wall of death rider on ketamin. No brolly, but a mac! Fantastic, it was of just the right material (shockingly unnatural and hence waterproof), cut (early 1970s dirty-old-man) and colour (ealy 1970s drab) to make it irresistible.

Then I saw the brolly, which came with that perfect handle, the sort that is hooked like the end of a question mark, making it ideal for hooking round the neck of the chap in front of you who is going to beat you to your seat on the train.

The brolly is perfect John Steed. The mac is exactly tailored to make me look like a bent copper from one of the seedier police forces. Perfect.