Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- PART I History
- PART II Law
- 12 Justice miscarried
- 13 Breaking the law
- 14 Declining the brief
- 15 Big lawyers and little lawyers
- 16 Parliament, government, courts
- 17 Judges in lodgings
- 18 Mice peeping out of oakum
- 19 Justice in Chile
- 20 Never do anything for the first time
- 21 Rarely pure and never simple
- 22 Law and plumbing
- 23 The Laws of Documents
- PART III Justice
- Index
17 - Judges in lodgings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- PART I History
- PART II Law
- 12 Justice miscarried
- 13 Breaking the law
- 14 Declining the brief
- 15 Big lawyers and little lawyers
- 16 Parliament, government, courts
- 17 Judges in lodgings
- 18 Mice peeping out of oakum
- 19 Justice in Chile
- 20 Never do anything for the first time
- 21 Rarely pure and never simple
- 22 Law and plumbing
- 23 The Laws of Documents
- PART III Justice
- Index
Summary
Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, pressed me to write a piece about life in the judges' lodgings. By the time I wrote it, in the autumn of 1999, my lodgings life was at an end: the PM's letter had come offering a seat on the Court of Appeal, and nostalgia was already starting to infiltrate memory. I still think that it is valuable to the administration of justice to have High Court judges sitting on rota at court centres in England and Wales.
In the pocket of my dinner jacket, because I can't bring myself to throw it away, is a slip of paper bearing in a neat italic hand the words ‘I expect you have remembered to ask the Bishop to say grace’. It was passed to me some years ago during pre-dinner drinks at the judges' lodgings in Lincoln by the butler, who had sensed that, though formally in charge, I was not to the manner born.
I had the same sense of not quite belonging in the Plymouth lodgings last winter. The lodgings, a terraced dwelling of colossal proportions on the Hoe, was once Nancy Astor's town house. She left it to the nation, and it is now let out to visitors in all its glory by the city council; though I can't believe that the en suite bathroom, where the bidet has a jet resembling Lake Geneva's, is as it was in her day.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ashes and SparksEssays On Law and Justice, pp. 181 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011