Simon Morgan – Freelance

A Happy New Year to you all. I trust that all your resolutions are still firmly on track. Some friends of mine have decided that their New Year obligation is to forgo alcohol for the entire month of January. Not exactly life changing but a reasonable gesture none the less. I have not joined in. We did it once before and all agreed come 1^st February never to do it again. I am afraid with me Hope seldom triumphs over experience.

However, I am conscious that this is not a good time to be either complacent or resigned. Hope must not be abandoned because the alternative is total despair. I am, after all, entering my 55^th year. I once read somewhere that one minute past midnight on a man’s 55^th birthday is akin to Zero Hour on the Somme battlefield back in 1916.

The hapless Birthday Boy is effectively clambering out of the security of the trenches of youth to face the horror of a multiplicity of dangers in a sort of health no-man’s land that is late middle age. Stroke, cancer, heart disease, diabetes even suicide come winging towards him like tracer bullets and he must trudge forward, teeth gritted, as best he can.

If he makes it to 60 he stands a good chance of carrying on to record his threescore years and ten. Otherwise he falls to litter the ground with the bodies of his miserable contemporaries. A sad and desolate scene livened only by the cackling of the widows as they drink a toast to death in service e benefit!

So, faced with this cheerful prospect I have made a positive start. I have bought myself an exercise bike which is now in my study and from which I now regularly watch television or listen to the radio whilst pedalling away. To enhance the cardio-vascular benefit of the exercise I have developed a sort of crude interval training system. It seems to be working so I might be on to something. Maybe I could start a whole new system of TV watching fitness; a sort of couch potato callisthenics.

Like all brilliant ideas the concept is quite simple. Take, as an example, ‘University Challenge’. This is a half hour programme which is an ideal period during which to exercise. When Jeremy Paxman asks the teams a starter for ten you put on the clutch and commence a period of maximum effort and stress. Keep this going until the next starter for ten when you can ease off and start a period of light effort. Keep alternating until the gong goes. You’ll be amazed at how impatient you become at slow answers!

‘Just a Minute’ and ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’on the radio also lend themselves to this treatment. However, I have yet to work out a system for ‘the Archers.’ Perhaps some of you could make some suggestions. One that immediately comes to mind is to alternate between each occasion that you feel like reaching through the ether to give Pat Archer and her insufferable drab of a daughter Helen a good slapping; but as that happens so often it might not give you enough time on either effort level to do any good. [Read more →]

I apologise to readers for not fronting up in November but my start up law practice is, thankfully, taking up more and more of my time and so I have decided to settle for a Christmas Rant. I must say that I will be very happy to see the back of 2009. On reflecting upon my past I have come to recognise that all the years ending in ‘9’ have not been happy ones but, and this is the good news, they have all been followed by much more enjoyable ‘noughty’ years. Let us hope the tradition continues.

Certainly the initial signs are encouraging. For a lawyer, one of the more obvious signs of vibrancy in one’s career is to get a call from a legal head hunter. For cultural reasons law firms have never been very good at recruiting staff. This has led to the rise of the legal recruiter. These enterprising souls either act on instructions from firms who know what they want or simply ring up senior partners on the off chance to try and dazzle them with their stable of talented lawyers.

Both options require them to assemble a beauty parade of willing candidates and this means many hours on the telephone assembling their list. If you get it right the rewards are very lucrative. Typical fees are 20% of the successful candidate’s starting salary. Clearly the more demand there is for lawyers the more these bottom feeders of the legal industry have to fight over the available pool of talent. This means that in times of high employment, such as occurred during the late Nineties and most of the Noughties, one could expect to receive at least one call a week from a recruiter especially from those who had acted for you in the past.

Like many lawyers I have built up a coterie of such contacts from my own career moves. They become a sort of therapy. In order to persuade you to become a candidate these people lay on the charm and the flattery. They assure you that they have received glowing reports of your competence, energy and enthusiasm and believe that you would be the perfect fit for this truly wonderful opportunity they are instructed upon. If you feel a bit down you ring one up and they are immediately suggesting all sorts of wonderful opportunities.

Of course, wonderful is a matter of opinion. For every potential partnership position with a leading London firm there are many less attractive berths such as assistant probate clerk in Scunthorpe. Anyway, the fact is that after an Eighteen month absence they have started to ring me again. So, things must be beginning to move. Scunthorpe here I come! [Read more →]

The recent Cambridge report on primary school teaching methods has recommended that formal lessons do not begin before the age of six. Once again the tired old dirge of cant, hypocrisy and prejudice that is the United Kingdom’s education policy is given an outing. Never has there been a more important subject so consistently badly handled. Followers of this blog will know that as far as I am concerned the disaster visited upon education is second only to the Black Death in the scale of social cataclysms that have befallen this country. However, I was generally referring to secondary education and the ghastly catastrophe of the Comprehensives. Primary education has always been a comparative success; but now they are threatened and why? Because the body politic refuses to confront the huge elephant sat in the living room that is parental indifference to their children’s education. Large numbers of children are in households where academic prowess, reading ability and scholarship are despised and teachers regarded with suspicion. It is these unfortunates who find formal lessons so difficult to understand. It is they who seem to need a further period of assimilation in order to respond to teaching. But, rather than tackle the fecklessness of their parents the wisdom is seen to be in holding those who can engage in lessons back. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Equality of opportunity comes from levelling up, not levelling down.

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I have decided that a weekly blog is too much of a good thing and so I henceforth I will be confining myself to a monthly out burst. In any case I was spreading myself far too thinly! If only! So here is Miss September.

I note that a charity is calling for fake muggings to be staged in the street to try and encourage the public to assist their fellow citizens when they are attacked. I also note that some artist wants to put up a vending machine outside a school that will sell toy guns. There really is too much of this. It seems that we have to put up with any number of crackpot ideas if they are meant to highlight some perceived social ill. OK then, I will go along with this. From now on, in order to highlight the danger of silly bastards being given too much leeway, I will slap anyone coming up with a daft suggestion very hard round the head.

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