Hahaha. Small world. I know Kaly Kaul. I was in the same chambers as her for a few years before she became a judge.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1492523/Patrick-Pakenham.html Another obituary in a similar vein.
I do like a good obituary. They have become slightly boring since the mad generation of explorers or forces personnel passed. I always smiled on reading the sentence "They never married "......
1. No. 2. I’m too much of a gentleman to comment, not least because I still appear in front of her occasionally.
I read an article where it said the best & most interesting department to work in, on a newspaper was the Obits. Death is not prejudiced even though the resulting obituary may be.
That is absolutely fantastic - "for reasons which I won't go into now, my grasp of the facts is not as it might be". That is gonna be summat I'll attempt to learn by rote. But that whole paragraph is just superb and oh! for the ability to have such an instant cutting & humorous ability with the English language. I can often think of such witty and withering ripostes but unfortunately they usually arrive hours later. The Germans have a word for this, Treppenwitz, which can sortov be translated as 'staircase wit'.
One of the great joys of my career and a source of sadness more recently is being surrounded by people like Paddy as the criminal Bar is a magnet for raconteurs and frustrated actors and comedians who chose law over the stage. In the days before digital working, everyone would drift back to chambers after court to collect their papers for the next day or touch base with the clerks and stories would be swapped, rants about difficult clients, crazy judges or dopey solicitors who’d dropped you in it ranted and copious amounts of steam let off. Almost every day was like being both audience for and performer in an impromptu stand up show and we’d often still be there late into the night. Sadly, it’s no longer like that as remote working started to take over in the late 2010s which meant less and less face to face contact and then Covid came along and killed it off completely, such that we rarely have any need to go into chambers these days and so I hardly see my colleagues anymore. It’s a not dissimilar tale to what we were discussing in another thread about the way digital scoring is taking over cricket and something warm and human is being lost along the way.
At the end of the day popping in to Pomeroy's wine bar for a glass of Château Thames Embankment red, before heading home to Gloucester Road and Hilda
