Second opinion
WHEN Jason hit Wayne with a baseball bat four years ago, Wayne applied for, and was granted, legal aid to sue Jason, though Wayne had started the fight in the first place and Jason had nothing with which to compensate Wayne in any case — except, of course, his most trea- sured possession, his baseball bat.
Having been present when Wayne was brought to hospital nearly half a decade ago, I was called to court last week. Unfortunately, the case was adjourned because Jason's wife — I use the word in its metaphorical sense — had just given birth, and Jason therefore didn't turn up. I should like to assure British taxpayers that, at £800, my charges for sitting in the antechamber to the court, doing nothing but watching the goings-on around me, are moderate, in the middle of the range. Perhaps this was just as well, because there were three other expert witnesses who were stood down, to say nothing of the banisters, barris- ters' clerks, solicitors and solicitors' clerks, on the plaintiff's side alone. Moreover, this was the third adjourn- ment of the case so far. I've already made more out of Jason's attack on Wayne than Wayne will ever be able to extract from Jason.
The middle class wins again! First it weeps crocodile tears over the poor's lack of access to justice, or at least to the courts, then it grabs all the money for itself. It's enough to make you sick unless you're middle class, that is.
At first the judge didn't believe that Jason's 'wife' had just given birth, as he hadn't believed last time that Jason injured the cartilage of his knee playing football, and was thus forensically indis- posed. Jason's tactics seem to be to delay matters until the legal aid money runs out — as likely, it seems to me, as the Pacific being emptied by a madman with a teaspoon. In the end, however, documentary evidence was produced in court that a woman was in hospital somewhere having recently given birth — the nearest we can come these days, short of a DNA test, to proof of paterni- ty. Somewhat reluctantly, the judge accepted it.
But what a spectacle are the antechambers to our courts, worth any number of adjournments! Daumier, thou shouldst be living at this hour, England hath need of thee! Contrast the chalk- stripe, shoe-polished, plummy-accented barristers with their track-suited, Doc-Marten-booted, expletive-muttering clients (the solicitors coming somewhere in between the two). The majesty of the law matters not at all to our modern-day plaintiffs and defendants, who turn up to court looking as if they've come straight from a hard night's video-watching on the sofa.
`I'm head of ethnic affairs for our chambers,' I overheard an upper-class woman barrister say to a client.
What on earth did she mean by this? That she made love to representatives of all the races of the world on behalf of her partners? Did they watch through a one-way mirror? I wish I'd gone into the law rather than medicine.
Talking of ethnicity (as the weasel word is), I couldn't help noticing the large proportion of Indians at the Coun- ty Court. They're obviously as attached to civil proceedings as Jamaicans are to criminal ones. What really saddened me, though, was to see the way young Indian males have taken young white scum as their model and imitated them in every particular, from their nose rings to their body language, from their hairstyles to their snarls. This is the first age of mass downward cultural aspiration.
Theodore Dalrymple
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