This could be the last thing you ever read

T-0: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and – so far – I feel fine.

I am keeping an eye out for any Pale Horses, but so far the world still seems more concerned with scatology than eschatology.

Ha ha – that means “poo, not the Last Things” and they rhyme. If any rappers are reading this, feel free to use that one.

Anyway, it looks like this whole Mayan apocalypse thing has been a big hoax, which just goes to show AGAIN that numberology, ancient prophecies and any ideas of destiny are load of old crap.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

If the world does end, you could do worse than repeat those words over in your mind as it happens.

Assuming it doesn’t, this is likely to be the final ODHSNM of 2012, so I thought I’d wrap up a few loose ends.

My Vasectomy - Epilogue

That I write a blog is one of the first things my wife, Elvira of Castille, tells people who she introduces me to.

Without fail, the next thing she tells them is that I wrote all about having a vasectomy on here – which indeed I did, all through July.

I feel it is incumbent upon me then to close this whole story off and tell you what happened next.

You will remember, I was given instructions – and little jars – to come back after three months (and again a month after that). This is because sperms can apparently survive for a very long time in the cosy environment afforded by the human bollock, and it’s only after said periods of time that you can be sure they’re all dead or trapped like a bunch of Chilean miners. 

I shan't bore or appall you with too many details, but I did receive a small insight into the mind of the psychopath on the two occasions when I set off for work carrying a small container of my own jizz to hand over to a complete and unsuspecting stranger.

And I passed the tests. Or failed them. I’m not sure which you'd say. 

Suffice to say, it worked. I "may now consider myself sterile". RESULT!

Moving House

The Sicilies moved house in September. I know I said I’d write about it, but I unwittingly dragged myself into that whole school appeals can of worms – at which point I lost the will to blog at all as I found myself confronted with a situation which required me to do more than just write the first thing that came into my head.

It seems redundant now. I can’t be bothered to write about it three months later. Sorry. Sometimes interesting things happen to me, but they don’t make it onto here (see the one sorry post I did on jury service in 2011 – that was supposed to be a whole series!).

Hell, if I wrote up everything that happened to me on here people I met in person would find me very boring indeed...

...

Errr...

That’s all folks!

So that’s it. If the world DOES end, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these sticky by-products of my brain over the last two and a half years.

If it doesn’t, ODHSNM will be back in 2013 with MORE MORE MORE of the same old shit. 

Ooh, you are lawful

Every aspect of popular culture is very keen to tell us how interesting and exciting the legal profession is. The books and films of John Grisham and others and endless TV series – like Elvira’s favourite “The Good Wife” – all paint a picture of lawyers as Ubermenschen.

They’re cleverer than you and me, they’re richer than you and me, they’re harder-working than you or me, and they’re either more ethical than you or me or more ruthless than you or me. Sometimes both. 

Because sometimes, doing the right thing demands a lack of ruth.

Ordinary people (like you or me) are mere cattle to these soaring beings. Only they can protect us, save us or vindicate us, poor victims that we are – only they can enter the Holy of Holies and look The Law straight in the eye.

Which is why every encounter I have ever had with the legal profession has been such a crushing disappointment.

When I did jury service last year, the barristers were very well spoken but they were utterly pedestrian in questioning witnesses and presenting their cases. It was extremely unsexy.

Nevertheless, some of my fellow jurors were not disabused of their preconceptions of these titans walking among us. To them, the sheer impressiveness of these bewigged posh boys was utterly convincing, notwithstanding what they actually said. They were thrown into confusion by the fact that one said one thing, while the other contradicted it. Fortunately, there was a nice, posh, old man in an even bigger wig who told us what to do.

But at least that bore some resemblance in outward form to the mental picture of the legal profession we have all built up.

I await eagerly John Grisham’s upcoming “The Conveyancer”.

As previously mentioned, the Sicilies are moving house. After Stamp Duty, legal fees make up the second largest expense of the average house-mover.

Has anyone ever met a conveyancing solicitor? I haven’t. In all of my house moves, I have never once seen face-to-face the person who I paid to do this work.  

And what does this work consist of? Sending me letters asking me to get things for them, waiting a few days, and then passing those things on to another solicitor, who will write a letter to the other party (after a few days), as far as I can tell. Being a conveyancer must be much like being a personal trainer, insofar as it involves getting paid to make the person paying you work.

On one occasion, this involved Elvira and I driving from Woking to Oxford on a weekend to put some paperwork through the letterbox of a locked and closed solicitor's office - just to make sure they had it on Monday morning. 

If you pop down to WH Smith, you can pick up a DIY Last Will and Testament kit for a few quid. Go back 20 years or so and if you wanted a will, you had to get a lawyer to do it for you – no doubt at the cost of several hundred pounds.

Today, most conveyancing seems to get done in glorified call centres by unqualified or semi-qualified legal executives, overseen – on paper at least – by an actual solicitor.

And it can, because much like making a will, conveyancing appears to be a semi-skilled bit of administrative work which has been mystified by the self-interest of the legal caste into yet another tax on getting anything done.  Godspeed the day when you can print a DIY conveyancing kit off the internet and this professional closed shop is broken up.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s really just like it is on TV. But somehow, I doubt it.

I know that my own line of work is little better than the fleas that plague the vultures feeding on the rotting carcass of late capitalism, but if a tree fell on the whole legal profession and no one was there to see it, would anyone care?

Nice doing justice with you

You may have been wondering what has happened to ODHSNM recently. No, I was not co-opted to serve in the governments of either Greece or Italy. Much worse, I was doing jury service.

As such, I have not only some actual real world experiences to write about, but also some opinions that are supported by evidence – as opposed to the  steady diet of blind prejudice I usually feed you.

However, I must begin with a warning and a disclaimer. I am not going to tell anyone about anything relating to the deliberations of those juries I sat on, because it is an offence under the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

I am also going to be deliberately vague about when and where I did it and what cases I was involved in. Seems that blog accounts of the details of jury service are a bit sparse, and so even though I have a better grasp of the law in this area than some, I don’t want to go out on a limb and do or say anything dodgy (working from this broadly).

So, as a preliminary – while I await the input of those of my friends and readers who know the law better than me – here are some interesting factoids about jury service:

1. At the court I attended, probably about 50 new people got called up each week. Given that the usual term for jury duty is two weeks, that meant that at any one time there were about a hundred potential jurors locked up in a special waiting room, ready to be called. There is a LOT of waiting.
2. Whenever a trial is ready to start, 15 to 20 of the people get called out – apparently at random (more on the nature of "randomness" in the criminal justice system at a later date...). You may immediately be thinking, “hold on – not 12?” Well, you’d be correct. Those people then go up to the courtroom, where an official literally shuffles cards with all their names on, and the first 12 called out go and take their places. At this point, the counsel can reject any potential jurors they don’t like the look of – so this is the point that your swastika tattoos and copies of the Daily Mail come in most handy. Those rejected or not picked, get sent back to the holding pen.
3. Anyone who is on the electoral register and aged between 18 and 70 can get called up for jury duty. If you get a letter saying you’ve been picked, you can be fined up to £1,000 if you don’t reply to it within seven days.
4. There are nine lions on the Royal coat of arms. I counted them. Many times.

More will follow, pending legal direction.