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the train home and after TheCreep had stropped off in a sulk after agreeing to the settlement that TheBusker gave me the full low-down.
    â€˜You know, things are rarely as they seem. I heard this judge speak at a dinner only a few weeks ago when he described that case as [and he put on a slightly pompous judicial tone] “the worst injustice I’ve ever caused in a long career dedicated to causing such injustices”. And he went so far as to say that “If such a case ever comes before me on the bench, it’s one of the very few of my wrongs I intend to right.”’
    All this has led me to wonder if I can apply the ChuckleBluff to a few of my own upcoming cases.
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    Monday 12 November 2007
    Year 2 (week 7): TheMoldies
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    TheMadOldies or TheMoldies, as SlipperySlope has taken to calling them, arrived in chambers today. I’m not sure what the collective noun would be in this case: a cackle? Or maybe a hobble? Whatever it is, they certainly lived up to all expectations. Despite their average age being well above that of the Rolling Stones, they were certainly rock ’n’ roll, baby. There were seven of them in all and apparently there are more in the background. It doesn’t really bear thinking about. All of them have been served anti-social behaviour orders aimed at stopping them from causing various kinds of idiosyncratic offences. An eighty-five-year-old man called Arthur, for example, says that he can’t stop doing moonies every time he sees a police car go by. Then his seventy-nine-year-old wife Ethel says she gets into moods where she feels compelled to chuck buckets of water on teenagers going past her house. Another is an eighty-one-year-old man called Stanley (a nickname he says is due to the fact that his surname is Matthews), who has recently taken to dribbling a football wherever he goes. This not only includes the local shops but it even extended as far as chambers today. Mind you, I have to admit that I enjoyed it when he dribbled into UpTights’s room and kicked the ball on to her desk shouting, ‘He shoots, he scores!’
    Now whilst this may seem unusual behaviour, you may well ask whether these people are simply starting to suffer the terrible effects of such ageing diseases as dementia. This is no doubt the case that the other side will try to make, but the clients today were having none of it. We were told that there are dozens of them who have all been affected in similar ways within the space of six months and they all blame this on the local mobile phone mast that has recently been installed on top of a nearby little hill. They reckon that the telecom company in question has boosted its signal beyond the norm.
    Well, despite it certainly proving to be a colourful conference, there is very little I can do at this stage. If we are going to get anywhere with this case we will need some evidence, a vital part of the whole process, which at the moment is lacking in almost every regard with the exception of TheMoldies’ symptoms.
    Either way the case isn’t going away any time soon and it should provide a bit of extra interest to my practice.
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    Tuesday 13 November 2007
    Year 2 (week 7): Soul destroying
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    Been thinking a lot about TheMoldies. They remind me of a poem by Roger McGough called ‘Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death’, in which he says, ‘when I’m 91 with silver hair and sitting in a barber’s chair may rival gangsters with hamfisted tommyguns burst in and give me a short back and insides.’
    It’s incredibly sad that they are being affected by something and yet it was clear from the conference that their symptoms are something of a double-edged sword. As one of them said, ‘Us oldies have never spoken out before. But there are lots of us now young man and sooner or later we’re going to take back the power.’
    There was a kind of breathless excitement to the whole thing. It