I spy with my little eye something beginning with...

...barrister.

The deadline for one of the non-OLPAS pupillage applications passed earlier in the week. Josephine, having long ago lost faith in Royal Mail, delivered hers to the clerks in person shortly before the deadline (not itself impressive) and not without some considerable effort in locating chambers (from which you would quite rightly deduce that Josephine has not yet undertaken mini-pupillage with this set. Also not impressive). But for a little game of Spot the Barrister, Josephine might never have made it there at all.

The luggage is one of the tell-tale signs. They're either scurrying about in the Chancery Lane area wearing a three-piece pin-stripe suit and a satchel over the shoulder so full it might burst at any moment, or storming along the pavements with a suitcase on wheels so enormous they would look better in Heathrow wearing flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt. But it was the ravelled pink ribbon tied around the base of the shoulder straps that sentenced him completely. Short of sporting a wig and wing-collar it couldn't have been much more obvious. Mercifully his directions were rather more accurate than those of the sweetly helpful barrister I bespied beside a lampost on New Fetter Lane, who had pointed me in the opposite direction entirely.

Sauntering up Chancery Lane and back towards the bus-stop on Gray's Inn Road I was nearly knocked flying by a sincerely fraught-looking guy racing past me, large white envelope in hand bearing the words "Pupillage 2008" and the name of the barrister to whom the application should be addressed. Better late than never?

Following the recent scandal surrounding skulduggery and shenanigans in a Mooting Society South of the Thames, one wonders if the unscrupulous retiring President will be proudly boasting "veni, circumveni, 'vici'" in forthcoming pupillage interviews... If this is the manner in which he embarks upon his career at the Bar, the antics of BabyBarista look set to be surpassed.

Yes, it is Josephine's reasonable submission that Hannibal was not the last to declare "aut viam inveniam aut faciam"...