Off Games

Dear Captain of the Law Team,
Please excuse our Josephine from exams. She is unwell with trenchfoot...

Trenchfoot it is not, but Josephine is feeling decidedly iffy. It could be an allergy to land law, an intolerance to revision or - most likely of all - overexposure to traffic pollution from having her window open whilst working at her desk. Some might say it serves her right for not getting fitted for a gas mask.

You're upstairs in the room with the coats...

and everyone's speaking Latin.

Before Josephine is inundated with corrections regarding her poor attempt at latin wit from regular contributors to Points of View do please note that, in the interest of accuracy, Accidental Law Student and I debated at length the possible declensions of "patria" and "lex". Alas, despite being awarded full marks in various examination papers culminating in an A at A-level, Josephine has a very poor grasp of Latin grammar indeed (this largely owing to her latin teacher's philosophy that grammar would "just come naturally").

As such, the only thing she feels able to decline are any invitations to residential latin courses over the summer vacation. No thank you very much...

Adrenaline II

Today Josephine got up, as her father would say, first thing of an afternoon and opened the curtains at 4pm to the End of The World: apocalyptic gloom and vile squally-grey rain. The only other option being land law revision, Josephine returned to bed to catch up on the remaining hours of sleep accumulatively lost over recent weeks and to generally chill out. The energy supply, it seems, was not unlimited.

Josephine has no doubt that she was herself pretty annoying gabbling away through case law on Occupiers' Liability yesterday morning on the bus into Islington. She apologised profusely to the lady commanding the seat-and-half-of-her-own next to her, before muttering quietly at some speed under her breath. But more irritating than "Coleman Bros...lion!...The Calgarth...slide down your banisters!...Laverton kebab!" was undoubtedly the portly, suited gentleman who proceeded to make unrelenting business calls on his mobile for the duration of the route to the tube, at a volume just a little too loud to be natural.

"Charles! Is now a good time to talk? Well I won't keep you long... [so obviously not, then, but I'll talk at you anyway] I've been thinking about carbon offsetting..."

He evidently thought himself to be exceedingly witty, repeating all of his jokes at least twice for the benefit of those at the back of the bus who perhaps didn't catch them on first utterance or, as Josephine suspects, because the poor sod at the other end of the phone had missed his cue to laugh the first time. What on earth did these people do before the invention of the mobile? Couldn't he have waited until he got to the office? And what exactly made him think we were remotely interested or impressed?

Of course, we were and after the fourth phonecall in fifteen minutes everyone was in complete awe: we all thought he must be very clever and popular and important and busy indeed. What a pity Josephine had an exam to get to and alighted at Angel otherwise she might have been tempted to stand next to him and make a couple of imaginative calls of her own...

"Algernon! Hallo old chap, how are you? No, no, that's quite all right, I won't interrupt your kippers. I was just giving you a tinkle to discuss the coy carp in the moat..."

So. Almost halfway through the War on Law and a brief revision interlude before the battle recommences a week on Monday. Josephine will resume her post at the revision parapet tomorrow for more fun and frolics from within the trenches of law-books, notes and folders gathering in her room.

Dulce et decorum est pro lege mori.

But for now, amused by the crying orgasmic girls mouthing his name in the audience, Josephine is going to return her attention to Pennebaker's film of Bowie's last performance as Ziggy Stardust at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973 on BBC Four. Sublimely unusual voice but by god, David, that's quite some swimsuit you're wearing...

Adrenaline I

Thank goodness for Adrenaline. But for it, Josephine might be dead!

Josephine went to bed at 4am. Josephine got up at 7am. Josephine did a three hour contract paper on caffeine, lucozade and alka-seltzer power. Josephine sat around forever again in silence again while they collected in the papers slowly again. And then Josephine got on the train again and went home again. Now...

Josephine can't bloody well sleep again!

What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start.

Think Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra, Op.30.

Huge rolling reinforced-metal shutters glide upwards like something out of Apollo 13 to reveal row after row after row of desks, before sliding down again to lock almost a thousand of us in for over three hours. Our invigilator speaks to us over a tannoy. A string quartet plays outside. Josephine has never seen anything like it in her life. So many lawyers (and not enough pupillages).

It took over half an hour of sitting in silence for the invigilators to collect all the papers. It took almost a decade to get there, and almost the same again just to walk from the entrance to the examination hall. It took nearly twice that to queue for the toilets. The hall was freezing, it's somewhere out in the deepest, darkest Zone 3 wilderness, and the only conceivable way of getting there is by Toy Train. The trains and the platforms are barely big enough to hold a class of primary school children, let alone an army of law students.

According to the specifications detailed on its website, the exhibition space in which our examinations are held boast 32,250m2 column free space, partitioned floor space with movable walls, 10m high ceilings, 7.2m wide drive-in-doorways and 3 lane lorry way access. All of which proved to be invaluable in my first examination this morning: I don't quite know how else I'd have managed to squeeze in otherwise.

When time permits, Josephine will spew forth on the spelling and grammar inaccuracies that litter the course manuals published by her GDL provider. Most of them are irritating. Apostrophes as unwelcome as snails in ginger beer bottles, and all kinds of variants of the more common spelling errors. Of course, some of them are highly amusing. Two particular highlights during my revision so far this week:

12.8 Conflict between Article 8 and Article 10
"... In the former circumstances the press had a 'watchdog' role imparting information and ideas on matters of pubic interest."

17.3.1 Impossibility
"...Equally in Robinson v Davison (1871) LR 6 Exch 269 the contract was frustrated when a piano who was booked to perform a concert could not perform due to illness."

That really should be "which was booked".


One battle down, another 6 military operations to go.

Oi moi. Eheu.

Josephine is at the end of her tether. If the paddock is 9 metres in diameter, and there are buttercups growing in the centre, how long is a piece of string?

Exams commence in 17 hours, 52 minutes and counting. Therefore never send to know for whom the alarm bell tolls; it tolls for me.

Ostranenie

I've often been curious about the various techniques employed by fellow-students in revising for exams. Some of them have, in the past, seemed highly unproductive and others slightly crazy yet oddly profitable. It seems I am not alone in my current approach to committing case names to memory, using a system of flashcards which I believe to have been quite effective in learning music theory as a child. Of course, I have yet to see if my method will prove in any way successful until I have taken the scheduled exams in a couple of weeks.

In a conversation with Accidental Law Student (at a not-very-sensible hour on a Sunday night) on the pleasures and frustrations of trying to speak of life's clichés in a fresh and unclichéd way, I was amused and slightly surprised at myself for dredging the word 'ostranenie' from the murky depths of my memory. It wasn't so much that I had managed to broadly recall a concept - that happens all the time: I had retained the precise Russian term along with all of the relevant associations I had attached to it, together with rather more irrelevant details such as the exact location and circumstances under which I had committed these details to memory. Of course there would have been nothing at all unusual about this had I spent hours, weeks, months diligently studying Russian Formalism: this, however, was the profit of an evening's agitated attempt to memorize all of literary theory the night before a second-year exam. Having failed, I fear, to recall anything else of worth from this last-minute endeavour I find myself wondering with some disillusion...

...what will be the single, utterly useless fact that I retain out of a few weeks' cramming on an entire year's postgraduate diploma in law?

JE Penner

On Thursday, in an attempt to reset the hands of a somewhat disoriented bodyclock I went to bed at about nine. Notwithstanding several bedtime stories (Goldcorp Exchange Ltd and The Three Certainties, amongst other mp3 lecture favourites) I was still wide awake at midnight and not in the least bit sleepy, so I thought perhaps a little further reading on the finer points of creating a valid trust might have the desired soporific effect. Not so.

Professor Penner's work on the Law of Trusts makes for really rather enjoyable reading such that Josephine was still reading at 4am.

Perhaps next time a spot of EU Law might be more effective.