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.