A rather startling story in The Telegraph about the fact that Queen Victoria wore bloomers with a 55 inch waist. She was only five feet tall and The Telegraph reports (in unnecessary detail for my breakfast reading) “Like other ladies of the late-Victorian era, the Queen wore open-crotch knickers whose separate legs were joined by a draw-string at the waist.”
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Geeklawyer announces that he is on a three week trip to Japan… no doubt with saki vouchers and various tech kit to report from Nippon. He plans, inter alia, to speak japanese to real Japanese people and, presumably, take them by surprise. A brief trip to Wikipedia to bone up on my knowledge of japanese provided me with a very useful japanese phrase. I have imparted this knowledge to Geeklawyer:
Zō-wa hana-ga nagai (desu) – “As for elephants, (their) noses are long”.
Reading The Mirror at 6.30 am this morning as I drank coffee outside my cafe of choice, I read “Somebody should have told Sergei Shmolik football is meant to be a game of two halves…[These pictures] show the top international referee earning himself a red card as he staggers around “like a clown” following an alleged vodka binge. The 43-year-old later claimed he was suffering back pain – but was in fact so bladdered during the Belarus premier league match he could barely move at all.”
Update: I managed to find a video of this command performance
Greedy, grasping, duplicitous, self-serving, silver-tongued, slimy, pompous… and that’s being 
diplomatic.
Dominic Carman, writing in the Sunday Times, asks if top lawyers are worth their huge fees, lists the Top 50, providing information on how much they earn / how greedy they are (?) and seems to conclude that the Top 50 are worth it. You may find it interesting to see how much they earn and either be depressed by the information or delight in the fact that they aren’t making quite as much as you are / you thought they were making!
I did, however, enjoy the cameo on Nigel Boardman (“the best-known lawyer in the City… Slaughter and May’s star dealmaker”) where Carman related the tale…. “He personifies the strong work ethos of the firm. One story tells of the trainee who shared his office getting up to leave at 8pm. As he reached for his coat, Boardman asked, “Are you cold?”
Well… that is quite enough about lawyers, greedy, rapacious, or otherwise. I am in danger of losing my reputation for not actually having any law in my blawg.
Moving on…
LAWMINX UPDATE…
I received a comment to this post from lawMinx: “horrendous problems with my blog – its been hijacked by a guy called Paul Masterson, and for the moment I can do nothing about it; my url has therefore changed – it is no longer lawminx.blogspot.com but minx610.blogspot.com, so you’ll have to ammend your link to me, Im afraid!!”
So what are they are to?…
Quite a bit, as it happens. Family Lore continues to survey the realm of marital breakdown and this week reports on “Mammon before Love” revealing that slumping city bonuses due to the credit crunch are driving wives of city high earners to take legal advice upon how to protect their own interests.
Andrew Keogh, author of The White Rabbit blog took time out in a busy week to give a detailed analysis of R v Davis and The Civil Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Bill in a podcast with me – allowing him, deservedly, to claim that he had shoehorned a bit of law into his law blog (a man after my own heart). White Rabbit also reported on the poetry of the Shipping forecast, even if it did interrupt the radio cricket coverage. White Rabbit is right – there is something remarkably British about the shipping forecast – always enjoyable to listen to.
Dan Hull of What About Clients?, who also did a podcast with me this week on his views on client service and lay Generation x / Generation Y types – has explained the mystery of why WAC? sometimes becomes What About Paris? – the name changes at weekends.
Head of Legal comments on the absurd case of Ladele v Islington: “The other court case that has attracted massive interest this week has of course been that of Lillian Ladele, who, an Employment Tribunal has found, was both directly and indirectly discriminated against on grounds of her religion, and was harassed on religious grounds, too, by disciplining her for her refusal, as a Christian, to perform civil partnership ceremonies.”
To my jaded eye, this is nonsense and, as Head of Legal pointed out: “if as the Tribunal says, Ms. Ladele’s stance is based on her belief that marriage is a life-long bond between a man and a woman, why didn’t she kick up this fuss about marrying divorcees?”
Binary Law comments on the issue of Unlocking the power of information. If you have a hankering for a peerage in the post cash-for-honours era and would like to know what arcane and mysterious ceremonial is 
performed on introduction to the Lords – The Lords of the Blog blog has the answer.
Phit for Phucking?
The irrepressible and amusing Ms R, author of the Woman of Experience blog asks: “Vaginal tune up anyone? “
And… the judges? Have they been keeping us amused this week?
Well, apart from the inevitable “Judge Judge become Lord Chief Judge” type 
headlines – on the appointment of Sir Igor Judge as Lord Chief Justice – we had Sir Mark Potter, President of the Family Division, defending the closed system by saying that families do not want the “washing of dirty linen and the exploring of deeply emotional and personal issues in public”.
We also had the extraordinary case, reported in The Times: “The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) suffered a major blow today after a judge threw out a price-fixing case against five drug companies, leaving an eight-year investigation that cost an estimated £25 million in tatters”
And finally…. Gaffe of the Week?
Gordon Brown reels from gaffe to crisis to gaffe. Gordon Brown attends the G8 meeting after lecturing the great British public about wasting food and then sits down to a huge dinner; reported as being 6-10 courses, depending on the newspapeer one was reading. Showing G8 leaders photographs of atrocities in Zimbabwe, Brown appeared to secure commitment from other G8 leaders to impose sanctions against the buffoon, Mugabe, and a number of other named Zimbabwe government cyphers, only to return in triumph to the United Kingdom to find, en route to the Commons, that President Medvedev of Russia had resiled and Bush was doing a one man comedy show by saying goodbye “from the World’s biggest polluter’ and waving his arms in the air. Brown had no triumph on sanctions or global warming to report. The shadowy figures continue to circle. How long will Brown last?
Charon QC 