James Morton's life was simpler and more personal in the days before iPods, BlackBerrys and easy bail for domestic burglary


Back in the good old days, when I was young, Saturday morning was about work for Simpson, my principal, and so therefore also for me and the managing clerk, who could break string with one hand. Other solicitors in the locality tried to unionise and agree that there would be no opening on Saturdays, but Simpson would have none of it and, as a result, they dared not close. The prospect of all that work walking down the street to this upstart was too much for them to bear.



So, on a Saturday morning there was Simpson in a sports jacket, checked shirt, yellow pullover and suede shoes. I answered the telephone while trying to put together a rudimentary card index system for old files. The managing clerk made the coffee. Without Simpson’s lady conveyancer, of whom I suspect he was really rather afraid, everything was much jollier. The clients rolled in.



While in the high street the wife ordered the weekend groceries, in came her husband to check on how the house sale or purchase was going. No appointment needed, just take a seat in the waiting room — free for once from my clients, who had not shaken off the effects of Friday night in the Astor club.



I thought of those long-gone Saturday mornings the other day when the brother of a friend was telling me about an uninvited call he made on his solicitor, at which he was made to feel most unwelcome. Both the solicitor dealing with his case and her secretary were far too busy to deal with him. Perhaps it was his fault – with email, iPods, BlackBerrys and all the other invasive paraphernalia, in today’s high street personal contact is both unwanted and no longer necessary.



At least he seems to have found a buyer for his house. Over the years I have been unlucky with my choice of estate agent. Once, when I threatened to take a house sale away from one firm I was telephoned that afternoon to say an offer had come in. No, I could not be told the name and address of the purchaser. It was illegal to divulge that. Not surprisingly, I never heard another word. When I eventually rang again I was told the person had left the firm and, so far as I could make out, had taken my file with him because no one had any details about me.



A few months ago, another friend of mine had to sell a house. She contacted a number of agents and arranged a beauty parade for a Saturday afternoon. One failed to appear, but on the Tuesday she received a letter saying how pleased the agent had been to meet her. A second sent her a draft agreement offering a sole agency, but repeated emails and telephone calls failed to persuade the agent to say what he proposed his commission should be.



As a postscript (that being Latin, I am now surely committing a disciplinary offence), I am told by an Italian friend that the best way to sell a house is to obtain a statuette of St Joseph and bury him upside down in the garden. Apparently he should be removed after exchange of contracts.





Bare faced

My day-to-day reading is a little behind, but I see that last year two 21-year-old women in Worthing were arrested and charged with outraging public decency. They were accused of ‘exposing their chests’ to CCTV cameras. What allegedly makes the incident so shocking is that it seems two 15-year-old boys were nearby when they did this. Even in this day and age, when bare breasts are the staple diet of the cinema and television, the boys were doubtless shocked and horrified to see them in the flesh, rather than realising this was the best thing that had happened to them since Worthing Town won the Cup. The two women pleaded not guilty and it took only a couple of days for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide it ‘would not be in the public interest’ to continue the case.



This reminds me of the hopeless cases years ago when our clients were accused of swearing in public, using words now heard on TV well before the six o’clock news and ‘two nuns in the vicinity crossed themselves’ or, as a variation, ‘an elderly gentleman of clerical appearance hurried to the other side of the street’. Perhaps the boys should have given evidence. The nuns never did. But that never stopped the local bench convicting.





Easy thieving

At long last our local train service has pasted ‘keep feet off seats’ notices. But these seem to have acted as a challenge, and one readily accepted by passengers. I don’t suppose fines would help. I think it was Max Miller who, years ago, had the joke about the little boy saving his money: asked why he wanted to save £5, he said it was so he could spit on a bus. Today he could do that with impunity and use the money for a down payment on a Beretta.



Perceptions change. My local news sheet, to which the police contribute a column, has only one case listed as ‘major crime’. A man had driven off from the garage without paying for his petrol. Under a lesser heading were three domestic daytime burglaries. Naturally, there were no suspects in any of these latter cases. When I first began to defend, domestic burglary carried an almost automatic prison sentence. There was also a case – admittedly from the 19th century, Robinson I think – which said that domestic burglars should not be given bail. I remember it was cited with enthusiasm by the prosecuting solicitors in Essex into which county my clients foolishly, and inexplicably, strayed far too often late at night.



James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist