There is still amusement in the law. I delivered an application to the High Court today. Royal Mail had lost my previous bundle and I thought it best to hand over a substitute in person (ironically, the case is about a judge who believed in the efficacy of the postal service rather than my client who said she had never been served). I had not been behind the scenes for many years.

Nothing seemed to have changed.

There is no internal delivery service for a start, so once you get through the scanner you have to try to navigate a way to the appropriate office to deposit your bundle. Is any other large organisation so deficient?

Memory got me through the twists and turns to the Bear Garden, echoingly empty of course since Woolf drove most supplicants to the county courts, but then I was on my own. I was looking for the Administrative Court office at C315 but seemed doomed to stumble through E numbers only. Eventually someone guided me towards my destination. But there was great entertainment along the way. Everywhere there seemed to be notices in bold italic saying things like ‘Second Scrivener to the Queens Remembrancer, Do not enter’, long corridors with locked doors half way down and notices saying all would be locked after a certain time. It all felt like those endless passages in The Name of the Rose. All quite enough to make you laugh aloud, as indeed I did.

No doubt the design keeps the public at bay. Perhaps that is intended. But one comes away thinking it is going to need a lot more than Lord Justice Jackson to give us an efficient, consumer -friendly court system.

Roger Sceats, D. R. Sceats, Surbiton

Topics