On my desk in my private room I have a one-armed bandit and a biplane.

They are about two inches tall.

They are pencil sharpeners.

A trawl through the desks of other district judges is likely to reveal other such goodies; by far the most common are toy cars.Contrary to rumour, toy cars are not provided by the Lord Chancellor's Department, but they form an essential part of the machinery of justice.

They are used principally for road traffic disputes or, as they are colloquially called, 'bent metal cases'.

These are disputes involving two stationary vehicles which manage to crash into each other, and they occupy a considerable proportion of a district judge's small claims track list.Unless the defendant is going to admit that he or she ran into the back of the claimant's stationary vehicle, out come the cars.It is unlikely the district judge will have a toy car for every occasion.

A Ferrari may have to stand in for anything from a Ford Fiesta to a double-decker bus.

'Imagine, if you can, that this Lamborghini Diablo is your Mini Metro and this Porsche 911 Turbo is your milk float.'Occasionally litigants have objected to their vehicles being downgraded from, say, an actual Mercedes to a scratched Vauxhall Viva with a wheel missing.

There are also the difficulties of scale and size.

A model Fiat Cinquecento is useless for depicting a Volvo Estate.Some judges, me included, do not have the benefit of model cars at all.

Rather than substitute my one-armed bandit and biplane, I tend to rely on squarer objects.

'Let's call this inkpad your Toyota Carina with the electric windows, air conditioning and adjustable suspension and this Stationery Office volume two of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 your 52-seater coach.' Of course, the use of models and substitutes does produce some interesting results.

Vehicles are depicted as impossibly going sideways or in directions which appear to defy normal laws of geometry and physics.At least one district judge I know takes the depiction even further.

Not only does he have model cars but also different stretches of road.

The locus in quo can be recreated in an instant before your very eyes, be it a T-junction, crossroads or the dreaded roundabout.One wonders how far this might go.

Should buildings be included to add to authenticity? Is there an argument for a sort of judicial Scalextric, where cars can actually move without being pushed by anxious litigants?In America (where else?) they now recreate incidents using the benefit of information technology, so that the accident appears once again in all its glory on a computer screen in court.

I can see a whole new industry being born of 'incident recreation' with judges donning virtual reality headsets to establish exactly how the claimant's car came to roll back and hit the defendant's perfectly stationary vehicle.But therein lies the paradox.

There are bound to be two computer versions of the accident, that of the claimant and that of the defendant or even more if we include witnesses.None of these may even accord with what actually happened, as they are likely to be necessarily subjective.

At the end of the day the inkpad and volume two are just as effective.