The notion that writers cherish the idea that anyone pays much attention to what they write is a little far fetched. Law firm's learn their profits are below the national average. The joy of after dinner speeches.

The Law Society’s Gazette, January 1970

View from the countryNot many writers are able to cherish for very long the idea that anyone pays much attention to what they write… I once sat in a train watching a fellow traveller reading a magazine in which, at page forty, an article of mine was printed. After sixty miles he had with evident appreciation read the first thirty-nine. By then I was sitting bolt upright, ready to nod and smile in time with him. When he turned to the most important page and after the most cursory of glances, he yawned, threw the magazine on the seat beside him, leant back in the corner and fell fast asleep…

... Law firm profits, we now realise [following a report from the Prices and Incomes Board], average below what we learn to be the national average – and we had thought we were doing reasonably well… Below average as most of us may be, we have many blessings to number. Most of our clients we can count as friends. We do the work we enjoy in all its wide and frustrating variety. When we take a day off for fishing our only punishment is the accumulation on our desk the following morning. I would be unwilling to swap the advantages of self-employment…

... For me this has been a year of dinners [the writer was then president of the Cambridgeshire Law Society], and worse, of after-dinner speeches. We all admire the suave figure who rises with a look of real pleasure, cigar in hand, witty, urbane and spontaneous. I suspect, though, that even the suave figure may have been rehearsing in the car on the drive to the meal. He may have even been balancing, as I always do, on the edge of the abyss that is divided by the brandy that releases the urbane flow – and the next one that leaves one facing the audience with a feeling of severe concussion.

David Barr

Random RamblingsRecently we have had some unexpected support from the Lord Chancellor himself in a debate in the House of Lords on Consumer Problems. (He said): ‘No doubt it seems a shame that lawyers require to be paid for what they do, instead of not charging anybody and living on nothing, but I am afraid that if one wants somebody with the technical qualifications one has to pay for them.’ Well, I suppose this would apply to anybody in any walk of life who tries to provide a service, but it is encouraging to know that a socialist Lord Chancellor recognises one of the basic facts of life so far as solicitors are concerned.

GA Dodsworth