Even Houdini would have struggled with this one...

Last week we found our intrepid hero tied to the railway tracks.
The 7:15 to Oblivion is approaching. Can our handsome and witty idol disengage himself from the ropes, chains, shackles, thumbcuffs and assorted bondage paraphenalia to escape before the locomotive delivers the unkindest cut of all?

Does he leap up with a spring, a smile and a one liner?

In a word

No

I have no chance of an appeal, my advocacy assessment has (allegedly) been seen by 3 people, all of which have decided that it was not good enough to pass. Bugger.

In truth, I had expected that. Ho hum. C'est la rie. Still a bummer though...

Anyhow, the important thing now is to concentrate and get back to it. It's not the end of the world. I have a retake to do sometime in late April or early May. And if I cock that one up there is still a further chance in August. If I fail that one then we are talking about wasting a whole lot of money here. But, hey we are not there yet, right people?

So saying, it was pretty difficult at the start of the week. My motivation levels were rock bottom and I felt lower than a centipedes kneecaps. And before any entymolo, any entimulo, any entimililiogical, bug lovers complain, I know that centipedes probably don't have kneecaps.

I meant millipedes anyway.


As a corollary to last weeks post (which I have amended). I did not and have never lied to the police. I told the story to demonstrate how easy it is to make a mistake about an alibi. Even after a few weeks, it can be difficult to place yourself at a particular location at a particular time. Try it for yourself-pick a date close to a month back and write down what you were doing during the day. It's very difficult unless the day you chose was memorable for some reason-or you have a life like mine.

Get up-study-go to school-come home-play with toys-watch tv-go to bed. (repeat until senile).

One day I would love to burn the candle at one end.

So, where are the police now when I can pinpoint my movements exactly? Ha, nowhere to be seen.

Right that's the weekly drivel over-onto the important stuff now. The main feature of this week was the addition of consolidation workshops. We had 4 of these tacked onto the end of our days. Three were bigguns lasting an hour and the other a tiddler barely scraping 20 odd minutes.

The amazing thing about them was the way that they varied from being exceptionally useful and well thought out to where you could actually sense the oxygen molecules being wasted. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

Monday was our penultimate property session. As I have mentioned before these have a very laid back feel to them at present (partly from the tutor's style and partly from the 'fact' that the work load is considerably less).
This week we discussed the remedies that are available to a landlord when a tenant either fails to pay the rent or breaks another of their promises. All very easy going and pleasant. We even finished early (for the first time since Ive been here) and by a full 30 minutes too.
This would have been great apart from the fact that we had the first of our consolidation workshops to come. So rather than wait half an hour, we had to wait the full hour. Which is actually no great heartbreak since it gave me a chance to chat to members of my tutor group-unfortunately just bringing it home to me how much I'm going to miss them in a week or so.

BTW, I am a glass 'half empty' kind of guy (in case you hadn't guessed)

Property consolidation.

Well, that's an hour of my life I won't see again.

What a waste of time. If I have to sit in a lecture again while someone who hasn't sat an exam in nearly twenty years tells me how to spend my time in the exam.... 'Each mark should take about 2 and a half minutes, so a 10 minute question should take a about 25 minutes'. 'Oh and by the way, the multiple choice questions are worth 20 marks and you should spend no more than half an hour on them'

WTF? Do these people ever think about what they are saying? If you hadn't guessed, this was the waste of oxygen lecture. For the record, I wasn't the only disenchated person-I can't believe that anyone got anything from it and the moans of dissent as we left were audible. The common opinion seemed to be, 'well, if they're all like that I won't bother with the next one'


Tuesday-and I have my meeting with a tutor to review my advocacy. Astute readers will have already noticed the result so I won't repeat it. I will, however note down a few musings.

I was scheduled to meet her at 1pm-by about 10 past I was still waiting outside her door. When she finally opened up and met me she revealed that she hadn't got my tape with her-it was in her office (even though she doesn't have a TV/video in there). So she went off to get it. Cue another wait for 10 minutes. It should be noted that I have a workshop at half past-so we haven't got long.

She tries to give me feedback-this is a bit tricky because she hasn't seen the tape for nearly a month (and she saw hundreds then), so she is reading the comments from the original markers script. Some things I am told I did well, some not so well-where I let myself down was

• not explaining the factual situation
• my appalling start
• I focused in on minutia rather than taking a 'broadbrush' approach
• during the main part of my speech I (apparently) got very angry and emotional and appeared to be taking the case personally.
  

Oh, but my ending was good and my tie was nice...

Well, in a throw back to the 1980s I now have a registered video nasty sitting on my shelf. Not quite as gory as 'driller killer' or as crude as 'I spit on your grave' and with less artistic merit than 'Cannibal holocaust'.
Yep, I am now the proud owner of my own advocacy. (and no, it is not going on 'Youtube' anytime soon). In preparation for writing this, I actually did something very brave and watched it this morning (with my thumb on fast-forward) and discovered something strange.

It's not as bad as I thought it was. Granted I didn't watch it all (I hate looking at myself) and yes, the drying up at the start is acutely embarrasing but it looked OK. As for anger, well to quote an iconic TV prog from the 70s;

'don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry'.

No, that's not anger. If I was feeling any emotion about the case it would be because the woman who was making the claim came across as a right chancer and I thought she was wasting court time.

It does rather put me in a bit of a quandary though. If that is not good enough, what the f(heck) can I do to improve it? Outside of plastic surgery and a hair transplant of course...

The upshot of this was that I was late for class (luckily I arrived at the same time as another student-so I was saved a sarky comment). Insolvency was pretty straight forward, this tutor tries to slim every subject down to a 'checklist' and base all answers upon this.
This is pretty good advice generally for the course. We have to know no actual law just procedure. Procedure is just that, you go from A to B to C following a strict path. The checklist becomes your guide to staying on the path.

After Insolvency, we bimbled into the second consolidation hour-this time for business. Business is tested in two exams since it covers almost half the compulsary course. It encompasses company law/partnership law/revenue law (tax) and insolvency. It was worth noting that numbers were down on the previous day-their loss, because this one was excellent.
The tutor had taken time to break the course down and produced a list of what we could (and should) be focussing on (granted he did stress that we ought to be revising already-cue look of withering scorn from my seat) but like all the others students present, I was pleased that I had attended.

Mind you, there were a few dazed looks at the end-but only because they were trying to take it all in. Business is a really large subject. I have filled 3 A4 files comfortably and although I aim to strip away a lot of that to get it neat and concise for exam purposes it will still be the most extensive amount of information I'll be taking into an assessment.

Talking of assessments. I had planned on Wednesday to finish my drafting ready to hand in on Thursday-but it kind of never happened. I think I was still taking the previous weeks result badly. I was happy to write up my course notes but that 'spark' or inspiration was never there. So I worked on other things and prepared to get up early Thurday.

Its 4am Thurday morning. No really, it is. When I say early, I mean it. What I had to do was finish off my criminal prep and finish off the drafting. So I drifted between the two, not quite putting my full concentration into either.
I shall draw a veil over it suffice to say that I did hand in a finished agreement (not my best work-but once you've failed one you don't give a toss about the rest...).
Interestingly, when I got to crim lit I found that my prep for that had been good, so maybe the drafting was better than I gave it credit for.

Criminal lit focused on 2 big areas coming up to a trial-can the prosecution (hurrah!) use a defendants confession or 'bad character' as evidence or can the defence (boooooooo!) get this evidence thrown out as prejudicial and unfair? It is a little strange-about 5 years ago, the defendants previous (including character) could not be mentioned except in special circumstances-whereas another witnesses convictions and character were fair game to either side.
Cue the 'Criminal Justice Act' (a misnomer if ever one existed) which allows a defendant's convictions/bad character to be raised easily and another witness? Yep, you guessed it-harder to get hold of than fresh dodo pate...
Liberal society? Ha!

After a quick consolidation session on the last two workshops-including consolidating what we had just studied (go figure) we were free to go. I had the urge to have a celebratory drinkee to commemorate handing in some more written work.

Friday-ugh, hangover! Oh, god, why do I do this...?

Company law was as awkward as ever-we seem to have run out of new things and this workshop was treated as an exam practice. We were handed an exam (style) question, chatted informally about it for ten minutes then had to answer it in exam time (about 45 minutes). I was pleased because I finished it (I may have been the only one) but not so pleased when we checked over the answer in class and my work disappeared under a lot of red pen.
Still, having a 'glass half full' moment, I am now just one workshop away from not having any more business law to do (exam excluded). Hurrah!

The final hour of the week (the graveyard shift) had been drawn by a tutor who tried to get us interested in a civil litigation consolidation. It was 'kind of good' in that it went over a typical long exam question fairly thoroughly but 'kind of bad' in that after telling us (again) how we should use our time for questions depending on how many marks they are worth, they gave us a question with no marks indicated on it.

As we were leaving my neighbouring colleague muttered to me, 'how the **** do they expect us to answer the ****ing questions to time if they don't give us the ****ing marks?'

I don't know, these covent educated girls-mouths like sewers, all of 'em...

That's me up to date-I did some work over the weekend but only about 5 hours on each of Saturday and Sunday. I don't mind being lazy this weekend. I have decided that from next weekend on, I'm going into the 'tank' to be ready for my exams, so it'll do me some good to get a bit of time away from the books.

Oh, and we had snow this week. It was on Wednesday and was a few millimeters deep and as such the whole transport system almost ground to a halt...