Random jottings from a disused mind
As I approach the start of the second (and smaller) part of the course and haven't anything new or exciting (as ever) to write I thought that I would put a few disjointed musings down.
This week I begin my electives-these are optional courses that are chosen to fit in with your career plans. By this stage it is expected that we can apply our rapier-like legal brains **cough** to the course of our future vocations.
And, to be fair; I have kept my elective choices the same as they were before I ever came to Guildford-so confident and positive I was before the course began. **double cough**
(As an aside I do have to mention 2 former class-mates who had their own (slightly eccentric) methods of choosing their electives.
This week I only have the first 2 large group lectures to attend. This would be blissful (a whole 2 hours work to do) except I'm going to be spending more time walking to and from college than actually attending the lectures...
Being a good student I had planned to do some pre-reading this week on my new electives. The post-exam lethargy had stopped me looking at the criminal textbook but I did stare at the employment one and the benefits and immigration one. In fact I knocked off about 100 pages of benefits and god does that look dreary-it reads like one long shopping list of what a person can claim and what they can't.
However, with this preparation in mind I had a look at the first of our lectures.
It's all about immigration....
Wrong, Paul. Very, very wrong. How wrong can one dipstick be? I could have looked at the lecture notes before wading through the boring dross. But no, old simple Salmon thought that because immmigration is at the back of the book we would do it last. Silly me for assuming that we might do the book in order-like in every other bloody course to date!
Oh well, best laid plans 'n' that.
Well, what else did I do this week? Well I applied for another training contract. I won't say with whom since there may be others who read this who might want to apply to the same place but would realise that they have no chance alongside my massive intellect **coughing fit**
This did involve me submitting a CV-this is old hat for me, my CV has been distributed far and wide throughout my working career.
I used to make it a point of not using any businesses that rejected me for a job but by my early thirties I was limited to shopping at Anne Summers and Kwikfit so had to abandon that idea.
I wrote out the accompanying letter with the right mix of subservience and toe curling brown-nosedness and then hunted for my CV on the laptop.
Ah, horror of horrors. Close to the start of the term I had a laptop cockup and had to wipe the hard drive and re-install everything. (I lost all of my undergraduate work-but that was no major loss mind...)
But I had also lost my CV-granted it was written about 15 years ago and has not dated well (but who has?) but that meant I had to write it from scratch. Cue panic-mode, I hunted high and low for a single hard copy to use as a blueprint-I could not find one. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!
Then I came across an entry on my internet PC labelled CV1-only problem is that it was 4kb big. I transferred it to my laptop and.....it worked, my CV was safe. A weeny bit out of date but repairable. Job done.
This week I also coughed up the cash for a place on a training scheme organised by the Free Representation Unit in London. (It does sound kind of like a 70s/80s political movement 'Free the Representation Unit One!'). The idea is that after a days training, I'll receive a couple of case files-and have to write up an assessment of them.
If this is done well enough then I'll get a real case file with a real human being and prepare and then fight the case for them at an Employment Tribunal. This is real 'brown-trouser' stuff for me-exciting as well though. (Although probably not as scary as for the client though-especially when they meet me 'this quivering wreck is your advocate-forget the goofy smile and crooked face, he probably doesn't eat babies')
If this is fun, then they have a second course to attend for Social Security Tribunals and I'll try to get on that one as well.
I have to submit my last piece of written work this week (excepting any retakes). It is an extended piece of legal research, we are given a scenario which raise a number of legal points and using the t'internet or books (yeah, right) come up with an answer that could be used by a senior member of our imaginary firm to give advice to the client.
The research took an age but I did find it quite fun (in the whole crossword/Sudoku aspect) of solving a problem with the tools at hand. I will have to write it up in the next few days and that part will be dull in comparison but ho hum.
And finally two confessions. I forgot to write last week that one of the reasons that the property exam freaked me out (apart from the questions being a lot harder than I expected) was that before the exam the presiding tutor asked us to carefully read the multiple choice instructions. When I did so I realised that I had not completed the 3 previous papers correctly. Oh, blox.
These papers are marked by computer to save time and if not completed correctly they will be discarded.
That afternoon I emailed my tutor for comfort-luckily he was on the ball and put me through to someone who assured me that a human agent was still used to check any papers to see if they had been completed. They also said that I would get all the marks coming to me. So that's another few in the bag (not many though since MCQs are hard, really hard)
And another embarassing story;
Leading up to the exam I had lost some weight from a mixture of good diet and stress. However, my weekends idleness and drinking/junk food scoffing had contributed to me piling it back on.
Determined to beat this curse I decided to go for a walk before lunch. I packed my rucksack with law books (I knew that they had a use) and set off. It was a chilly day but I set a brisk pace. A quick half an hour to get the heart pumping will do me.
I had planned to walk down by the river but when I got there I realised that the recent rain had turned this into a brown squelchy ice rink. After attempting a few hilarious Bambi-like steps I turned back and decided to go for a pavement promenade.
After about 20 minutes I had nearly completed my circuit and was heading home. Now I must stress that I had never walked this way before (I had done it just once from the other direction) but confident in my natural ability to sense direction I gambolled along.
When the road I expected to see didn't come into view I took stock. Oh, silly me, I must have taken a wrong turn-oh well, this is the way, so if I proceed along here I'll reach my destination soon enough.
Astute readers will know what happens next. I am hideously and hopelessly lost. I hadn't brought my A-Z with me and didn't actually know the names of the roads I was looking for. Undaunted I used my amazing senses to find me home. I live close to a VERY busy road, so if I focus on the loudest sound of traffic and head that way I'll hit the main road.
At this stage you will be thinking, 'how did this lackwit EVER get a law degree?' (a good question, I'll get back to you on that one)
About half an hour later, I finally gave in and asked a local man how to get back to Guildford. I recognised him as being ethnically from the Asian subcontinent-so my first thought was 'just how far have I walked?' But this kind gentleman put me on the right track and helped me to retrace my steps.
I soon came across a road that I knew from the earlier part of my journey and 'because I know best' departed from his instructions and decided to retrace my steps.
Astute readers will know where this is going (which is more than I did). I got further lost. By this stage my MP3 player was running low on juice and this meant desperate times. (I hadn't brought any money with me to get a bus home-who needs money on a gentle walk?)
Eventually, I found a road that took me into the main part of Guildford and I made my way home. At this stage I was limping badly, partly from blisters on both feet but also from pain to my right knee (it is not a good knee, it is only held together by string and bubblegum)
I crawled my way up to my flat and the glorious luxury of a hot shower.
I set off at 12 noon with the aim of a brisk half an hour walk-I got in at 3pm!!!
Out of interest I weighed the bag, it weighed exactly 1 stone (7 1/2 kilos) and I had lugged the bloody thing around for 3 hours!!
I mention this because I had always prided myself on having good direction sense, however the previous week a friend had dropped me off after one of the exams and chided me for directing her so badly. Being a sensitive soul (you must take your victim as you find them) I suffered badly from this slight and shall be issuing a claim against this woman for defamation, loss of faculties and my wasted 2 1/2 hours. I have instructed my solicitors from the firm of Withey & Moftir to serve the papers...
The good news is that I had sweated off the weight that I had put on over the weekend. But sometimes the ends do not justify the means...
This week I begin my electives-these are optional courses that are chosen to fit in with your career plans. By this stage it is expected that we can apply our rapier-like legal brains **cough** to the course of our future vocations.
And, to be fair; I have kept my elective choices the same as they were before I ever came to Guildford-so confident and positive I was before the course began. **double cough**
(As an aside I do have to mention 2 former class-mates who had their own (slightly eccentric) methods of choosing their electives.
- One chose the same courses as his best friend-the theory being that they might share some classes and at least he would be guaranteed good notes.
- The other asked my advice on how to use the on-line choosing system then without looking to see what the courses were about picked 3 at random)
This week I only have the first 2 large group lectures to attend. This would be blissful (a whole 2 hours work to do) except I'm going to be spending more time walking to and from college than actually attending the lectures...
Being a good student I had planned to do some pre-reading this week on my new electives. The post-exam lethargy had stopped me looking at the criminal textbook but I did stare at the employment one and the benefits and immigration one. In fact I knocked off about 100 pages of benefits and god does that look dreary-it reads like one long shopping list of what a person can claim and what they can't.
However, with this preparation in mind I had a look at the first of our lectures.
It's all about immigration....
Wrong, Paul. Very, very wrong. How wrong can one dipstick be? I could have looked at the lecture notes before wading through the boring dross. But no, old simple Salmon thought that because immmigration is at the back of the book we would do it last. Silly me for assuming that we might do the book in order-like in every other bloody course to date!
Oh well, best laid plans 'n' that.
Well, what else did I do this week? Well I applied for another training contract. I won't say with whom since there may be others who read this who might want to apply to the same place but would realise that they have no chance alongside my massive intellect **coughing fit**
This did involve me submitting a CV-this is old hat for me, my CV has been distributed far and wide throughout my working career.
I used to make it a point of not using any businesses that rejected me for a job but by my early thirties I was limited to shopping at Anne Summers and Kwikfit so had to abandon that idea.
I wrote out the accompanying letter with the right mix of subservience and toe curling brown-nosedness and then hunted for my CV on the laptop.
Ah, horror of horrors. Close to the start of the term I had a laptop cockup and had to wipe the hard drive and re-install everything. (I lost all of my undergraduate work-but that was no major loss mind...)
But I had also lost my CV-granted it was written about 15 years ago and has not dated well (but who has?) but that meant I had to write it from scratch. Cue panic-mode, I hunted high and low for a single hard copy to use as a blueprint-I could not find one. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!
Then I came across an entry on my internet PC labelled CV1-only problem is that it was 4kb big. I transferred it to my laptop and.....it worked, my CV was safe. A weeny bit out of date but repairable. Job done.
The moral of this story? Don't bugger up the most important tool of your academic life.
OK, that's not much of a moral-but I try.
OK, that's not much of a moral-but I try.
This week I also coughed up the cash for a place on a training scheme organised by the Free Representation Unit in London. (It does sound kind of like a 70s/80s political movement 'Free the Representation Unit One!'). The idea is that after a days training, I'll receive a couple of case files-and have to write up an assessment of them.
If this is done well enough then I'll get a real case file with a real human being and prepare and then fight the case for them at an Employment Tribunal. This is real 'brown-trouser' stuff for me-exciting as well though. (Although probably not as scary as for the client though-especially when they meet me 'this quivering wreck is your advocate-forget the goofy smile and crooked face, he probably doesn't eat babies')
If this is fun, then they have a second course to attend for Social Security Tribunals and I'll try to get on that one as well.
I have to submit my last piece of written work this week (excepting any retakes). It is an extended piece of legal research, we are given a scenario which raise a number of legal points and using the t'internet or books (yeah, right) come up with an answer that could be used by a senior member of our imaginary firm to give advice to the client.
The research took an age but I did find it quite fun (in the whole crossword/Sudoku aspect) of solving a problem with the tools at hand. I will have to write it up in the next few days and that part will be dull in comparison but ho hum.
And finally two confessions. I forgot to write last week that one of the reasons that the property exam freaked me out (apart from the questions being a lot harder than I expected) was that before the exam the presiding tutor asked us to carefully read the multiple choice instructions. When I did so I realised that I had not completed the 3 previous papers correctly. Oh, blox.
These papers are marked by computer to save time and if not completed correctly they will be discarded.
That afternoon I emailed my tutor for comfort-luckily he was on the ball and put me through to someone who assured me that a human agent was still used to check any papers to see if they had been completed. They also said that I would get all the marks coming to me. So that's another few in the bag (not many though since MCQs are hard, really hard)
And another embarassing story;
Leading up to the exam I had lost some weight from a mixture of good diet and stress. However, my weekends idleness and drinking/junk food scoffing had contributed to me piling it back on.
Determined to beat this curse I decided to go for a walk before lunch. I packed my rucksack with law books (I knew that they had a use) and set off. It was a chilly day but I set a brisk pace. A quick half an hour to get the heart pumping will do me.
I had planned to walk down by the river but when I got there I realised that the recent rain had turned this into a brown squelchy ice rink. After attempting a few hilarious Bambi-like steps I turned back and decided to go for a pavement promenade.
After about 20 minutes I had nearly completed my circuit and was heading home. Now I must stress that I had never walked this way before (I had done it just once from the other direction) but confident in my natural ability to sense direction I gambolled along.
When the road I expected to see didn't come into view I took stock. Oh, silly me, I must have taken a wrong turn-oh well, this is the way, so if I proceed along here I'll reach my destination soon enough.
Astute readers will know what happens next. I am hideously and hopelessly lost. I hadn't brought my A-Z with me and didn't actually know the names of the roads I was looking for. Undaunted I used my amazing senses to find me home. I live close to a VERY busy road, so if I focus on the loudest sound of traffic and head that way I'll hit the main road.
At this stage you will be thinking, 'how did this lackwit EVER get a law degree?' (a good question, I'll get back to you on that one)
About half an hour later, I finally gave in and asked a local man how to get back to Guildford. I recognised him as being ethnically from the Asian subcontinent-so my first thought was 'just how far have I walked?' But this kind gentleman put me on the right track and helped me to retrace my steps.
I soon came across a road that I knew from the earlier part of my journey and 'because I know best' departed from his instructions and decided to retrace my steps.
Astute readers will know where this is going (which is more than I did). I got further lost. By this stage my MP3 player was running low on juice and this meant desperate times. (I hadn't brought any money with me to get a bus home-who needs money on a gentle walk?)
Eventually, I found a road that took me into the main part of Guildford and I made my way home. At this stage I was limping badly, partly from blisters on both feet but also from pain to my right knee (it is not a good knee, it is only held together by string and bubblegum)
I crawled my way up to my flat and the glorious luxury of a hot shower.
I set off at 12 noon with the aim of a brisk half an hour walk-I got in at 3pm!!!
Out of interest I weighed the bag, it weighed exactly 1 stone (7 1/2 kilos) and I had lugged the bloody thing around for 3 hours!!
I mention this because I had always prided myself on having good direction sense, however the previous week a friend had dropped me off after one of the exams and chided me for directing her so badly. Being a sensitive soul (you must take your victim as you find them) I suffered badly from this slight and shall be issuing a claim against this woman for defamation, loss of faculties and my wasted 2 1/2 hours. I have instructed my solicitors from the firm of Withey & Moftir to serve the papers...
The good news is that I had sweated off the weight that I had put on over the weekend. But sometimes the ends do not justify the means...
posted by Paul Salmon at
9:15 pm
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