The banality of death

They tell you about death as dire but inevitable, a dread we all must face.

They tell you about death as bereavement and loss, as a pain to suffer and mourn.

They don’t tell you about death as an endless procession of bureaucratic tasks, turning a moment of sorrow into a litany of monotonous administrative chores.

Take arranging a funeral.

Is there going to be a service? If so, who will conduct it? Does the crematorium have a slot available (my mother had asked to be cremated) at the same time as the celebrant (he was about to go on leave)?

What style of coffin did we want (given that it was going to be burned…)? What colour of flowers? How should the press announcement be worded? How about the Order of Service booklet – which should contain what photos, to represent 94 years of life in just five images?

Then there’s the will. The lawyer was kind enough to phone me.

‘You need to contact your mother’s bank.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to contact the Department of Work and Pensions.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to make arrangements for the cremation.’

‘Done.’

Have you noticed how helpful lawyers are? How they’re happy to provide all the advice you could possibly need and more? At £280 an hour, wouldn’t you be?

But the worst bit is clearing the flat. My mother was living in sheltered accommodation, in what was in effect just a bed-sitter with its own kitchen and bathroom. But it never ceases to amaze me just how much someone can cram into a small space if they really set their mind to it.

Trolley load after trolley load of books went down to the charity shop. Great piles of clothes. Bits of bric-a-brac. And that’s without counting the items of furniture which the organisation that runs the place has decided to keep.

Or, come to that, the bits and pieces my brother and I simply couldn’t bring ourselves to part with. I came home with my car full. But not just of those objects – above all, what I had was boxes and boxes of photos and correspondence, not just my mother’s, but my father’s, even my maternal grandmother’s and grandfather’s.

Leonard, my father, amateur writer who generated another

Strangely, both my maternal grandmother and my father were keen amateur writers, as I am. I now have a box file labelled in my mother’s hand as her mother’s writings, as I have another of my father’s. My grandmother’s papers included several sealed envelopes marked ‘Before destroying these manuscripts, have a little patience, and read them. Your relative had a questing mind, and a certain literary facility.’

Well, I shall be the first to fulfil that wish since she died. I shall break the seals on those envelopes. That will be a time of some emotion. I’ll have a reminder that death is about loss and bereavement and not just about a banal and tedious bureaucratic process.

Sadly, before I can get around to that, I still have to get through some correspondence with the public authorities, a meeting with a lawyer at £280 an hour, to say nothing of dealing with any outstanding payments due for utilities, phones or, indeed, funeral services.

It’ll be a poignant moment when I can turn my attention to my grandmother’s writing. And my father’s. But oh, what a relief that will be.

Yetta Bannister, a while before she became my grandmother
An amateur writer in the making

Criminal Defence: just who's the criminal and what's the defence?

Great to see a sign advertising the availability of ‘Criminal Defence’. Now, I know what the words really mean, but I find what they could mean – if taken at face value – far more interesting. 

OK. So who's being defended?
And with what sort of defence?

On the one hand, they could mean the defence of criminals only. That idea opens up quite a can of worms. After all, no-one’s a criminal until convicted by a court. So a lawyer doesn’t know whether he’s really engaged in the defence of a criminal until the case ends. What’s more, he’ll only be sure of his ground if he loses. 

That might lead to awkward moments between lawyer and client in the cells afterwards.

In one scenario, the lawyer would be saying, ‘well, it turns out you’re a criminal after all, despite all your assurance to me, you vile piece of scum. So criminal defence fees apply and you owe me ten zillion pounds.’

In the other scenario, the client would be saying: ‘see? see? I didn’t do it. So I’m not a criminal and I’m obviously not paying for criminal defence. So, thanks, but you know what you can do with your invoice.’

Not sure how well the system would work, though. It would rather incentivise failure in the profession, wouldn’t it?

On the other hand, ‘criminal defence’ could mean that the defence itself is criminal. Not perhaps technically criminal, in the sense that it actually breaches the law, but morally criminal in the sense that it resorts to practices that are simply unacceptable in a society with any claim to upholding civilised values. Bullying rape victims in cross examination, perhaps, or even those ethically greyer acts such as getting telling evidence excluded on the basis of some trivial technicality.

But I have only to write those words to know that such an interpretation is quite untenable. No lawyer would ever sink so low.

Which reminds me of my wife’s favourite joke.

An engineer dies and finds himself in Hell. He looks around and immediately sees that it badly needs sorting out. He gets straight to work, installing air conditioning, escalators, refrigeration, proper lighting and ventilation. Within six months, he’s transformed the place.

News of his work filters upstairs. St Peter gets straight on the blower to Satan.

‘What’s are you playing at down there? In Hell’s name?’ I apologise for the weakness of the pun, but that’s Peter for you: he has a taste for them. A historian in this matter, I merely record.

‘Great guy. Love what he’s done with the old place. Delighted to have him with us.’

‘Well, you won’t be having him long. Send him up here.’

‘Send him to you? No chance. He stays with us.’

‘You’re going to fight us on this? Watch out. We’re ready to sue.’

‘Sue? Don’t make me laugh. Where are you going to find a lawyer?’


Note to my lawyer friends: I really do know what ‘Criminal Defence’ means. And I appreciate the people who do it. I always remember the words of John Mortimer, pointing out that the defence barrister is the only person who stands alongside someone in trouble when the full panoply of the state’s arrayed against him. That’s admirable.

I just think that lawyers should be able to roll with the punches and take the jokes in good part. And, if they can’t, they’re probably paid enough to cope.

Speaking out for the unjustly mocked

Time to speak out in defence of women. And of the world’s favourite profession, the law.

A staple of anti-feminist sentiment in Britain is the accusation that women are unable to understand the offside law in football. This is unfair on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start.

In rugby, the rule is stark in its simplicity: get in front of the ball, and you’re offside. But in football, it’s a hopeless mess. It’s to do with there being no defender other than the goalkeeper between you and the opponents’ goal at the time when you receive the ball (or do I mean when it was kicked?). It’s not clear to me what happens if the goalkeeper is behind you but there’s another defender between you and the goal: are you offside or not? It also seems that you can be ‘played onside’, whatever that means. I could probably get clear on the subject in about two minutes with Google, but I’m not interested enough to devote a couple of minutes of my life to the question. That, I suspect, is the case of most women – most people – who understand the offside rule no better than I do.

Of course, there are women to whom the rule really matters. Recently, soon-to-be ex-Sky TV football commentators Richard Keys and Andy Gray came out with some offensive remarks about a woman assistant referee, Sian Massey, already a professional and tipped to become the first woman to be a full Premiership referee. She kept her flag firmly down when many thought a Liverpool player was offside in a recent match; the move culminated in a goal against their opponents, Wolves. I quote:

Keys: ‘Somebody better get down there and explain offside to her.’

Gray: ‘Can you believe that? A female linesman. Women don’t know the offside rule.’

Those in the know say the replay shows indisputably that Massey was right, and Keys and Gray are out of a job today.

 

Sian Massey with flag raised, showing she understands the offside rule

Such unfair criticism of a woman deserves nothing but contempt. But spare a thought for another group, constantly the target of scorn from anyone outside it. I speak of course of lawyers. What other profession is subject to so many cruel jokes? It’s reached the point where today people ask what the problem is with lawyer jokes, the answer being that lawyers don't think they're funny, and no one else thinks they're jokes.

So it was fascinating that the passenger I was sharing a table with in my train this morning was both a woman and a lawyer. It was a 7:00 a.m. train, so like me she’d got up at the crack of dawn. I took a few minutes to read the paper and get my breath back before starting work, but she was buried in a pile of documents from the off – and when I say ‘pile’ I mean ‘pile’ – it was the height of two respectable dictionaries or three parsimonious ones (the kind that don’t contain words like ‘parsimonious’). Steadily she worked through all the papers, picking out the bits that really mattered, rejecting some, sorting the others into an order presumably designed to lend the greatest possible support to her case.

I couldn’t help glance at the documents at one point. She was careful to shield them from view, but I did see the words ‘grievous bodily harm’. So I suspect she was on her way to the defence of someone charged with a common law offence, suggesting she’s being paid out of legal aid, which means (in lawyers’ terms at least) she’s working for a pretty miserable fee.

And as we drew into station, out came the compact and the mirror, the eye-shadow and the lipstick. Because this was a woman as well as a lawyer, and I rather suspect if you’re going to help a client who is probably not terribly articulate or literate, you need to impress unsympathetic policemen and hostile judges that you’re ‘sharp’ and business like.

This morning I had a shave. Before I go into my meeting, I’ll put a tie on. But she had to engage in a major cosmetic exercise to be ready for her job.

So this post is my tribute to her. It's a source of real comfort to me to know that if you get into trouble, you can at least still count on the help of someone bright, alert and hard working, who doesn’t mind rising at dawn – or, even more admirable, does it although she minds it – and travelling some hours to come to your aid, preparing for the task ahead all the way, for little reward. And at the last moment she even has the attention to spare for that last detail that might prove a lot more important than it really should.

Final touches before launching into her client's defence