Supreme Court art: inappropriateness

The squirrel does some cute acrobatics, then shimmies into its drey on the ledge outside my bathroom window. The closest thing I have to a pet.

I head for L. Batley Pet Products Ltd v North Lanarkshire Council, which could have been avoided by simple communication between the parties - by carrier pigeon, say - and is about dilapidations, not pets.

Did the company (the landlord) have to give written notice to the council (the tenant) to trigger the obligation to reinstate the property to its original condition?

'The power of irritancy' gets a considerable airing in court today and I think of the power of pets to irritate: the breakages, the nocturnal marauding, the emotional blackmail real or imagined, the journeys not made, the havoc they wreak when they die, the expense.

With a blurred sense of anthropomorphism, our ancestors were goaded into litigation: trials of animals (domestic and pests, defended and undefended) were recorded from the middle ages until the Enlightenment and beyond. The tale about the monkey recovered from a French shipwreck, tried and hanged in Lord Mandelson's former constituency of Hartlepool during the Napoleonic wars may not be based on fact.

We now draw a line between animals and humans as defendants. But how stable is the line between humans and other humans? I will be an 'appropriate adult' in a court soon. On behalf of another adult. Which implies a degree of inappropriateness somewhere in the process. I'm not permitted to write about that. Understandable, but frustrating.

After the hearing I wander down to the basement to seek out the Supreme Court's companion animals. A bronze horse is poised on a swallow in flight, a gift from the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China.

The souvenir bears are sitting in the showcase. A woman in Wyoming was arrested this month for aggravated assault and battery after stabbing a five-foot teddy bear during an attack on her ex-boyfriend.

PS: the Grey Squirrels (Prohibition of Importation and Keeping) Order 1937 has just been scrapped. Failing to alert the authorities to the presence of a grey squirrel on your land is no longer an offence.

Supreme Court art: time no longer

'A drawing is a map of time.' I wish I'd said that, but it was said to me by an artist called Richard Cole.

This picture of two QCs on their feet reflects what I see over time as as I draw from right to left.

At issue in R (on the application of Fitzroy George) v the Secretary of State for the Home Department is whether someone's indefinite leave to remain in the UK, which was invalidated by a deportation order, remains invalid if the deportation order is revoked.

There is much discussion about the difference between 'revokes' and 'ceases to have effect'. And does 'invalidate' imply permanence? In Siberia, a virus has just been revived from 30,000-year-old ice.

In the café at lunchtime I meet a couple with a hearing dog for deaf people, a placid golden Labrador.

'We waited six years for him. He was cared for from the age of ten weeks to ten months by a prisoner in Bristol. All I know about the prisoner is that he was very big bald guy covered in tattoos so I like to think of him cuddling this tiny puppy.'

Court 2 has an air of death, starting with the walls of white. The colour of mourning in so much of the world. The pale horse.

The stark walls are asking for graffiti: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN, thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

The Welsh slate clock, regularly checked by apprehensive counsel, goes !!SKRANNK!! from time to time, a relentless ratchety sound.

And the flowers. Hectic on the curtains, silhouetted on the blinds, strewn on Peter Blake's carpet, gem-like on the plaque above the bench. All at their point of perfection. A transitory moment carrying its inevitable decay.

Some bat-sense makes me turn to see a tourist in the back row produce a camera from his anorak and aim it at the bench. I shoot him a governessy look. He puts it away. He'll never know I saved him from an usher's wrath.

Before I leave, I cruise the basement showcases. The folklorique gift from the Russian delegation owes something to Catherine the Great. More pictures if you scroll down.

Catherine the Great in her coronation robe (detail), 1778-9, by Vigilius Eriksen

Supreme Court art: Welsh bards

I am startled to hear an invocation of the Middle English poet Gower. No, it's GOWA (the Government of Wales Act 2006). But Wales is ungovernable if you read R. S. Thomas:

To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales

(From Welsh Landscape)

At issue today is whether, under the Agricultural Sector (Wales) Bill, the National Assembly for Wales can set minimum wages for more than 13,000 agricultural workers. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own wages boards. 

'There's a distinction to be drawn between legislative function and parliamentary intention,' is uttered from the bench, a frequent theme in this court.

I return to ungovernable forces, chiefly Dylan Thomas:

I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage red, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms

To Wales in my arms. 

(From Author's Prologue)

Following today's hearing I can advise you on how to become Attorney General for England and Wales. Don't rear up and whinny at bundle malfunction. Make silence sound purposeful rather than lost. Be alert to the justices and allow them to cough or study a screen for a moment without losing your rhythm. Don't go near contact lenses - you're not a film star. Sound interested. Then you too will fill Court One on a wet Monday. 

I check the National Assembly for Wales's art holdings for anything oracular about the hearing. I ignore a sequence called Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (You can find out about public paintings on a site pointedly called www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings.)  

Farm, Penne du Tarn (1958) by Mary Fedden is on loan to the National Assembly for Wales from the National Museum of Wales.

Conference: 'Performing the law: the effective v the virtual'

This comes to you in hallucinatory snatches as I enact an operatic deathbed scene with mansize tissues, aka the common cold.

We're at the Institut français in South Kensington for an anglo-French-American conference. Academics, lawyers, artists, actors.

The key word is 'performative'. To what extent do lawyers, and the law itself, perform? Asking this question is all the rage.

'Being Wallander is very much an existentialist state.' The perfect sequel to Hamlet for Kenneth Branagh, then.

'What is the function of seduction in these TV crime dramas? Are they akin to sexuality and parenting?'
'Do they educate or obfuscate?'

'One wants to make work in the form of a virus.'




'You cannot represent the boredom of boredom.'
'You have to look to Chekhov for how to do it.'

'If you're complaining about a dog that barks in the night, make sure the judge doesn't have a dog that barks.'

'There are locked courtrooms which haven't been used for years - it's a perfect metaphor for Belgium.'

'Sometimes in court lawyers are so small you don't see them.'

This is not my drawing [left]. It's by someone with a decent line. The ultimate drawing of the effects of legal process: Marie-Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, sketched by Jacques-Louis David. He voted for her execution. Her trial was re-enacted verbatim on stage in the USA: audiences on most nights, not needing a sense of history, let her live.

More pictures if you scroll down.

Supreme Court art: risky credit

So he went into PC World and...

You can hold it there. That already makes me feel like Ruth weeping amid the alien corn. But back to Durkin v DSG Retail Ltd and HFC Bank Plc.

...into PC World in 1998 and asked if the laptop had a built-in modem.

'Yes, it does.'

He bought it on the understanding that he could return it if it didn't have a built-in modem, paid a £50 deposit and signed a consumer credit agreement to cover the balance.

The laptop did not have a built-in modem. And the credit agreement had small print. 

The salesperson, having triggered 16 years of costly litigation, vanished from the story. Mr Durkin returned the laptop and felt he should not have to pay for something he no longer owned but his credit rating was trashed.

Today the bench exudes energy, led by a brightly fascinated Lady Hale. Amid discussion of the doctrine of confusio, I meander down memory lane. 

There was the time the London Electricity Board (RIP) broke into my flat, treading dog mess into the floor, and changed the locks because they mistook it for the flat upstairs, leaving me locked out for the night. The time the Nationwide lost the deeds to my flat when I was trying to sell it.


And the time the Royal Bank of Scotland mysteriously changed the payee for my mortgage standing order. Month after month I unknowingly drew closer to eviction. When I got a danger signal from my mortgagee, I rang someone at RBS. 'We were wondering when you'd get in touch,' he sniggered, as if I'd been the subject of a bet.  

None of these is analogous to the credit agreement issue. But I am lamenting those modem moments we all share, which could be avoided if someone gave a toss.

In court today, a tourist couple shove me half off the end of the bench by plonking themselves down in a space meant for one. As I try not to fall off my precarious perch I think of the Nationwide some decades ago, refusing me a mortgage on the stated grounds that I was a single woman, not a couple.

'I am financially entitled to a mortgage,' I snapped.

'But ethically?' he sneered.

Children, that's the way things were. I was not a bad debt, but a morally undeserving one at a time when mortgages and credit agreements were not being thrust at consumers.

Coda:

Every time I pass a branch of PC World, Pavlovian conditioning evokes a scene from The West Wing in which CJ warns an erring colleague: 'I'm going to shove a motherboard so far up your ass.'

Today hasn't helped.

More pictures if you scroll down.

Supreme Court art: dress codes

Call me reactionary but I like a well-designed uniform.

What better to suppress merely personal opinions and to preserve the sober anonymity of statute than an outfit rooted in seventeenth century court dress, which suits both men and women.

Before you say it's OK for me, I don't have to wear a wig, I would draw your attention to the hair extensions I saw in court today. What's that about, apart from pain?

Court 3 itself has a wig, in a way. The fixed carpet in front of the bench bears the emblem of the Supreme Court - but put another rug on top and voilà, you've got the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which hears appeals from the UK overseas territories, Crown dependencies and some Commonwealth countries.


To see which statutes are in play, look for the flag: Isle of Man today.

The information sheet says that Holt v Her Majesty's Attorney General on behalf of the Queen will examine 'money laundering - falsification of documents - misdirection of jury - improper comments made by trial judge - whether miscarriage of justice - whether conviction unsafe.' It's not an edifying tale. People took certain precautions 'in case we **** up'. They did. I have a pang of regret that I'm not in Court 2 (village greens).

So back to court costume and an irresistible, entertaining, erudite book: Dress, Law and Naked Truth by Gary Watt (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Hogarth liked to bait the legal profession, as in his engraving The Five Orders of Periwigs. 'Aping the standard scheme drawings of architectural orders,' writes Professor Watt, '...Hogarth shows the judicial periwig [third row down] overlaid with lines to indicate the rules that determine the relative proportions of its parts.'

Steeped in Gillray, I've always taken this engraving to be not just a parody but obscene, although no one else seems to mention that, unless I've missed something.

And if you think I'm frivolous, may I refer you to the Cour de cassation, the French equivalent of the Supreme Court:

 


As I leave the court I see a confetti star glinting on the wet pavement.

A bemused security guard asks me what I'm photographing (the guards here are as genial as you could wish).

I garble this quotation from a forgotten versifier:

'Two men look out through the same bars:
One sees the mud, and one the stars.' 

'Look, there's another one,' says the guard. 

My blogger uniform looks rather arch and twee today. It might not be appreciated by anyone whose liberty is at stake.

More pictures if you scroll down.

If it's Christmas, it's Crisis

Let's start with the small print: the guests signed Crisis consent forms to release these pictures.

So. Dickens would have tried to make you weep if he'd seen Crisis in operation.

But there's no time for Mr Popular Sentiment. If you drop your guard and glimpse the enormity, the appalling insolubility of the underlying problem, or if the red rage coshes you from behind, do something constructive. Be a manicurist, make up the numbers for ping pong, unload food supplies, look after a rough sleeper's dog, give someone your undivided attention, sing.

Don't get dehydrated, don't let your blood sugar sink. Here, have a Quality Street. No, I don't know what flavour it is. Forget choice. The only reality is here, where any stray sparks of discord are quickly dampened by firm kindness and tolerance.

I'm at the West London Day Centre, the Downton Abbey of Crisis. There are tougher gigs.

We all know the chorus. There's no room for cynicism. You'll find camaraderie, instant life stories, jokes, hope.

'Put the date on this picture please. I don't intend to be here next year.'

'How long do you sleep at night? For me it's five foot ten.'

'Do you draw before you go to bed? I do. I draw the curtains.'

'Oh, don't do his picture. He thinks he's good looking enough already. He'll stick it on the wall and pray to it.'

A softly spoken guest, courteous and deferential, has a personality change at karaoke time. He knocks out I like the way you move by the Body Rockers. Cue tumultuous applause. Then he goes quietly off to the canteen on his own.

Make sure guests know what services are on offer. Would you like a shower? Game of football? Language tuition? Advice on housing or addiction? Sewing repairs to your clothes or bags? Do you just want to spend the afternoon asleep, safe, warm, dry, fed? Surrounded by scruffy and unfussy volunteers? 

I said unfussy. At this time of year I park all the crap outside - it's a relief, frankly.

The drawings here show yoga, exercise classes, the art and craft room, the hair and nail salon, karaoke. I give each drawing to the sitter as a rule, but I've kept some of the group pictures.

It's The Wizard of Oz on TV.

A guest grabs the mike and sings that Boney M song.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

She goes around showing the drawing to people. 'Look at this.'

It is herself.

Please scroll down for more images.