Supreme Court art: too much/not enough information

I learn that Fine Cell Work, a charity which trains prisoners to create beautiful embroidery, is planning a fundraising auction. Somewhere secret. That sets the tone for the day.

Freedom of information boffins are fixated on Kennedy v The Charity Commission. Are a public authority's inquiry documents exempt from disclosure for 30 years under the Freedom of Information Act 2000? If so, does this interfere with Times journalist Dominic Kennedy's human rights?

Kennedy wants to see documents from the Charity Commission's inquiry into an appeal launched by George Galloway and -

Pause. That cat moment with Rula Lenska. I've never watched Celebrity Big Brother, but because of the way certain gobbets of information are hurled around like custard pies that image appears, unbidden.

Down at the Old Bailey, more unwelcome information (about Rebekah Wade's unedifying affair) is ricocheting off the walls in the trial about hacks hacking.

Meanwhile, over at the High Court, the Naked Rambler Stephen Gough is losing his appeal. Is nudity too much information? I don't mind him. How could I, having been naked myself in public (sort of) over the summer, modelling for a very select life class. But today Lord Justice Leveson says people would be 'alarmed' by him. Here's a sketch of Lord Leveson I did earlier - at his inquiry last year which was prompted by phone hacking (see above).

What's he doing here? Lord Justice Leveson,
whom I sketched at his inquiry last year

In the Court of Appeal, cameras are rolling for the first time today. Transparent justice, or slithering towards sensation? During the O. J. Simpson trial, a TV show hired burlesque dancers to portray the judge. Go on, waste some time on YouTube with the Dancing Itos.

When today's Supreme Court hearing is over, lawyers go into a post-match huddle: 'It was very amusing how we managed to garrotte him on ....'
But I won't tell you who said it.

There is information.

There is truth. Somewhere.

And there is enlightenment.

Here is an Enlightenment figure, the blind magistrate Sir John Fielding, his elegant hands resting on a book called 'The LAW'. This portrait by Nathaniel Hone hangs in Court 1, today's arena.

I head for a concert given by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and things start to fall into place.

More pictures if you scroll down.

 

　

　

　

　

　

Supreme Court art: heartbreak hotel

Peter Bull

So here I am next to a real court artist, one with skills and stuff. She has a huge box of loose well-used pastels. A vast sheet of thick buff paper undulates over her lap.

I ask if I may sketch her while she is drawing. She politely refuses.

I'm used to rough drawing gigs where comfort goes out of the window (see my Occupy posts here passim) so I'm faintly puzzled by her response, until the hearing starts.

She has to draw feverishly, against the clock, with no distraction, such as being stared at by me. It's as if a pistol is held to her head. She must isolate each person clearly from the rest and preserve the scene in client-friendly aspic (her client today being the Press Association), all by high noon.

Hazelmary Bull flanked by lawyers

Normally she draws in the lower courts, or rather outside them, because drawing inside them is against the law. She's got The Trained Memory.

Today, I think, she has the rare luxury of not having to draw from memory. I glance sideways. She's drawing from memory, using the models before her as an aide mémoire. She fixes the scene and the poses with brown chalk, then skims hectically from model to model, estimating how they would look if they'd stayed at the same angle. Clever.

She agrees that I can sketch her in the afternoon - but the tempo is brisk and the hearing ends before lunch.

Oh, the case. Bull and another v Hall and another. Does the Bulls' refusal on religious grounds to let a double room in their hotel to a gay couple in a civil partnership constitute discrimination under the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007?

There's an attentive party of schoolgirls here. It's like a L'Oréal commercial. Oceans of lustrous hair.



 Before kick-off, Robin Allen QC (in what he describes after the hearing as 'my poncey pinstripe suit which I hardly ever wear') turns to ask the girls if they know what the case is about. They assure him that they do.

When it's time for them to leave they move osmotically, silently. Benenden. Worth the money I'd say. A single anorak-clad tourist can make more of a racket than this group of 30 plus.

The mood is genial as counsel air cool abstractions, oblivious to the former hoteliers' presence.

Robin Allen QC points out that impoverished students hitch-hiking will share a bed to save money.

Robin Allen QC

In response, counsel remarks: 'Sharing a bed while hitch-hiking, which I have never done...'

'Sharing a bed or hitch-hiking?' enquires Lord Neuberger. 

I'd like to show you the official drawing but I'm advised that the Press Association would visit a plague of locusts on me if I did. Tiens. A PA photographer snaps it on the pavement in Parliament Square while autumn leaves scurry around.

　

Supreme Court art: a pipe is not a painting of a tax return

SKRANNNKK goes the unforgiving minute hand of the slate clock in Court 2.

SHWOOSHH goes my Pentel waterbrush on textured paper.

Cotter v Commissioners for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is the attraction.

Should Mr Cotter's claim for tax relief be adjudicated by the court (s9A Taxes Management Act 1970) or the first-tier tribunal (schedule 1A TMA)?



René Magritte's painting

What does 'in a tax return' mean? In fact, what is a tax return?

'This is like the painting This is not a pipe,' says Lord Reed.

Counsel invites their lordships to consider the distinction between 'in a return' and 'in the return'.

Lord Neuberger remarks on the surreality of tax law while dizzying flowers on the velvet curtains, owing more to the Pre-Raphaelites, play around the wigs of counsel.

Last night I had a drink with someone who's been let loose on the freelance world by the cash-strapped Lebedevs. Worryingly, I was the person she asked for advice. 'Accountant,' I said. 'Spreadsheet. Monthly. Claim.'

Today I'm out of my depth.

'Why do you say that?' says Lord Neuberger in response to counsel. 'Other than common sense which is unwise in tax revenue cases.'

More pictures if you scroll down.

Mr Cotter - not the respondent but
someone in the public seats



The Royal Courts of Justice. For a change.

Kim Evans (@lifeincustody) has provided a vantage point - a room at the London School of Mediation.

Down on the pavement, protesters with a loud hailer are making unkind remarks about the senior judiciary.

Sometimes they block the traffic by jay-walking on the zebra crossing. An angry man hangs out of a delayed bus, shouting at the demonstrators.

I share the office with a  unopened jar of tapenade and the Chinese characters below.

Disjointed phrases float up from the protest:

'They legalise masturbation...'

'Sixteen sixty-six right? The great fire of London was an inside job. Poor people burned out of their homes so that these buildings could be built yeah.'

The RCJ was completed in 1882, according to the godlike Pevsner, on 'a site of specially disreputable slums.'



'Cavalier lawyer: a man who would defend
the poor or refuse to work for the corrupt'

Pevsner describes G. E Street's architecture as 'an object lesson in free composition, with none of the symmetry of the classics, yet not undisciplined where symmetry is abandoned.'

I refill my pen with malodorous ink. It's the little puddle festering in the bottom of the bottle, diluted with my paintbrush contaminant, life-class tea, which produces the softest of sepia washes.

Peter's day out at Bisley shooting range

Peter precision-shooting

For me it ends in A&E, natch, but this is about my friend Peter Sloper who wants to go to the National Rifle Association open day at Bisley in Surrey.

'I expect we'll only stay for about three hours,' he says.

By chuck-out time, with a slew of top scores and compliments from stocky, jocular gunfolk, Peter is considering taking up long-range precision shooting, joining the Artists' Rifles club, converting a derelict building in the grounds into a house for himself, and inviting friends to attend the imminent weekend of Northern soul, indie, motown and ska in the Bisley Pavilion.

But back to our arrival. We register alphabetically. He stands hopefully with me at the T-Z table. 'No, your name begins with S,' I say, my only useful contribution of the day.



Discarded target

Then breakfast on the verandah: a bacon-and-egg roll for Peter. 'Tastes a bit odd, like army food.' He manages most of it before a peppery shower of Lilliputian meteorites falls out of the sky. Onto our food. Into our tea. What the hell is that?



We walk out to the ranges. We're a bit late because Peter puts on the wrong trousers and has to repair them with needle and thread and then I get lost in the centre of Woking where I was born.

The echoes of gunshots around the sunlit downs make a beautiful looping shape. 'Like ripping air,' says Peter.

Peter asks his instructor, 'Would I be better off in reading glasses?'
Then he scores straight A's. He says he was talent-spotted when he spent a few weeks in the army cadets at the age of 14 but hasn't shot since.

Speed steels

The randomly percussive, out-of-tune speed steels are pure John Cage. You have to hit five pocked metal circles (ping! toing! plink!) in a second or two with discreetly dainty ammo favoured by the Mafia. While Peter is nailing this, I sketch.

I take up a more advantageous position. On a grassy knoll. The boss man, who has Steve Smoothy printed on his polo shirt, moves towards me slowly, avoiding eye-contact, as you would when approaching an animal. 

'It's OK, I'm a blogger,' I say, waving my unconvincing sketch book, guilty of social drawing. He explains kindly that my behaviour looks suspicious.

The place is awash with bars, cafes, eccentrically improvised club-houses and bungalows nostalgic for the Raj.  'Ooh look, there's a mop on that roof,' says Peter.

Can you spot the rooftop mop like sharp-eyed Peter?
Or indeed the architectural influences?

Time for tea in a cafe which displays its hygiene score on the wall - disappointingly not a bull's eye but four out of five. Magnum ice-cream, obviously. The toasted tea-cake is off.

Peter (left)

We don't discover the classic and historic firearms section until it's too late.