I was at a conference with a client and Counsel the other day at a certain Lincoln’s Inn Fields chambers. The place was heaving with lighting stands, women with clipboards and the kind of unshaven, tool belted man that can only be a rigger. Lo, they were filming the ‘This Life’ 10 years on Christmas special.

Allegedly, the programme spawned a whole generation of wannabe lawyers, surely down to the sex, drugs and nifty shared early Victorian (late Regency?) house rather than the joys of a well drafted contract, or agressively timed application.

Nearly Legal was not tempted to the law by ‘This Life’, but I did enjoy it, so it was with a quickening of breath and an irregular pulse rate that I ambled slowly through the corridor and paused in the courtyard. Looking, though I say so myself, pretty damn fine, in a suitably 10 years on sort of way, I was awaiting the call to be a passing lawyerly figure in the background, somewhere in the blurry distance behind Miles or Anna.

In an all too convincing meeting of art and life, I was ignored. Neither a pretend nor actual lawyer shall I be, it seems.

[I was right about the other interview, by the way]