A Dartmoor day

Tuesday was a typical February day on the north Dartmoor edge: grey, rain threatened but instead a cold damp seeping into your bones. 2.00 in the afternoon, and the road into South Tawton lined with cars; in St Andrews, the parish church, standing room only. A congregation of more men than women, in black suits rarely worn. A lot of people had been in the pub over lunch, but there was no buzz, little chatter. We were there, with, or so it seemed, most of Moretonhampstead, for the funeral of Roy Smaridge.

Roy was our builder. He had been born, he told us, just up the road from South Tawton, in Taw Green. We found this out as when we had thought of moving in 2006 (posted about in A lot can happen in seven days). The house we looked at had been in Taw Green. Roy, when he heard, commented, “You wouldn’t have liked it much: that house was always damp”. A builder’s comment.

We had known him from the time we moved into Moretonhampstead in 1997. He had then been living here: a jobbing builder, a retained fireman, and one of those people that either you liked or you didn’t (or perhaps it was he that liked you or didn’t). Whichever, we liked him from the start, and over the years he and his boys have lovingly rebuilt and repaired the house: bedrooms, bathrooms, dining room, hall, walls, roofs. There are very few bits of it that he has not worked on.

And the sadness is that those plans we still have for the house, and had discussed with him, will now be for someone else to complete for us. I always joked with Roy that our house was his pension: now not required. His yearly gift of a Christmas hamper to us might have raised the children’s eyebrows, but it was just part and parcel of the relationship. And he touched our lives in more ways than one. Roy had been on the shout when Holly had broken her femur up on Mardon Down, thrown off her pony: with the nearest emergency ambulance either Okehampton or Exeter, the Fire Service are our first responders.

We were in north Norfolk when we heard the news: somehow very apposite as it seemed that we were usually on a distant bird reserve when Roy called from work on the house. “Are you sitting down? Good. We have had to dig out the dining room floor” or some such piece of less than welcome news. And here we were, sitting in St Andrews with all those other people whose lives Roy had also touched.

And his boys brought him into the church to Madness’ One step beyond, and at the end of the service he left to Don’t let the sun go down on me.

Practising deceit

I was very struck by one particular answer John Moulton gave in the 20 Questions column in last Friday’s FT. He was asked, “Have you ever lied at work?” and his answer was “No. I detest deceit”.

This is the answer we probably all hope we would give, and indeed all think we could give. If you were to ask any lawyer which virtues he or she would consider fundamental to lawyering, my money would be on ‘probity’ and ‘integrity’ as two that would rank very high. Trust is, or should be, the foundation upon which we build our careers as lawyers.

And yet, and yet: deceit is never far away. Our ability to negotiate, whether in litigation or in transactional work, is one of those core skills that we lawyers also need. This in turn may involve, as Lord Armstrong remarked in the 1986 Spycatcher trial, our being “economical with the truth”. The maxim is from Edmund Burke: “Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatsoever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.”

At the end of our careers (although I am not suggesting for a moment that this is where John Moulton is) it would be good to be able to give that answer. It may, however, be difficult.

A cold churchyard but a warm welcome

The first Sunday in January saw us on the moor: not walking but taking my sister and her husband on a quick tour by Land Rover along icy roads. Not quite as bad as Christmas Day afternoon, when we drove to Hound Tor past Jay’s Grave and wondered if we would get back in time to pull the crackers, but still interesting.

Permanent four wheel drive is great, until you lose it. Then, as we found a few days later, more than a ton of metal takes some stopping.

Widecombe-in-the-Moor was all but empty of visitors. The National Trust shop, in what was once the Church House, offered a temporary respite from a bitter east wind, but we had come to see the “Cathedral of the Moor” and morning service in St Pancras was not quite finished. We loitered in the cold churchyard.

It was well worth the wait. We not only got to see one of the finest churches in our part of Devon (even though Pevsner wasn’t much enthused about it) but we were met as we went in with coffee and shortbread; and the suggestion that next month we arrive earlier to help with the singing!

A cold churchyard but a very warm welcome.

A moral profession

One (among a number) of the things you are not taught at Law School is the importance of morality in the practice of law.

Instead this is something that most lawyers learn later: whether during the training contract, or in legal practice. And some lawyers learn it better than others. I have posted before, in Professional Unease, about what Bill Knight called the moral dilemma that most of us face at some stage or other in our professional careers, ‘when your client wants to do something which is legal, but which in your view is highly questionable’, and in the doing of it will be looking to you for help and advice.

Earlier in the week in the ft.com/managementblog, Stefan Stern posted about passing the parent test, referring to the remark by Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, to the Treasury Select Committee: “If you asked my mother and father about my pay they would say it is too high.” Stern went on (and this is what caught my eye),

We should always be ready to explain to close family members what it is we do at work, and why. The FT columnist John Kay prefers this sort of practical morality to any sort of imposed code of behaviour. If you would be embarrassed telling friends or family about aspects your job, the chances are you should not be doing it, he has said.

This is the practical morality that Bill Knight was writing about.

The danger is failing to look beyond our formal Code of Conduct; assuming that if our actions do not infringe the Code, they must be acceptable. This ignores the possibility that certain behaviour may not be professional misconduct but may be professionally unethical. Having said that, the purpose behind Rule 1, as set out in the general guidance, was to ‘define the values which should shape your professional character and be displayed in your professional behaviour’: perhaps the intent behind Rule 1, and I was a member of the Committee that drafted it, has not translated into action as we had hoped. Finally, a formal Code is no guarantee either that lawyers will recognise moral dilemmas, or, having done so, will act ethically.

Should I just buy bigger glasses?

I sometimes wonder about the world our politicians and their advisers live in (although as reports of this alternative universe (nearly) always come to me through the media, perhaps a pinch of salt is a necessary accompaniment). I was much taken by this morning’s report (no online link available) G&T at home? Mine’s a double by Kate Devlin in the Telegraph (a quick read of the Telegraph is the alternative to listening to Today on Radio 4, if you like a little irritation to kick-start your day).

Apparently, according to a study conducted for the Government’s Know Your Limits campaign, when pouring drinks at home, we get the measures wrong (i.e. we get carried away and end up drinking much more than we mean to).

What I most liked was the idea that if only we had this pointed out to us, we would start pouring the ‘correct’ amount. What’s the betting that we will soon be able to get optics on the NHS?