Leaving the Locker Room

This will be my last Lawslot Redux post as a practising lawyer.

In less than a week I change roles, leaving the world of corporate transactions – a world I have known for some 36 years – to focus on client relationships and client development. I will still keep my practicing certificate (and I have been assured that I will remain insured) so technically I will still be a lawyer – but without transactions it will not be the same.

Not surprisingly this change has led me to reflect on my career – far too much reflection, according to my children, who believe they should have a monopoly on introspection. But don’t worry, I am not going to go there in this post. But what has struck me is that notwithstanding how the legal profession has changed in my professional lifetime – and is still changing – the same cannot be said for the actual day job. This has changed very little in 36 years. There is no doubt that that the means of doing is different: back in the day we had no email, no fax, no PCs. Everything was typed (and then copy typed), drafts travelled (marked, and occasionally butchered, in precise colour order, with riders stapled, or stuck on with Sellotape), calls were landline, and you still dialled a number. Even if there wasn’t, there seemed a great deal more time.

But transactions, and our role in them as lawyers, have remained pretty well unchanged: same documents, same issues, same arguments (just a different generation of lawyer doing the arguing), same tensions . . . and same excitement. Each transaction the same in its essentials, each different in its particulars.

And it is the excitement that has kept me working – this is what I know that I will miss, but, as my last post, the time comes for us all.

Signs of Spring

Sunday morning and we were back in Yarner Wood. It wasn’t much warmer than it was a fortnight ago, but Spring is definitely here, the Pied Flys are back, and we had another three hours of gentle birding: the long climb up to the top of the Reserve, by the side of Trendlebere Down, and then back, through the oak woodland.

Birdsong all the way, the odd glimpses of Ravens and a lone Buzzard, a Blackcap letting it rip from the very top of one of the trees, Warblers, and, Yarner’s special birds, Pied Flycatchers. On the report by the office, Pied Flys have been back since 2 April, the day after our last visit. The males usually arrive first, but today we saw two pairs, as well as a good half dozen single males. And just before the car park, a pair of Redstarts.

No Swallows or Martins yet, but at home the death watch beetle are tapping away: another sign of Spring.

BBTs, BGTs and the McGarrigle sisters

Bright April mornings are deceptive. In the Yarner Wood car park just before 09.00: the air was still, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and it seemed quite warm. We stopped to admire a pair of Mandarin ducks on the new pond and then walked on up the concrete path to the hide – and as we climbed the side of the valley realised that it was not quite as warm as we had thought (and as the temperature had only been 5° in the courtyard, perhaps we should not have been that surprised).

It took an hour (and a detour back to the car park to collect a hat) to warm up.

Yarner Wood is a magical place. We spent three hours walking the woods – from the car park up and across the heathland, before the long steady climb to the top of the wood, just below Trendlebere Down, and then down the other side of the valley. And as we walked and talked, Greater Spotted Woodpeckers, Ravens, squabbling Crows, Nuthatches, Chiffchaffs, Buzzards, BBTs (bloody Blue Tits), BGTs (likewise Great Tits), a female Kestrel stooping on smaller songbirds, and everywhere birdsong.

No Pied Flys yet – last year we saw them on 27 March; this year, despite last week’s warm weather, they are going to be a little later.

And the McGarrigle sisters? I had Walking Song in my head,

Wouldn’t it be nice to walk together/Baring our souls while wearing out the leather/We could talk shop/Harmonise a song/Wouldn’t it be nice to walk along.

Spring cleaning

It has been a warm weekend. Not typical late March weather for this part of Dartmoor, but very welcome, giving us the opportunity to get out into the garden. My Norwegian sister called last night. They too are having the same weather, and, like us, have been working hard: “The garden just gets so dirty in an Oslo winter”.

Well, ours may not be dirty but there was and is a lot to do, to get it ready for Summer.

Coming home after a Spring visit to Venice some 10 years ago, we planted a yellow Banksia rose (rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’) on the warm east wall of the garden. We had seen a beautiful specimen in a small sunny courtyard of Ca’ Bembo, part of Venice University, and had decided that it would work well for us. What we hadn’t thought about was quite how fast, and furiously, it would grow, once established. It is a real triffid: bullying two of the other climbing roses into submission, crowding out the hamamelis that we had planted in the bed below, and rampaging up and along, and over, the wall.

So this is the year it has had a make or break hair cut: not just taking out the spent wood, but cutting it right back, almost to ground level. Five hours in the sun, and two dumpy bags filled with rose, with at least another bag’s worth waiting, and, now, a bare wall.

The photo below was taken during the lunch break.

In the landing flight path

A week into the New Year and it has been relatively quiet in the office. Clients seem to be taking stock, and projects and opportunities we discussed in the closing weeks of 2011 remain to be taken forward. It may the calm before the storm, but it has allowed time for some gentle housekeeping, and in particular sorting through and sorting out those old newspaper cuttings and articles I have squirrelled away.

These days it is much easier to store and retrieve on-line content (although given the number of apps I have used over the past few years – Instapaper, Evernote, Delicious and FT Clippings – the challenge is remembering which one: or did I just tweet the link?). But in my pre-digital life I was an avid clipper of anything that caught my eye, and the deeper recesses of my desk drawers are home to bundles of cuttings, yellow edged, and for the most part well past their sell by date.

But not all. As with any housekeeping, part of the pleasure is in finding things you had lost, or reminding yourself of things that you had forgotten. Given that this is the year in which I will change roles and leave the world of corporate transactional work, it was instructive to re-read one of Luke Johnson’s FT Columns, Learn to tame the ravening beast, ambition – and in particular his final paragraph,

Is there a moral in all this? I suppose it is that we must each know our limit, and resist the urge to overreach. Ambition is a ravening beast that must be kept in check, because even if we do not all formally retire, one day every one of us has to surrender. Better to go with dignity and grace than have the booty snatched from our enfeebled grip because we cling on too long.

Well, it has not quite come to this. Yet.