Life Beyond the Spires

PHILIP WOMACK left Oriel last summer. He is now doing a law conversion course in London. Who would have thought that lawyers could be such fun. “The EU was set up to prevent Europeans killing each other. Now they bore each other to death over interminable treaties,” is the first line of my first presentation. The mother of three dutifully writes down the sentence then bursts into antipodean guffaws. My tutor gets up to congratulate me and reveals that he is a scout for the toppest of top city firms and wants me to start tomorrow on a salary of £80,0000. I know that none of them are listening. I have not been listening to those that came before me to read out what they had copied out from the manual. In fact, I have to admit to finishing the crossword during a particularly dull speech from a girl in my group, which isn’t very group-bondy at all, which is what this rather silly exercise has been trying to achieve. The exercise being: read pp 1-2 of your manuals and do a presentation on them. Not difficult, you would have thought. But we have to do this IN A GROUP. So we can get all bondy and exchange intimate childhood memories and talk about that funny time when you were drunk and did that funny thing with the trolley and gosh didn’t you laugh when the policeman told you off for being slightly too loud outside an old people’s home. My group of four bonded like this: “Which paragraph do you want to do?” “The first one.” “OK.” “See you tomorrow.” If they want us to bond they must give us drink, damn them. Anyway, the result is we all leave the tute despondent, and no one has even noticed that I made lots of very funny jokes about Latvians not being able to join the EU because of hygiene reasons. “Let’s go to Starbucks,” says someone. “Huh,” say I. “There’s a perfectly decent pub down the road.” We troop down in that way that freshers do, where you’re trying to sort out who you actually want to be friends with without leaving out the boring ones at the back. Two drinks later the silly story competition starts. People did notice my joke about the Irish blocking treaties because they couldn’t remember having signed them because they were drunk, and we are bonding. I take it back. Lawyers are fun.ARCHIVE: 0th Week MT2003