Some­times life imi­tates satire: recall BabyBarista’s story on being mis­led as to the need for proper court dress some while back? Of course the obses­sion of the Bar with Wigs is a story that has been retold time after innu­mer­able time on UK lawyers blogs: it is so much more impor­tant than jus­tice, defend­ing legal-aid or civil lib­er­ties. After all what the hell’s the use of a free soci­ety if you can’t wear bits of dead pony to cover your bald patch or lack of tal­ent? Exactly.

Geeklawyer was in the High Court last week on mat­ter which was a sad lit­tle busi­ness — the capit­u­la­tion of a noble claimant in a valiant, doomed, but wor­thy cause. He trolled into Court X intend­ing to stand before Mr Jus­tice Heardi­tall­be­fore and wave the white flag with what­ever dig­nity his punter could man­age, which was, to be frank, not much. Now the rule is, in the Courts where Geeklawyer nor­mally hunts, that wigs are only for tri­als and not interim mat­ters. And you can guess where this one goes: to his hor­ror all the other coun­sel — the reg­u­lar boys, LJ Hearditallbefore’s lit­tle posse — were all in full cir­cus out­fits. Wigs. Gowns. Bands. The fuck­ing works. What to do? Well nat­u­rally a man of hon­our would ‘fess up to the judge and hope for the best. Geeklawyer did the only thing a man such as he could do:

‘My Lord I am improp­erly dressed because a pack of feral Solicitor-Inadequates attacked me at the Strand entrance of this Court so as to steal my wig. My Lord, they fled with it and my gown and bands while yelling “We has the pre­cious. We has it, is ours. We wants it, we needs it.” My Lord I assem­bled a hunt­ing pack of Bar­ris­ters and we gave chase up Chancery Lane and as far as Hol­born Tube but they eluded us.’

Mer­ci­fully the oth­er­wise crusty LJ Heardi­tall­be­fore was a decent old codger and fell for it hook line and sinker. Even Geeklawyer’s utterly bol­locks argu­ments about the neces­sity of a detailed costs hear­ing on a one day mat­ter were allowed comis­er­a­tory passage.

Geeklawyer was rum­bled by one local hack who, uncon­vinced even for a split sec­ond, whispered:

“Never mind all that bol­locks — if you are after me I’ll lend you my wig.”

This cam­er­aderie mutual respect and broth­erly sup­port is what lies at the heart of the Eng­lish Bar. Geeklawyer declined the offer because the pathetic wreck was a crim­i­nal bar­ris­ter: with Legal Aid what it is he prob­a­bly couldn’t afford to wash his hair from one month to the next and prob­a­bly had lice; “No thanks my dear chap, ter­ri­bly grate­ful but I’ll wing it before the old buffer.” What’s a brother to do? eh?

In the end every­one noted that LJ Hearditallbefore’s eyes were seen to fix repeat­edly on Geeklawyer’s dichroic cuf­flinks which undoubt­edly sal­vaged him from the deserved fate of a bullshitter.

Geeklawyer has revis­ited the rules on court dress and will not be so com­pla­cent in future: He’ll be wear­ing a frig­ging Tutu.