August Blues

The lights are on. The door is unlocked. In the distance there is the very slow sound of keys being pressed on a typewriter. The photocopier is humming. The telephone is ringing. Actually it is not ringing. Telephones in offices have not rung for years. They have chirruped, and warbled and sometimes shrilled. But terminology has not yet caught up: "Tell her I'm engaged. I'll warble her later". As I said, the telephones are warbling....
But the office is empty. Well, not quite empty. Three clients stand in reception chatting idly. One of them can stand the chirruping no longer. She answers the telephone.
"Hello.... well I am actually a client. No I can't either..... Injunction? Well I've never done one before.... Hold on a moment...."
The client sits down and begins to take notes. The other two clients enter into the spirit of things and start to open post and deal with other clients.
What am I talking about? Christmas day? The day of the Lord Mayor's show? The day Terry Wogan came to town? A weekend? The holocaust?
None of those things. I am talking about an ordinary working day in the month of August. Holiday time. The time when solicitors' offices are deserted by their staff; when those who remain have to develop a siege mentality in order to survive.
I have not yet taken my annual holiday. I have another 3 weeks to go. At the moment I am dreading it: the packing and the travelling and the traffic jams and the waiting at Gatwick and the crowded flight and the unbearably hot foreign country and the unsafe food and indifferent drink and the suntan oil and the risk of skin cancer and the risk of being shouted at by foreign policemen or being kidnapped by foreign guerillas and then the travel back and the lugubrious faces of my partners who remind me of all the many things they had found I had done wrong and how, now that my holiday was over, they expected me to do a lot better or else, but they would not say what.
Right now I do not want to go on holiday. I would rather struggle on, in my bad tempered ways, and continue the wholly unequal struggle of trying to reduce to manageable proportions my mound of outstanding work.
But there is one thing which will drive me away on holiday: the fact that everyone else has gone.
When, twenty or more years ago, and full of enthusiasm for this wonderful legal career, I joined the branch office as its only permanent solicitor, and doubled the total staff, holidays even then produced their problems. Our office had made a bold incursion into the twentieth century and acquired Dawbarns' first electric typewriter. This was operated successfully by Maureen who assured her counterparts in head office that she never suffered electric shocks from it.
They were unconvinced. When Maureen went on holiday, the office was manned (well, actually womaned - but would you feminists please leave me alone till September. I am too stressed out to deal with equal opportunities) by head office secretaries. Each would arrive in a car with sagging springs - weighed down by a manual typewriter which would need the services of a small forklift truck to get it into the office. The electric typewriter would then be safely disconnected before the secretary could feel out of danger. During Maureen's holidays, the office would shake with the clack clack of the typewriter, and I would yearn for her return so that my headache would go away.
Two decades later everything has changed? Not quite. We keep one manual typewriter in the office as a precaution against the Revolution. For days the senior partner has been trying to have a letter typed. But the few secretaries who are left in the building always vanish when he approaches. They will perform, but only for the good looking Ian on the second floor.
In exasperation the senior partner attempts to use a word processor. He switches on the power. It makes a grating noise. He quickly extinguishes it and puts its cover back on. Later it is discovered that the grating noise was caused by a paper clip which found its way into the disk drive but the senior partner was not to know. All he does know that it takes a degree to boot up a word processor, and he is a five year man.
The measured typing heard by by the clients waiting downstairs is the sound of the senior partner clinching a million pound takeover - manually.
It is not only the senior partner who suffers. It is a grim time for the office plants. The Busy Lizzies become idle; the rubber plants perish; the evergreens become nevergreens and the aspidistra no longer flies.
The Maastricht spirit comes to the fore. We may mutter the description "Bastards" of our colleagues, but we get on with the job. Litigators attack conveyances with zeal, dispatching letters before action to those who dare to delay exchanging contracts. Probates spring to life at the deft hand of the divorce experts.
Conveyancers nervously appear before the local judge and burst into tears when he indulges in his favourite sport of solicitor baiting.
And the senior partner goes away on a typing course.
The only people who do not seem to go on holiday are the clients. Clients are not like other human beings. They do not celebrate Christmas. They do not observe weekends. They do not understand the meaning of office hours. Instead of going away in August, they choose this month to dream up interesting new legal problems to bedevil those who remain in solicitors' offices. They are impervious to excuses. They want action now, even if "now" = an empty office in the wicked month.
* * * * *
The return of the tourists is little more fun. Brown and irritatingly relaxed they spend the first few days enthusiastically recounting the histories of (to us the non-holiday makers) amazingly boring exploits in the Aegean - mostly of the "I got drunker than I've ever been before" variety. In between watering the plants, shampooing the carpets, washing up (yes the cleaners go away too) we try to fit in a little work. As soon as a holiday-maker approaches we start to do unusual things, like return three telephone calls or answer a letter on the same day it arrives. If a traveller persists we hand her or him an application to join the personal injury panel and ask for it to be completed by lunch time.
Forgive me if I seem a little jaundiced. Everybody is entitled to their holidays; and good luck to them. I hope they have a wonderful time.
They will need to. Although I will be the last to go, I will also be the last to return. And when they have forgotten about mayhem in Majorca or pranks in Portugal, I will be happy to read them the diary of my holiday, and show them hours of video disclosing tantrums in Turkey. And when they think that I have exhausted my onslaught I will collect my films from Boots and show them too, until they beg for mercy and promise not to go on holiday next year, at least until September.
 
This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal in August 1993