Salty.

"Dew yew....?" the old man began to ask with a distinctive Norfolk twang. In the smoky atmosphere of the Smuggler and Scud Missile (it used to be the Smuggler and Sausage but in the last Gulf War it decided to be patriotic and move with the times), it was easy to be distracted. There were the darts in one corner, and the pool table in another. And there was Gladys behind the bar who had a cleavage which was certainly worth a look when she pulled a pint. Saturday nights were enlivened by Inglebert Homperdonk, the local talent who sang songs from the sixties (out of tune).

So the old man did have a bit of competition, but eventually he managed to get his question out. It was not, after all, an enquiry about early morning moisture and its impact on the trees that were once used for crafting bows for use in the Battle of Hastings. His enquiry was more immediate than that:

"Dew yew think" he persisted, "that there will be solisstors 'roond these parts in tha' next century? Won't you all be replaced by them tha' compooters?"

I had had encounters before with this old man. He had the bright eyes of a mariner, enough tattoos to cover a table cloth and a beard which would conceal a multitude of chins. He had already tackled me on defending criminals that we all knew were guilty, the high rate of charges by lawyers and why did solicitors have a monopoly on conveyancing. I try not to look like a lawyer if I can avoid it. I never go into the "Smuggler" wearing a pin-striped suit or carrying a copy of Stones Justices Manual, but the first time I ordered a pint there, he homed in on me, prodded me with his pipe and declared: "you're one of them tha' solisstors in't ya?"

Ever since then the old man (whose name even he does not seem to know how to pronounce but sounds a little like "Salty") has never allowed me to down more than one pint of Old Sludge before he delivers his latest assault on lawyers. And he is good at it. He carries around with him clippings from tabloid newspapers which describe in lurid detail how solicitors have pocketed thousands of pounds of their clients' money, or have been criticised by judges for not getting on with their case. If he senses that I am winning a round of the battle he pulls out his press cuttings and leaves them swimming in the beer spilt on the bar.

"Narthin' persnal" he will say, "but don't you think yar sort shud pull 'emsels t'gether?" And then he returns to his theme of the night: the replacement of solicitors by computers.

His logic is simple: computers can get rockets to the moon, sequence the human genome and map the earth from space. Surely they will have no trouble in deciding if a woman is guilty of murder or a businessman has committed fraud.

I start to point out to him that computers have not yet learned how to drive cars, and the humble frog can catch a fly better than any robot, but he waves me aside: it's not just anyone that computers should replace, it's the lawyers. Frogs should carry on catching flies, and normal people should drive cars, but no one needs lawyers because we are parasites who have no useful function (he usually makes sure I have just bought the round before he gets to these extreme views).

It then emerged why I was being given such a rough time. He was railing against the Gulf War 2, and he was blaming the lawyers for it. With the same impeccable logic as before, and with the advantage of clearly having had a lot of time on his hands to think these things through while I assumed he was gazing out to sea, he pointed out that Bush was not intelligent enough to go to war on his own, and he was only doing it because our Prime Minister had put him up to it. And what is Mr Blair when he is not being PM? Yes he’s a lawyer. And what was the Prime Minister who led us into the Falklands? Right again: Mrs Thatcher was also a lawyer.

"So yew see," he concluded. "It's all the fault of yew lawyers,. and what yew lawyers do not understand is ordinary people. You deal wit' heretofores and whereases and notwithstandings, and we ordinary folk harn't a clue what yew are on 'bout. How do yew think them poor 'Raqis can be spected to rise up 'ginst Saddam if lawyers send 'em legal documents. No wonder they run and get their guns. Saddam may be a tyrant, but many of them can live ordnary lives. Mebbe them don't want to be liberated by Blair and Bush? Would yew want a bunch of well meaning yanks telln you how t' run the country? I think we should be liberated from the lawyers , but would you want 'Raqi troops, let 'lone 'Raqi lawyers, coming to do it?"
 
I could feel myself disappearing under the burden of opprobrium. Deftly he had shifted the root cause of the problems of the world firstly onto the shoulders of the lawyers, and then onto mine.

It is no use complaining that you don’t find doctors or accountants coming under fire from pub clientele for the ills of the world. If "Salty" had had his way he would have blamed the extinction of the dinosaurs and the destruction of Pompei on the legal profession.

No harm trying, I thought, to find his Achilles Heel. It would be hard to berate a lifeboat man or a hard-pressed crab fisherman. I tentatively asked him how long he had worked at sea.
"Me, sea? Yew gotta be kiddin'", he paused to draw on his pipe, and then on the pint I had just bought him. "Never bin to the sea in my life, except when taking the missus on a cruise liner. No I have a desk job."
"Doing what?" I scented victory.
"Oh I run a little finance company to help people who can't borrow from normal sources" (spoken suddenly in best BBC English).
So that was the maritime connection: the shark infested water of usury. Now I was beginning to look forward to my next close encounter with "Salty", but before then I had to take my scissors to the tabloids so that I had some ammunition with which to demonstrate why "Salty" alone would be responsible for the end of the world when it came.

This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal on 4 April 2003