Turkish Delight

It was as bad as it could be. At least once a year I aim to clear my room of those files which have gathered not only dust, but also mildew and canker. I also deal with the myriad notes and memos which turn the surface of my desk permanently to autumn: they have become brown and curled, and they crackle underfoot when I stand on my desk to unjam the expensive blinds which the curtain committee kindly chose for me when we moved office
The occasion was my departure on holiday. I told you in the last issue that I was going. And I did. I used not to make these preparations, but some years ago my tidy partners decided to organize my room while I was away. The effect was catastrophic. There are still files which have not recovered from the experience, and two which have never re-appeared. They are evidently in hiding, still lurking in terror.
This year I did it, after a fashion. But I felt uneasy about the exercise. So many things had intervened to militate against any sort of holiday. The sheer volume of work vied with domestic challenges. Quite unreasonably the grass decided to grow at the very moment when our big lawnmower chose to give up the ghost. You should see our garden. We have 1½ acres of field (bought, I hasten to add, in case the Lord Chancellor thinks I am earning too much, for £750 twenty years ago), lots of trees (planted by me because I discovered that you do not have to weed them) and no vegetables (because I discovered that you do).
The garden can never decide whether it has returned to the wild or forms part of the hinterland between rural idyll and country chaos. I delight in cutting angry swathes through the relentless cow parsley and stinging nettles. But in turn these plants rejoice in trying to defeat my efforts by growing so fast that they overwhelm the flailing blades of our raunchy, macho mower.
The grass had scored a small victory by thrusting a colossal flint into the blades and turning the mower into a giant vibrator - exciting to hold but ineffective for cutting grass. I had to fall back on the little grass cutter which we bought to manicure the small patch of real lawn around the house. Have you, if you are a man, tried shaving with a woman's razor? Cutting our field with the small mower is a similar experience. Let me nervously add that there is no sexism implied. It is just that somebody decided a while ago that women should shave their arms with miniature razors. For all I know things have moved on, and there are now women solicitors reading this who shave with hover mowers.
But back to the office - if you insist. If I had worked any later on that last Saturday, I would have arrived home too late to get to the airport to catch the flight to Turkey. The last two or three hours consisted in damage limitation: "Very sorry.... pressure of work.... must give thought to your problem... back in a fortnight". I also found my brimming waste bin a suitable receptacle for difficult decisions.
Somehow or other, and using the same techniques as others might apply to dust and the lifted corners of carpets I left a reasonably tidy room, but firmly believing that even though I may have been wrong in the past, this time the reward of a fortnight's holiday did not justify the effort involved in getting away.
Because other and greater forces prevailed (like incurring the wrath of a family who, over the last 12 months have rather forgotten what I look like), I went.
And here I am now in Turkey, not kidnapped, not dying from food poisoning or sunstroke, sitting on one of a small group of sun beds not occupied by Germans and reluctantly admitting that it is all worthwhile.
The breakpoint came when we went on a trip to the mudbaths. They were advertised as being very good for you and making you "fell 10 years junger". The Turks do not speak very good English, but my Turkish is not brilliant either. I took the whole fortnight trying to learn to say "thank you" in Turkish - and failed.
There has to come a point on every solicitor's holiday when he or she stops being a solicitor, casts aside the heretofores, abandons the pin-stripes and eschews Latin expressions. Such a moment came for me when the entire Barr family stood, stripped to our trunks, in a muddy pool and smeared ourselves with slime.
If you sell an idea hard enough you can convince anyone of anything. You can understand why Germany went mad when Hitler arrived on the scene, or why the Americans became obsessed with Communism under the influence of MacCarthy or even why we take seriously men who dress up in amazing fancy dress and pronounce judgments which affect our lives.
We slipped and slithered along muddy paths until we reached some deep pools where about 5 dozen people had entirely taken leave of their senses.
Now I have a confession: I find it difficult to imagine what those men who wear fancy dress look like in real life. I am always surprised when I see Judge Tumin on television, that he looks human, even slightly vulnerable.
My vote is that in future years, the Law Society should pay for a holiday for all High Court judges, and insist that they go to the mud baths in Dalyan in Turkey and smear themselves with mud. It would do them good (the loss of ten years could bring some of them down below retirement age) and show the rest of us that they had hairy chests, fat bellies and spindly legs. Besides, judges need holidays too.
While I am instructing the Law Society on its duties, it should, before I get back and change my mind, make it a condition of the renewal of every practising certificate that all solicitors should prove that in the previous 12 months they have taken at least 4 weeks holiday (two of them consecutively). I am sure that there is a correlation between claims on the compensation and indemnity funds and lack of holidays.
You can go to Dalyan too but not please at the end of August. We plan to go again. The last thing I want to do is play in the mud with a lot of solicitors.

Published in the Solicitors Journal September 1993