Back into it

Some barristers have to slink back to work because of their shameful antics at the end-of-year chamber's party ... Junior Junior is not one of them ... She stayed late at the party and now has something up her sleeve that may prove useful on a rainy night 

RETURNING to chambers after a few weeks of blissful inertia is a shock to the system.

It is a time of mixed feelings: relief that there is work to return to and dread that there is work to return to. 

Days that were earmarked for beach-going are now days that I must show up to court, looking like a drenched mess due to the hellish temperatures.

Ah summer! You suck.

For some, however, the return to work provides an even greater challenge. 

Numerous chambers are the repositories of particularly interesting characters, who have an allergic reaction to free alcohol and Christmas cheer. 

For these characters, the post-holiday return is akin to a walk of shame. 

They sneak in behind sunglasses and a new haircut hoping their colleagues have forgotten that they removed their trousers and jingled their bells during the head of chambers' speech.

There is no shortage of these antics at Christmas time.

By and large, I have found that people are unreasonably well behaved. They drink, they complain about the quality of the wine, they talk about their cases and politics and occasionally sing Christmas carols with words satirising colourful identities at the bar and on the bench. 

But, every so often there is a corker.

There was the junior junior who got intoxicated and was unable to walk. A senior took the poor sod home in a taxi, but they were both so hopelessly drunk that neither could remember where they lived.

Once they hit what the senior thought was the right suburb, the taxi ejected the junior junior who promptly vomited in the gutter then screamed at the fleeing vehicle and its passenger, "You're a paedophile".

Life thereafter was very difficult for that junior junior. 

Fortunately for me, I was well behaved at my chambers Christmas party.

I enjoyed sitting back and watching the antics. I ensured I was one of the last to leave so that I didn't miss out on any excitement. 

You never know what blackmail-able actions will occur in the last drunken moments of a shindig when the pressure is off and it all hangs out. 

So what happened? I'm keeping that one for a rainy night.