Barristerial schtick

Behind the scenes Tippy and the other 'staves devote a healthy amount of time to eviscerating barristerial performances ... It also occurs to her that she may be the subject of scathing dinner table analysis 

As I am wont to tell my hangers-on, weeks can pass within the walls of this bunker in downtown Sydney with only the most trifling of amusements to keep one on the livelier side of the consciousness line.

As I am also apt to say, these are by far the most enjoyable of life's diversions.

Over the past nine-odd months, Gus and I have channelled a vast deal of our surplus energies - that is, those snatches of time not devoted to pillorying Plastic Man - into watching the routines of the learned advocates that sweep into Our Courtrooms.

"Mr X QC has said Farah and Say-Dee 12 times in seven-and-a-half minutes," Gus marvels at the morning tea adjournment, referring to that deliciously nasty High Court case dotted with superior smack-downs to the court below.

"Mr Y - you know, the one who looks like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings - keeps on making that smacking noise with his lips," I say, scooping coffee into the plunger.

"Ooh, I hate it when he does that," Gus shudders. "I told you we had him for a five-day trial and I could hear that moist smack-smack-smack sound in my sleep.

"I think it's the dentures that do it."

Ah, but we love barristers.

Curmudgeons, young guns akin to undergraduate mooters, dab old hands, smooth-larynxed operators, embittered veterans who should settle down into fractious retirement with their fashionable wives on the harbour.

My favourite is a young woman who, in the throes of argument, crinkles her nose like a rabbit.

Barristerial turns of phrase have wormed into our vernacular like a compelling Bret Walker SC argument: we wouldn't put an assertion "quite so high"; our trials and tribulations in matters romantic may be compared "mutatis mutandis"; my compulsion to write (badly) is made grand by labelling it a "cacoethes scribendi".

Gus and I shall never tire of watching the endless permutations of barristerial schtick.

If we could spread out their dear black-caped wings and paste our favourite specimens into scrapbooks, like butterflies, we would.

On occasion, I try to extract judicial thoughts on the bumbling advocates before us, but HH is ever the professional.

Judge will similarly try, when I enter the lair of chambers, to draw me into robust discussions of the law.

But my well of respect for HH runs too deep to sport with the Judicial IQ by offering ill-informed musings on such weighty topics.

So we have, by now, a well-choreographed routine of our own.

I enter chambers with a research note, lunch, coffee, or all three; we pretend these routine exchanges are not timed to the second but welcome, spur-of-the-moment offerings; I wave away any expressions of gratitude; we make a fist of conversation - I on matters trivial, HH on matters meaty; an uncomfortably long pause of one-sided incomprehension hangs in the air; I scuttle away backwards, hit a trolley I parked badly, and tell Gus that Judge has another anecdote of Tippy Stupidity for the familial dinner table.

I do imagine Judge's conversations of an evening en famille.

In my mind's eye, HH is holding court with a glass of pinot noir, red-faced with suppressed laughter, saying ...

"And THEN, Tippy said, 'Judge, why can't a plaintiff receive common law damages for an equitable cause of action'?"

Hearty guffaws sound all round, from a spotty adolescent son to the impeccably coiffed, clever judicial spouse.

I imagine a variation of this Tippy-inspired mirth around The Associate's familial table, or with a gaggle of colleagues in the chambers kitchen.

She tolerates my stupidity with an air of amused benevolence teetering on affection these days, and for this I love her without restraint.

But I can hear her accounts of my botched errands yet:

"And THEN, Tippy said, 'Can I put the Wedgewood in the dishwasher'?"

You can imagine the rest.

I cannot bear to think of leaving this place.

I am not ready for the world, and it is not ready for me.