Another sour and yawn-inducing offering from Tabloid Watch

In my mid-40s, with my journalism career gently coasting, I became a student again. The subject was unimportant. My brain was due a workout to match the body poundings that since my early 20s have been a daily routine. After years of tread-milling, weightlifting and squat-thrusting towards ever-elusive physical perfection, it struck me that decades of mental autopilot had rendered the muscle above my shoulders a saggy, 'don’t bother me till noon', spare-tyre of its former self. So, I started an Open University law degree.

Being a middle-aged student is vastly different from how I remember it first time round. There’s no drinking, no drugs, no staggering home at 3am and sleepwalking into midday lectures. But more notably, and something that would have horrified teenage me, I enjoy it. No enticement is needed to get me into bed at a reasonable hour; I’m there at 10pm, hitting the books by 7am the following  day.

This must have been what the high achievers­–weirdos who put finals before acid-house rave parties–were doing in the 90s while I was slumped over student union coffees vowing never again to touch alcohol, around two hours before getting the pints in. Oh well, I had a good time, and now I love studying, and I’ve also discovered I’m not bad at it. So, I have good news for all those whose university plans Covid has over the past year and a half kicked under a piledriver: if it’s knowledge you seek and not solely the pursuit of raucous fun, leaving it late might not be a bad thing.

(Picture credit: Element5 Digital. C/o Unsplash)

I feel huge sympathy for those school-leavers from whom Coronavirus has robbed a coming-of-age milestone: that of leaving home for the first time, making lifelong friends, and dipping a toe into the technicoloured world of real life. Palpable sadness and injustice emanate from dejected figures slumped in front of online lectures, denied the adventure of leaping from cocoons as freshly hatched almost-adults. It’s not fair. But the inordinate gravity of the pandemic has changed the world and everything in it, and the kindest advice I can offer is to be patient and go to university when things have died down. It’s never too late to start learning. 

I picked law from a hat, and now I’m obsessed. As anyone will undoubtedly say about their chosen subject, it’s relevant to everyday life in ways I could never have guessed. I find myself flexing my pumped-up brain as I would my biceps if I worked as hard in the gym as I do at Blackstone’s Statutes. I no longer dread challenging energy companies over bills rocketing as my usage drops. I charge from the battlements with gusto, blitzing them with ‘exclusion clauses’ and ‘misrepresentations’, brandishing the Consumer Rights Act like King Arthur’s Excalibur. A fly-eating pitcher plant yawning scarlet tonsils, I lure them into my baited trap, deliberately prompting ‘it’s in your contract, sir’ before I sally a retort of ‘reasonable foresights’, ‘onerous terms’ and ‘implied warranties’, all buttressed by the Unfair Contract Terms Act.

To a journalist, the law is intriguing. Good lawyers must be skilled writers, but I’ve discovered they should never try to be too good. Writers are perpetually slicing cumbersome, adjective-laden monstrosities into neatly pared sentences. Stylists pillory those who fail to activate passive clauses while forbidding repetition of words in single paragraphs. But while lawyers must use language forcibly and eloquently, obediently following rules drummed home by grammarians and English teachers can wreak devastating consequences. Swapping the odd ‘dishonest’ for an ‘untruthful’ or slipping a ‘fair’ into the rightful place of a ‘reasonable’ could cost a client at best the price of a poorly constructed conservatory, at worst their liberty.

Legal words have unyielding, specific meanings. Arguments must be precisely constructed using nothing other than the most appropriate language. A watertight contract is rendered a gushing mains leak by the substitution of a single word that unravels a Gordian knot into a case-collapsing loophole. And that’s what lawyers look for­–loopholes; they scour contracts and agreements on a level of syntax known to few other professions. They unpick documents syllable by syllable looking for the tiniest, hair-breadth fissure to get their client off the hook and their opponent on it. And loopholes spring from the omission or inclusion of a single word. 

In his book The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth questions lawyers’ excessive use of ‘merisms’–rhetorical devices which substitute composite words for whole concepts: ‘the tall and short of it’ instead of ‘everything’, ‘bread and butter’ to describe main source of income, that sort of thing. Mr Forsyth describes love-struck poets dismembering the objects of their affection into rosebud lips, buxom bosoms, and tresses of golden locks–merisms that Hannibal Lector would have enjoyed with a nice chianti.

(Picture credit: Tingey Injury Law Firm. C/o Unsplash)

Lawyers writing contracts do the same thing, but with far less Shakespearean flourish. Their merisms are sprawling lists of payment dates, text message allowances and conversation hours; bricks, windowpanes and specifics of roof panels; every Ming vase, Rolex and offshore penny the fiancé of a millionaire celebrity will forego should the love-in turn sour. Law students study cases that panned because the contract omitted a single word or hedged its bets with an unspecific ‘everything else you can think of’. Words count.

Studying law has instilled a newfound appreciation not only of learning, but of the craft I have spent twenty years doing without really thinking how; writing. And to my 21-year-old self, who skulked home after three years at university with a less than impressive 2:2 in biochemistry, I say don’t worry; give it time, wait until you’re ready, and one day you’ll discover studying for no other reason than the sheer joy of learning. 

This message I offer to all those whose university plans were last year left tattered by the pandemic. It’s never too late. Go out, discover yourself, earn some money, find out what you like. And remember, some of the most successful people on the planet never went to university; others just got on with their careers, made loads of money, and left learning till later.