A Blithe Disregard

How fucking dumb are people who are not legal practitioners? This dumb: at parties everyone who meets you for the first time always has just two questions to ask you and the first one is without exception, "what is the difference between an attorney and an advocate" or maybe, if you get a really bright spark, "what is the difference between an attorney and a lawyer?" The question that follows as surely as death follows taxes is, "how can you defend someone who's committed a crime when you know that person is guilty?"

I've thought of carrying laminated cards with the answers to these life-enhancing questions and then I could just hand a card to whoever was asking the questions at the time, and move swiftly on to the canapés and the drinks table. After a while even the faint hope of getting leg over is no longer any incentive to continue that particular conversation.

The least thrilling scenario ever, though, as a stage setting for the questions, occurred one early morning at my local pub where a colleague and I had stopped off for a nightcap after a long night's drinking. My colleague had gone to powder her face and I was leaning against the bar when this obviously tiddly, ageing hippy chick came up to me and declared, "You are either a minister, an undertaker or a lawyer." Admitting to being an undertaker would have saved me some of the ensuing tedium, both that night and over the next few weeks, but my colleague, whose timing was not always of the sharpest, chose that moment to return to my company and to cheerily admit to being a legal person herself. Hilarity ensued. No, wrong sitcom.

In truth we were then treated to an abridged version of the faded hippy chick's life story – three marriages, abusive relationships, alcohol and drug issues, and more – before she got to the main feature, which was her alleged rape at the hands of two police officers the previous year at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. She was pissed out of her skull, caught at a roadblock, the cops offered to take her home but first drove to a deserted spot where they raped her. Since then she'd been on a quest to obtain justice and redress but had been kind of tilting at windmills. She made it sound as if there was a general and nationwide conspiracy by officialdom of all kinds to suppress her case. She needed help, she needed sympathy, she needed someone to believe her and in her cause.

Never, never talk to tipsy middle-aged hippy chicks in bars at 2 p.m. but if you are drunk or stupid enough to do so, never admit to being an attorney, lawyer, advocate or even just someone who works in the office of the Clerk of the Court.