Last year's pupils

I've been tucked away in the library at chambers all day today. No sign of The Master, although he did phone me in some instructions at about 10am and asked me to call him before 5pm to check how I was doing. I've been sitting almost by myself reading case files all day and trying to get to grips with the issue of 'ordinary residence' for the purposes of local authority duties to assess and provide for care needs under the National Assistance Act 1948. I'm supposed to be drafting some representations to the Secretary of State for Health for a s.32 reference on which local authority gets to look after the applicant. It might not sound it, but it's actually quite interesting and it's something that I've come across before in asylum work but know very little about.

I'd like to think that I'd normally be able to knock off a task like this in a couple of hours, but it really has taken all day and I'm still not done. I just can't focus as it isn't real work, it isn't my case and yet I'm also pretty much unsupervised and, ultimately, nothing depends on it. To give myself some credit, I am also pretty knackered after a busy weekend.

I said almost by myself as one of the pupils from last year has a desk in the library. The other pupil from last year, a guy I've met once in the post room, has been taken on as a tenant but she is doing a third six (an additional bolted-on period of pupillage) here. I don't think she applied for tenancy this time around. We've been sitting trying look busy and not disturb each other's non-work. I've no idea if she spotted that I was bored so I spent quite some time sorting photos from my long weekend. We did just manage to have a chat about her experiences here, which seem to have been very positive.

She has come straight through directly from university, unlike the other pupil who started at the same time as her, myself and, apparently, the other pupil who has started with me (more about her when we actually speak properly, hopefully this week). She spent eight months with one pupilmaster and four with another. She has found the set friendly and pleasant and she has learned a lot in her time here.

As a third six pupil, she is a qualified barrister (I think) but is not a permanent member of chambers, called a 'tenant'. However, she also does not need to pay chambers 'rent', the fairly hefty fee for being attached to a set of chambers and benefiting from the central resources and clerking service. Today, she was quite excited about doing two linked Interim Care Order (ICO) renewals at the Registry on High Holborn, as they pay £35 a pop but only take a few minutes. She seems to be pretty dependent on the clerks to feed her work, and that is all she got for today. She says the guy who got taken on as a tenant has a busy diary and is developing his own practice, and that he is very good at the whole networking thing.

She will apply for tenancy here but she'll also be applying elsewhere as insurance. She isn't sure that there is enough low level work coming in at the moment to sustain two quite junior members of chambers.

I think there are quite a few lessons in all this.