Rock and a hard place

I've been out of chambers for a couple of days. Today, The Master has asked me to make some progress on a draft advice and particulars of claim for a breach of services contract case for which he gave me the papers a while ago. It's like going back to law school, but I'm finding it quite interesting. I'm odd like that, though.

However, I got a call from the clerks on the tannoy thing at about 12pm and one of the senior ones wanted me to go to Brent with Barry for a case management hearing at 2pm. While he attempted to sell this to me as an interesting trip out of chambers, it quickly became clear that Barry was in court elsewhere on another matter, didn't have the papers with him and needed them taking to him. I should say that it's quite possible that the papers had arrived late in the day, rather than this being an indictment of Barry's organisational skills.

The mission, should I choose to accept it, was to meet him on the northbound Jubilee line platform at 1.20pm, or wait there with the papers until he turned up. He might be running late.

I gave a rather ambivalent, lukewarm in response to this request for two reasons. The first is that I didn't want to go to Brent and was hoping to get away early today to get started cooking for my girlfriend. The other is that The Master, quite some time ago, said in passing that other members of chambers should ask a pupilmaster's permission before giving work to a pupil. There was also another, less important reason - I was making progress with the job in hand and it has been on my 'to do' list for a couple of weeks now. OK, this is getting like the Spanish Inquisition sketch. Fourth reason: I didn't want to hang around underground waiting for Godot.

However, balanced against this was my desire not to upset the influential clerks, who will or won't be feeding me work in a few months, nor to upset Barry, who I think is on the pupillage committee and, like everyone else, has a vote for tenancy decisions.

I called The Master to ask for advice, but I couldn't get through. He's visiting Bath today to look at buying a property to add to his portfolio.

I ended up staying put, as will be obvious from the timing of this post, and am cracking on with the contractual terms research. I justified this on the grounds that I already had a job from The Master and was nervous about leaving it without being able to get in touch first - entirely truthful, so far as it went. Meanwhile, I suspect that as I write this one of the two junior clerks is hanging around underground, afraid to surface for mobile contact for fear of missing Barry, but with no sign of him actually showing up.