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Oct. 23rd, 2003 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanThe burning desparation in the back of my throat brings me out of what I term my fugue state, and I realise I have been sat here, wrestling with thie Re-Re-Amended Pleading, for two hours sans cigarette or coffee. The rain of which I was dimly aware, tapping remorselessly against the blinded windows, has stopped, and so I wander out to recharge my addictions and contemplate just how I can make this point with elegance. For formal pleading should be elegant, precise, accurate, and devastating, a thing of beauty in its own way.
It's half-light by five now, and the lamps are coming on in New Square. I wander across the top, towards Old Buildings, and behind them Chancery Lane and assorted over-priced coffee outlets. The rush hour is beginning, but little of the noise of Chancery Lane penetrates to the secluded, near-monastic calm of Lincoln's Inn. The Inns of Court evolved through the greater part of their history, I sometimes feel, to ease Oxbridge graduates into some semblance of a productive life without allowing them to quite realise it, and something of the aura of cloistered learning still remains, among the parked Aston Martins.
Around and back, into the open undercroft below the raised chapel where once John Donne preached weekly to the assembled Benchers and Members of this Inn. Three poets, I think, find particular resonance within me, Keats, Blake and perhaps above all Donne. I think of him, a man who combined within him the libertine and the poet-philosopher, as I perhaps sacriligeously light my cigarette sheltering in the open crypt.
Ah Nicotine, how I love thee, let me count the ways.... Over the Victorian gate that opens onto Lincoln's Inn Fields, the sun is setting in a gap of rain washed clouds...
And, finishing my cigarette it occurs to me that I have hours yet to do and it's really fucking cold, and I walk swiftly back to my warm chambers and my half-done pleading. But first, I burden you all with this over-written drivel...
"In breach of clauses 3(2) and 5(4)...."
It's half-light by five now, and the lamps are coming on in New Square. I wander across the top, towards Old Buildings, and behind them Chancery Lane and assorted over-priced coffee outlets. The rush hour is beginning, but little of the noise of Chancery Lane penetrates to the secluded, near-monastic calm of Lincoln's Inn. The Inns of Court evolved through the greater part of their history, I sometimes feel, to ease Oxbridge graduates into some semblance of a productive life without allowing them to quite realise it, and something of the aura of cloistered learning still remains, among the parked Aston Martins.
Around and back, into the open undercroft below the raised chapel where once John Donne preached weekly to the assembled Benchers and Members of this Inn. Three poets, I think, find particular resonance within me, Keats, Blake and perhaps above all Donne. I think of him, a man who combined within him the libertine and the poet-philosopher, as I perhaps sacriligeously light my cigarette sheltering in the open crypt.
Ah Nicotine, how I love thee, let me count the ways.... Over the Victorian gate that opens onto Lincoln's Inn Fields, the sun is setting in a gap of rain washed clouds...
And, finishing my cigarette it occurs to me that I have hours yet to do and it's really fucking cold, and I walk swiftly back to my warm chambers and my half-done pleading. But first, I burden you all with this over-written drivel...
"In breach of clauses 3(2) and 5(4)...."
