North of the Stupid Line

I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the penultimate offering of JK Rowling in the Harry Potter series. I started reading it on Wednesday morning, so it’s taken me just over 3 days to read 605 pages.

It was quite a different style of book from the previous 5 books, and I think it could be my favourite one so far. There was a lot less action in it, but to compensate for that, it was a far more complex and intelligent piece of work. I won’t give away any plot developments, as I know some of you are or will be reading it, and I don’t want to spoil it for you. What I particularly liked, I think, was how Harry, Ron and Hermione are depicted as real teenagers – this raised a lot of laughs at my end.

I won’t say any more. If you haven’t read it yet, go get it and read it!

The next book on my reading list now is a re-reading of Stephen King’s Wizard & Glass, the fourth book in The Dark Tower series. The reason I’m re-reading it is because I have the last 3 books in the series: Song of Susannah, Wolves of the Calla and The Dark Tower, and because I read the first 4 books ages ago, I’m re-reading to remind myself what happened before reading the new ones.

I am so relieved. I have just completed my assignment on positive discrimination for the LLM. It was 7,561 words in the end, which is a little over the limit, but to be honest, I’m past caring. It was a really difficult subject to get my teeth into, but I think I’ve produced something decent. Whether I get another Distinction though, remains to be seen.

Some excellent news. I’ve *almost* secured a training contract! RAD are now working in partnership with South West London Law Centres (SWLLC) to provide me with a training contract, as RAD wants to keep me committed to RAD for another two years, and also because they know that being a solicitor is my ultimate dream.

The terms of the training contract will be that I will be a full time trainee solicitor with SWLLC, based at their office in Croydon. I will be carrying outreach work two days a week in RAD centres, doing casework with RAD clients who need specialist legal advice, under the Legal Help scheme. Three days a week, I will be interviewing clients and doing casework at the Croydon office.

It is anticipated that the training contract will last for 18 months, as my two years experience with RAD will be used as “time to count”, thus reducing the contract by six months. I’ll still be employed by RAD, and managed by my current manager, Linda Isaac, while supervised by a senior solicitor at the Croydon office.

The subject areas will be as follows:

1. Welfare benefits
2. Housing
3. Employment

The reason I say *almost* is because the training contract itself needs to be approved by the Law Society, and also Tom Fenton, Chief Executive at RAD, needs to agree to the new arrangements.

So, all being well, I will be a qualified solicitor in April 2007! I would like to say a massive THANK YOU to Linda for making it possible. It’s a dream come true!

I am sick and tired of people the world over using their religion as an excuse for their actions. It just means that their unshaken belief in a supreme being or authority who governs all our lives in some way is used to justify acts which fly in the face of common sense. Please allow me to give you some examples.

George W Bush and the USA

Private Eye has picked up on the tendency of the current President of the United States’s use of God as his justification for his actions, such as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Take this picture as an example (albeit satirical). Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), a documentary on the 2003 Israeli-Palestinian summit, contains footage of Nabil Shaath, Palestinian foreign minister to Yasser Arafat, who claims that Bush told delegates:

“God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did. And then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”

I agree with Zoe Williams from The Guardian, who suggests that while it doesn’t make sense for God to actually tell Bush to go invade Afghanistan, we cannot dismiss the claims entirely. While I’m not necessarily a Christian, I do feel that – on the basis that our lives would be worth nothing if we just died and faded away to dust, without an after-life to commend what we achieved during our lives – there must be some sort of overseer out there. Anyway, the point is that: we just don’t know.

Nonetheless, why would God rely on Bush to do something like this? Why would Bush say something so profound in its implications, so far-fetched, that doesn’t make sense? Perhaps he is trying to justify his actions, and because there is no justification for the losses of thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the military, he is blaming God for it.

Martin Kettle summed up the situation in the USA with regard to their divinity and attitude towards foreign policy in an article published in The Guardian back in November 2004 related to the US presidential elections:

Bush’s apparent acceptance of the view that he may be doing God’s work in the White House … is shared by millions of American conservative evangelical protestants, many of whom believe … that the very existence of the United States is proof of a divine purpose. In that context, the idea that America should reject ties with necessarily less blessed nations becomes existential, an exceptionalism of another order altogether.

Most Americans don’t think in these terms, of course. Yet sufficiently large numbers of them do for their conviction to be massively important, especially when they are so determined and have such powerful armed forces. If you believe that God has a higher purpose for your work, then you bring a special fervour to everything that you do, whether it is re-electing the president, challenging his opponent’s credentials, stopping his voters from voting, challenging their votes or – if by some cruel fate the opponent wins the election – preventing him from governing.

I do have respect for people’s own beliefs, but come on … !

Terrorists

From one extreme to another, terrorists are another example of people using religion as an excuse. A recent example would be that of Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the 7 July bombers, who said in a video released on 2 September 2005, in which he justified his actions as being a protest against the American-Anglo aggressions against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine:

I ask you to make du’a [a supplication] to Allah Almighty to accept the work from me and my brothers and enter us into gardens of paradise.

That reference to his religious beliefs is yet another example of how people are justifying unjustifiable acts by referring to an entity that is difficult to identify either physically or mentally. I’m sure that’s not what God intended when he (according to the Bible) created Earth in 7 days and created Adam and Eve.

Rather than doing a series of separate posts, I thought I would give you a quick summary of what’s happened in my life since 14 June 2005, as well as what is going to happen over the next few months.

24 Llwynon Road
Rachel and I finally had the keys to our new house on Friday 15 July, after a delay to our completion date of about 2 weeks, due to the fact that the Sellers decided at the last minute to add a chain to our transaction i.e. they wanted to complete on the house they were purchasing before they completed their sale of 24 Llwynon Road. We were a bit miffed about this because we learnt of this the day before we were expecting to complete, on 30 June. It was a good job that Rachel wouldn’t let me book anything or order anything until we had the keys, because otherwise I would have had egg on my face.

Anyway, we got the keys last Friday, and we are so thrilled about it. We went to see the house after picking up the keys on Friday, and it was so surreal entering *our* house. We got there around 3pm, and stayed till 7pm. Rachel’s parents and her brother Oliver came over after Oliver finished school, followed by Rachel’s grandparents, and then my parents, Kirsty and Sam came over. Rachel’s dad, grandparents, and Kirsty and Sam were the only ones who hadn’t seen the house up to that point. All were really thrilled with it.

We had a pleasant surprise upon entering the house: the Sellers had left their tumble dryer and their dining table and four chairs. We knew they were leaving their fridge/freezer, and we were surprised to see that it was practically new. So we’ve been very lucky with the house, and we’re really excited.

I will post a separate post later on when I have pictures ready and will submit boring things like plans of rooms. I bet you can’t wait!

Training Contract
There haven’t really been any developments on the training contract front. A quasi-legal agreement has been approved between RAD and SWLLC, and SWLLC have submitted an application to the Legal Services Commission for funding for my training, and things are progressing with the Law Society side of things too. I’m still hoping for a September 2005 start.

Croydon
I am officially moving out to Stephen Dering’s flat in Sandilands on 6 August 2005.

I think that’s about it for now.