Advent - Day 6 - Coincidences (retrospectively)

Tonight I went around to a girl (S) from Mosaic's house to help her out.  She's currently training to be a barrister and is doing a 1 year course at a private university in Leeds.  As part of her course she had an exam on Thursday and was preparing for it.

The exam was not a written one, but a role play situation where the situation was that she was meeting a client for the first time (which apparently often happens just before a hearing).  The barrister will have been provided with all the witness statements that the solicitors acting on the case have prepared and has an hour to interview the client and advise them on the best course of action with regards to what they should plead.  S often practices these with her colleagues on the course but as they were all preparing for the same exam, and had the same supporting papers, wanted to practice with someone else.

I had to read the witness and police statements and then play the role of the accused in the interview.  All I knew was what I could glean from the documents and I was free to say what I wanted and take any approach that I wanted to build on these and give my perspective.

The interview lasted for an hour and whilst it was quite hard work for me I think I made S work even harder by being fairly awkward at times, asking questions that went off topic and making her explain everything many times over.  Based on my understanding of the situation I decided to admit to one offence and plead guilty but to deny the second offence that I had been accused of and to want to plead not guilty.  This was a surprise to S who had not considered that possibility in her preparation and so went away to make sure she was fully conversant with the implications of this potential outcome.

It turns out that on the day of the exam, the client (played by a briefed actor), took exactly the same approach that I had done, meaning that S had a perfectly prepared set of recommendations and could advise on the likely outcomes of taking this approach.

My thoughts today were about those who people consider to be lucky, or fortunate.  It's true that we don't know the future and however well we plan there can be things which occur which we could never expect or foresee.   But irrespective of this I feel that preparation is important.  I don't know what I'm preparing for at present because I don't really have a vision or goal.  That doesn't worry me in the short term, but what does worry me is what I need to do to get that vision / goal.  I think it probably requires me to stop and take time out, something that I'm not good at doing at all, ever.