Mooting Malaise

My brain hurts. I’ve just spent the last six hours trying to figure out what to argue for my moot (mock trial) tomorrow, and given that it’ll entail arguing about criminal law topics we haven’t even covered yet in front of a practising barrister, I’m figuring that no matter how wretched I feel right now, the actual moot might quite possibly be worse.

So here I am, sitting in the library typing away on a stone-age computer at 9.30 pm. I haven’t had dinner. The library windows are rattling with the strength of the wind outside. It’s the last week of term.

And again I ask myself why the hell I bother doing something which I don’t actually enjoy. I detest having to sit and listen to people using too much legalese and too little brainpower blather on about things that I am incapable of finding interesting at 6 in the evening. I resent the intrusion of moot preparation into my already packed and badly managed schedule. The only part of the moot I actually find enjoyable is if the judge challenges me and tries to throw me off – that’s when it goes into the realm of the unscripted, and that’s where I most enjoy the cut and thrust of argument. Unfortunately, a fair number of judges I’ve had are either incapable or uninterested in getting involved in this.

And again I ask why I do this…I guess the answer is, simply, that I’m too damn arrogant to pass up doing something I know I’m good at, even if I don’t enjoy doing it all that much and it comes at the expense of other things. And it’s good for the CV, obviously, as sellouty and un-rock’n’roll as that may sound.

Rishi and Mickey, two other people in the moot tomorrow, have given up and gone home in disgust. We had a satisfying kvetch about our collective misery. I’ll probably venture out into the wind and rain soonish as well, go get some dinner, and hopefully find some suitably mindless TV programme or conversation to eat it over. I suppose a good frame of mind to be in now would be to think of all the poor starving children in sub-Saharan Africa etc. etc.

And on that note, I shall trudge.