Legally Blonde aims for the Bar (on Leeson Street)

The idea of getting up early on Saturday morning to go to a tutorial on the other side of the city is a bit like getting up to change a baby's nappy in the middle of the night. You know you have to do it, but the timing isn't great. Having babies puts paid to hangovers, you quickly learn no night out is worth the agony. Amazing how you forget that when they grow beards and sleep until lunchtime.

It’s our first law tutorial and my shell-shocked self is still overflowing with enthusiasm and vowing not to miss a minute of this tidal wave of knowledge … might have overdone the metaphors there, but you get the gist.

Friend, Victoria Grayson-Beckham, invites me for supper the night before, ‘well I warn you, I’ll be in bed before midnight,’ I smugly confide, ‘can’t miss my first tutorial’. Her husband, Baron von Richterscale, is out for dinner with his petrol heads, so it’s a tête a tête a deux. Or was, until Alpha Romeo became available and joined us in Victoria's secret kitchen at the foothills of Wicklow. Fast forward to 4am and we are still up with the iPod disco in full swing. By 9.45 after a long drive I’m 15 minutes late, the class is split into groups, they’re talking manically about legal terms, I don’t know where to sit, my head aches, my eyes sting. I get a nod from lovely red-haired girl, the group brings me up to speed, when tutor, not knowing who is who, calls a random name from her sheet. ‘Deirdre, can you identify the crime and which is the appropriate court to deal with case ‘B’? I look around for another Deirdre in the room. My group stare expectantly. Isn’t it just typical, I’m out of school thirty years and still in trouble. One of the lads had mentioned ‘piracy’, I parroted, then a gallant young fella backed me up. I swear it won’t happen again.

Now in my second week at the new school, we had our first lectures in constitutional, contract and criminal law. To call them lectures is an understatement, introductions to a whole new world is more like it, delivered by the most entertaining men I’ve come across in a long time. After a few minutes my colleagues in the front row sat back, put down our pens and just listened in thrall. Constitution man warned us that Contract man was going to be boring and his course was the most important subject in the world. Contract man pointed out the plethora of Latin terms we’d have to know, noting that English ones were much easier but then we wouldn’t be able to confound the client with our complex knowledge. So now you know.

Just because...

I can’t ignore landlady house while aiming for the Bar, cost-centres still need to be fed and goaded into cleaning, gentlemen lodgers are incredibly invisible and my blog is suffering, all the while I’m reading books and writing reviews for a Sunday newspaper (to pay for my own school books). I’ve even interviewed a crime-fiction writer, a doctor who specialises in ghoulish cases, he insisted on buying me lunch and after two hours said he wished we could keep talking (I daren’t have told him it was my first interview) and most of what he told me couldn't be printed!

Tonight will be the fifth night in a row at school and the young ‘uns have organised a class outing to a new club in town. House in Leeson Street, am I going? After a 50^th birthday dinner last night for Mariella, literary queen, involving a mad dash across town to the deep south and a struggle to keep awake today, a Latin phrase springs to mind, Carpe Diem.