LawLife

Monday Man : This Lawyer’s Life: Andrew Pack aka Suesspicious minds

This is our new feature: This Lawyer’s life where we delve into the life and mind of an eminent member of the legal profession (or just someone we really , really like). Fortunately Andrew Pack fits both categories. Hurrah!

All the law we know comes courtesy of his brilliant blog www.suesspiciousminds.com where he writes about ‘law, nonsense and the nonsense of law.’ Oh and he wins awards for it too!

Take it away Andrew

 

THIS LAWYER’S LIFE

 

Name:  Andrew Pack  (aka Suesspicious Minds)

Brief bio: I fell into law by accident (in fact, I was extremely drunk when I first got offered a job working in law) but I fell profoundly in love with it, and have managed to stick at it for twenty two years. I do family law for a Local Authority and I get to look at the sea out of my office window (if I stand up and crane my neck). I now channel my inner and outer law geek into my family law blog www.suesspiciousminds.com

My early morning ritual is:

Waking up and getting up has never been easy, as Elastica sang.

The advice I would give my 20 year old self is:

Yes you absolutely should take all of your months wages and bet on Hasim Rahman to knock out Lennox Lewis at 50-1, which my girlfriend at the time talked me out of. Don’t listen to her, listen to your instincts.

When I was growing up I wanted to be:

 Either PG Wodehouse or Gary Lineker. I have achieved both goals, I think. I can write about as well as Gary Lineker, and play football about as well as Wodehouse.

If I was omnipotent I would:

Probably be the sort of person that the Avengers would have to band together to defeat for the good of humanity.

If a film of my life was made it would be called:

The Avengers Get Together and Try to Defeat Andrew (but are ultimately unsuccessful, as are the X-Men, and Ghostbusters, and Batman)   – see answer 5. It’s not the snappiest of titles, but as I will be in charge of the whole world, it will win all the Oscars for always

If I could invite any 3 people (living or dead) to a dinner party I would choose:

I always struggle with this one, because it requires you to be such an egotist that you imagine that Che Guevera, John Lennon and Stephen Fry would want to talk to YOU at this dinner party, when the reality is that you’d be sidelined and marginalised and miserable, whilst they talked amongst themselves.

But assuming that’s not going to be the case, and that they all find me fascinating too, I’d go with Richard Feynman  (physicist, safe-cracker, bongo player), Raymond Chandler and Marie Curie –providing I get a Geiger counter.

My Mastermind specialist subject would be:

The Mr Man books (but not the Little Miss books, because I never read any of them)

I would least like to be stuck in a lift with:

Alfred Hitchcock carrying a large fern. I always worry about how much air there would be, and whether someone particularly corpulent would mean there’s less air in the elevator for my personal consumption – on Archimedes’ Principle, have they displaced more of the available air? And the fern because I’d be freaking out wondering whether the fern was stealing my air, or whether the fern might be absorbing C02 and releasing oxygen, and berating myself for not knowing.

If I could go back to any era I would choose:

You are talking here to someone who spends about an hour a day day-dreaming and plotting in intricate detail what I might do with a time machine, so that is extremely difficult. I’d go with Paris in the 1920s, and befriend Ernest Hemingway and write The Great Gatsby before Fitzgerald could think of it, and at the same time scoop myself some Nobel Prizes for Physics. I suppose I could also do something about Hitler at the same time, but if I’m hanging out with Hemingway I might be too hungover to get round to that.

My childhood crush was:

Wonder Woman, as played by Linda Carter. And frankly, she still is.

 If I was on death row my last meal would be:

It’s tempting to say something smart like fugu, the Japanese fish that can kill you if not prepared perfectly, but I know that it would actually be lasagne and Viennetta for afters.

My all time favourite book is:

It varies a lot – Right Ho Jeeves by Wodehouse is the funniest book I’ve ever read, The Big Sleep by Chandler is the richest in language, What we talk about when we talk about love by Raymond Carver is the book that made me want to write. If I had to pick one book to do it all, it would be Heller’s Catch 22 – it revels in nonsense, plays with language, has more pace than you’d imagine, and makes me laugh out loud but also has in the scene with Snowden in the plane one of the truly saddest sequences I’ve ever read.

So Catch 22.

My favourite song/piece of music is:

God Only Knows by the Beach Boys

The greatest fictional lawyer is:

Does anyone say anything other than Atticus Finch for this? Unless they’re massive Tom Cruise fans and say Tom Cruise in a Few Good Men. So I’m going to say the Simpson’s Lionel Hutz, Attorney at Law.  “Don’t worry Mr Simpson – I saw an episode of Matlock in a bar last night. The sound was off, but I think I got the gist of it”

 

 

 

 

 

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