“Fashions in crime are as changeable as the length
of skirts, popular music or the food in so-called smart restaurants. Every year
or so, the government picks a favourite crime, which, so it is said, is likely
to rot the foundations of society and cause universal anarchy. It regularly
promises to 'crack down' on the offence of the day, even to the extent of
mandatory life sentences. When I was a
young whitewig it was frauds on the Post Office and the stealing of stamps,
then it was the trashing of telephone kiosks. Later, spraying graffiti on the
walls of multistorey car parks and highrise flats was temporarily regarded as
worse than manslaughter. At other
moments of recent history it has been mugging, stealing mobile telephones and
the theft of expensive cars.”—John Mortimer, “Rumpole and the New Year’s
Resolution,” in Rumpole and the Primrose Path (2002)
The image accompanying this post is of the great
actor Leo McKern, who embodied John Mortimer’s poetry-quoting attorney for the
indefensible, Horace Rumpole, on British
television for years. Although it is a joy to read Mortimer’s droll
first-person passages, such as the above, somehow McKern’s basso profundo still resounds in my mind as they sink in.
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