Documents on the I will not be likely to shake the hand of Will Self: one never knows where it might have been . [ Previous Radical’s Diary ] April 22, 2008 (Tuesday) Windsor — Putney (England) I ARRIVE at Wandsworth County Court, at ten a.m., and sit in the waiting room — like The Tank at the Vienna prison, but without the graffiti — until lunchtime; I race up to the car, no ticket on it yet.

The case is finally called before Judge Amin (an Anglo Indian, I believe) at 2:30 p.m. She has read most of the relevant files, very fast, but with a shrewd grasp of what was going on at the Bed-and-Breakfast (B&B) in Kew. The judge is a very talkative woman who makes Tessa S. [a solicitor] seem positively taciturn.

She finds by four p.m. that because there were two perfectly reasonable but opposing interpretations of the cancellation clause in the landlady’s agreement, it is a legal “uncertainties” case and the purported contract on which I am suing is therefore void, i.e ., it had never existed. Therefore I can not sue for damages under it.

A fantastic own-goal by the landlady’s own barrister Helen Reid — twentyish, blonde, very female, just a touch of mascara (evidently anticipating a male judge) — who had argued the “no case to answer” on the contract clause, without anticipating (as I did not either) the uncertainties point in contract law. To add insult to injury, the judge then makes no Order as to costs, other than that I pay the landlady’s bus fare today. What a slap in the face for her.

She faces a £5,000 bill for legal costs (B P Collins [her solicitors] had already mailed and emailed the schedule of costs to me ). Pink-faced and seething, the cute young barrister holds us up another half hour furiously wrangling with the Judge about this draconian No Costs Order as it looms into view, but Judge will not be budged; it was wholly unnecessary for them to build up these costs or even to answer my Claim, she avers, until shortly before the trial.

Barrister Helen Reid argues that I could never have obtained damages, as they are unrecoverable in a breach of contract case. The Judge flatly and repeatedly rejects this point, and I do not even have to marshal the authority of Kemp vs.

Kemp which A. has phoned through to me during the morning — in a case of the wrongful determination of a contract, if the result is a forced eviction, a claim for assault and battery can be pleaded, in which case damages of “at least” £2,000 can be asked; of course I have not pleaded this, but it would have been worth the try.

The Judge bends over backwards to humour me, and although the second part of the case is never reached she makes plain that she is highly suspicious of the three hearsay statements provided [by the defence], and has even noticed the wrong dates on two of them. A most entertaining afternoon. I race