All over London the lights were on.  The hotel in High Holborn, where Michael Jackson once stayed, was lit up in shades of green and red.

But it was raining. Outside London we heard news of flooding, power cuts, freezers warming up, Christmas dinners in jeopardy.  Emails of concern were sent to friends in Kent, Cumbria – and Chelmsford.  You never know.

In London, however, we kept snug and warm.  The cards were written, the presents wrapped. A threatened court hearing on the day before Christmas Eve was adjourned to be thought about another day.  More presents were wrapped.

On Christmas morning there was egg and bacon for breakfast.  Delicious.  Especially with the chocolate orange.  And a kindle.  What to read?  Currently the Waterstone blog and something from the Guardian called All the Rebel Women which is not quite as exciting as I had hoped.  After last minute tidying and discussion about when is a capon like a turkey – answer, when it’s in the oven – the Chelmsford contingent arrived with the Muswell Hill crew.  Christmas gifts were exchanged.  When lunch was on the table, crackers were pulled.  Jokes were read – some several times, not because they were good but because they just were.  When is a boat like snow?  When it’s adrift.    It was home time.

Boxing Day brought roast beef and more crackers in Highbury.  The jokes were no better and some from Christmas Day were repeated.  Not necessarily correctly.  When is a capon like a turkey?  When it’s a laughing stock cube.

And onto the pantomime.  Sleeping Beauty at the Park theatre.

Who knows about the Park theatre?  People you mention it to say – Oh, how interesting.  Where is it?  The answer is two spits from Finsbury Park station, the Wells Terrace end.  A bar, with coffee, snacks, wine, beer, a lift, friendly people.  And what a fun pantomime – oh yes it was!

To avoid the threat of needles on spinning wheels, Sleeping Beauty lived in a land of soft fabrics.  At the interval safety flannels came down. But the handsome prince lived in a treacherous world of embroidered quilts and haberdashery.  There was singing, shouting, audience participation (for small people), the triumph of true love and we came home with free sweets.   Oh yes we did.

Vinyl.  Was there ever such a word to bring a smile to your lips?  In the back room of a pub in Hornsey High Street people of a certain age gather to play records from their youth and tell stories of the concert, the love affair, the shop which started it all.  I took an Alan Price LP which I bought in France in the 70s, but the track I chose on Saturday, ‘I Put a Spell on You’, came out as a single in 1966.   Almost any track that featured the electric organ was a hit in the Orpheus, the mods’ coffee bar in Chelmsford, but the opening notes of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ had a special haunting quality that made conversation fall away and stilled the clatter of cups on saucers.  And in the Railway Tavern, you tell your story and then sit in the leather chair as Dansette Dave plays the track.  And again, the room was captivated by the sound.  And last Saturday, people who told a story received a gift from Santa’s sack.  Mine was a Neil Diamond LP, the first I have ever owned.  www.stylusstories.co.uk

And then on Tuesday, stories of a different kind in Store Street.  I was speaking at a Haldane Society seminar on ‘How to Be a Feminist Barrister,’ with Alison Diduck an academic from University College London.  It was a truly uplifting evening, the room was full of young people, mainly women, mainly law students, most of whom according to my straw poll, identified as feminists.  The thing therefore was to give them tips – work for women, work with women, use your skills to make the world better for women.  They all seemed up for that.

Getting into the Houses of Parliament is a very difficult experience these days.  In 1976, when Jo Richardson MP was fighting to get her private member’s bill on to the statute books – the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Bill – you could walk through the main front door and there was scarcely any security checking.  Now it takes a good twenty minutes to get through to the Central Lobby – queuing in the cold night air, inching forward towards the room of metal detectors.  It’s like Gatwick Airport used to be, but without the shops.

In those days, we were members of Women’s Aid, there to provide statistics and support for the member for Barking and Dagenham, as her radical bill became law.

This week we were attending the launch of the report of the Lewisham People’s Commission of Inquiry.  The Commission of Inquiry, investigating the proposed closures at Lewisham Hospital, took place on 29 June this year.  Over 40 witnesses, questioned by a team of barristers from Tooks Chambers, gave powerful and moving evidence to the panel and an audience of 400 people.  On Wednesday evening, in room 46A, interrupted only by the occasional tolling of the bell calling members to vote, the report of that day was launched.

What a great night it was.  The evening began with a fifteen minute video of the day of the Commission.  Michael Mansfield and Baroness Warnock who had been on the panel, spoke about the negative effect that the Private Finance Initiative is having on our NHS – not least because of the enormous interest bills, being paid by us the tax-payers, which are crippling the hospitals.  One of the A&E consultants and then the mother of a child with Sickle Cell reminded us what the proposals would have meant in real terms.  And the words of Jeremy Hunt were read by an actor, explaining why the government’s defeat in the Court of Appeal was not going to stop them, in fact they were going to change the law so they could carry on without fear of similar legal challenge (Clause 118 of the Care Bill).

It was a powerful, uplifting evening.  Both the Commission and the report were hugely successful, but there is no mistaking that the struggle continues.  This government has no love for the NHS, certainly not the NHS that we all know and rely on.

Working on the report for the Lewisham Hospital Commission of Inquiry, I glance up and see the Guardian headline ‘NHS staff face jail for neglect.’  OK, we do not want neglect in our hospitals, we want the best care there can be.  But there are already sanctions if people commit acts which end in injury or death for people. What we need is more nurses, better training for nurses and doctors, more money to be spent on the front-line.  We don’t want to criminalise our doctors and nurses.  We love them.

And this, for the government, is a problem.

People love the NHS, they are proud of the NHS.  They rely on it and it serves us all well.

So what is going on here?  My view is that this is all part of the attempted destruction of the NHS.  The government wants us to start worrying about neglect, lack of care, low standards.  By revealing all these ‘failings’ they hope we will start to lose faith in the NHS.  They want us to worry about the NHS, to lose our sense of security about it. They do not want us to turn to the NHS.  They want us to use private health care.

But why?  Why do they want us to do that?  Why would they want us to turn away from our beloved NHS?   Who has an interest in the success of private health care?  Is it those who have shares in private health initiatives?  Where do we find those people?  Can we find them in seats of government?   Where are the figures about failures, disasters, neglect in the private sector?

If I were a person who wore badges – and I am someone who rarely wears a brooch – I would wear a badge that said ‘I heart the NHS’.  For now I shall get back to the report of the Lewisham Hospital’s Commission of Inquiry.  It will be launched on 27 November 2013 in the House of Lords.

Today all is talk of the Bechdel rating test for films.  To pass there must be i) two named women characters, ii) talking to each other, and iii) not about men.  It was devised as part of a cartoon strip in 1985.  Mentally I scroll through my list of favourite films ‘Some like it hot’ – pass.  The Apartment – the doctor’s wife talks to Shirley Maclaine, OK.  Klute – Jane Fonda talks to her invisible therapist, and she also talks to one of her ex-colleagues.  Is that good enough?  Cabaret – Lisa Minelli talks to Marisa Berenson – in the wonderful language-class scene, and later about Marisa’s father’s library sofa – although that conversation is basically about a man.  Private Benjamin – Goldie Hawn.  Women have to talk to each other.

Get Shorty – does it have Green Onions?  Yes.  Does it pass the Bechdel test?  No.  Fargo?  Argo?  Hard to say.  Mid-August Lunch – beautiful film.  Four women who come to share an apartment over the summer in Rome while their adult children are away on holiday.  Yes, they talk to each other.  I think.  Miss Congeniality, yes – good old Sandra Bullock.  Shame that her last film which passed the test (the Heat, not Gravity obviously) was so terrible.  She played an up tight police officer, whose partner was the more relaxed Melissa McCarthy.  Terrible script, terrible plot.  Sweetwater, (in France Sherif Jackson) a film with January Jones from Mad Men, where she is the star who goes out to avenge her husband’s murder, has very few women and they don’t talk to each other.

It makes you think.  What are we watching at the cinema?  What are films telling us about women?   Sex in the City, Bridesmaids, Maid in Manhattan.  Do they pass?  Should they pass?

Getting off the tube at Holborn I see a small cart in the middle of the pavement and a couple of young men casually handing out bottles of sludge coloured fruit juice to passers-by.  I pass by and am given a bottle.

Last week, in almost the same place I was given a free bar of chocolate.

The chocolate was nice – bit sweet.  The drink was nice – bit sweet.  But it occurs to me to ask – what is going on?  All this free stuff being handed out?  Could it possibly be a new political movement?  A new form of redistribution of wealth? Is this communism for the 21st century?

Or is it just the first stage in an advertising campaign for a gym?

The challenging task of moving to new chambers is eased by finding a local cafe that not only has abundant seating but also serves good coffee.  On top of that, City Lit is across the road and the bank is around the corner.  This is perfection.

Meanwhile, in Crouch End, there is a poetry evening at the local Oddbins.  It is rumoured that John Hegley will attend. In the interim, fortified by a small glass of red wine, we listen to various poems and pieces of music, one particularly interesting song is called Tax the Dead.

Sadly, pressure of work means that we cannot stay.  Later reports indicate that John Hegley came and was very good.

A close adviser to the Education Secretary Michael Gove, says that genes are more important than teaching.  Rather than the teaching a child receives, performance is due to genetics.  So presumably, he would say, all those struggles for workers’ education were pointless, the fight for women’s education unnecessary.  The man who dictates what happens in our schools is advised by an unelected person who believes this tosh.  What conclusions can we draw from this?

Moving to a new set of chambers is a daunting task.

Writing to the bank, emailing the Information Commissioner’s Office to ensure my data protection registration is correct, ringing the Bar Council to ensure my Practising Certificate reflects my new address. Saying goodbye to well loved colleagues and clerks. Emptying my shelves, throwing out ten year old copies of Counsel Magazine, shredding papers for cases that have an air of never having been paid, dumping old tins of shoe polish carefully purchased for those last minute dashes to the Court of Appeal, where it’s probably true that not much time is wasted on studying advocates’ footwear.  Although once, in Wimbledon Juvenile Court, a colleague was reprimanded by the bench for the ultra-sensibleness of her shoes – smart Doc Marten lace-ups.

And now a short walk to the new set.

What is Mr Grayling really thinking when he makes his decisions about Legal Aid cuts?

It is the Labour Party conference.  I hear Martha Kearney is interviewing Dennis Skinner.  She asks him if he is pleased socialism is back on the agenda.  Is it?  This is wonderful news.  But Dennis said we had to put meat on the bones. It was the most exciting ten seconds of radio I’ve heard for a long time.

When did we stop equating the Labour Party with socialism?  What does the word mean to young activists?  I wonder if they are waiting to be given the nod and they will explode into action and demand re-nationalisation of the railways and gas and electricity and an end to the proposal for privatisation of the Post Office.

On another note, literally, I read in the New York Times (the one that is given away with the Observer) that Ronnie Spector’s show with which she is currently touring is called ‘Beyond the Beehive.’  Aren’t the first eight notes of Be My Baby some of the best?

Nephew and partner safely ensconced in new flat which is just down the road.  This must mean our area is becoming very hip.  If that is the hip word.