Episode 03 - On Waiting

Every barrister waits. It is the first thing the job teaches you and the last thing anyone admits. The pupil waits for work. The junior waits for the phone to ring. The silk waits, with a straighter back and a larger fee, but waits all the same. We are trained, from the outset, to sit very still in uncomfortable rooms and appear to be thinking. Much of the time we are.

International practice takes this modest domestic skill and elevates it into a vocation. The English barrister waits for a listing. The international one waits for a tribunal to convene that has been convening, in some form, since before he was called, and will still be convening, in some form, after he has stopped. He waits across time zones. He waits in languages he does not speak. He waits with the calm, load-bearing patience that the brochures, if we were honest enough to print brochures, would describe as saintly.

Which brings me to the comparison I have been quietly avoiding. There is a saint — Simeon Stylites — who sat on top of a pillar in the Syrian desert for thirty-seven years. Simply sat there. Waited. And for this he was made a saint, sought out by emperors, remembered for sixteen centuries. I have done broadly the same thing, in a departure lounge outside Vienna, for what felt like a comparable period, and received a rebooked connection and a voucher for a coffee I did not want. One of us understood the assignment. Again, it is not the one typing this.

The waiting comes in varieties, and I have become a reluctant sommelier of them. I have become a sommelier of another kind too, that also goes to waiting, but in more comfortable settings. That's for another episode. Anyway, back to where I was. There is the wait for a tribunal to sit, which runs on a clock inherited from institutions older than the aircraft that brought you. The wait for a translation, on which a client's liberty depends, turning quietly in an office in another hemisphere while you refresh nothing, because there is nothing to refresh. The wait outside the courtroom, in a corridor built by someone who assumed everyone in it had somewhere better to be — and I never do; being there is the entire job. And the purest form of all, the one this series is named after: the wait with nothing to occupy it but one's own nerves, which I have documented previously and will not embarrass myself by revisiting.

There is also the wait nobody warns you about, which is being kept waiting by the very people you are waiting for. The client who will call back and does not. The body that will rule "in due course," a phrase that in international law can comfortably outlive the person it concerns. You learn not to take it personally. You learn, in fact, not to take very much personally at all, which is either wisdom or attrition, and on a long enough delay the two become difficult to tell apart. I will confess the thing underneath all this, briefly, before I lose my nerve.

A career spent waiting is a career spent just outside the room where the thing happens. Always in the ten minutes before. The judgment takes a moment to read; the years leading to it are where I have actually lived. My family, who wait for me at the other end, understand this better than I do, and have stopped saying so, which is its own kind of verdict. I am writing this, as it happens, from a gate whose departure time has now been described as "estimated" three times, each estimate more theoretical than the last. For once I am not restless.

This, after all, is what the whole career has been for — sitting somewhere I would rather not be, waiting for something that is running late, doing

it with a straight back.

Simeon had his pillar. I have seat 3A. More next week — schedule, and sainthood, permitting.