I started this blog a year ago today, with a tentative and fairly dull post about television licences. It has developed from there and is, I hope, less dull at times.

To “celebrate”, I joined some colleagues at 7 am this morning for a paper day. This sounds innocuous, but basically involves rooting out endless boxes of dormant files and dumping them into a large room where they can be reviewed and marked for shredding, if appropriate. So paper day involves a good deal of heavy lifting and results in a physical manifestation of the next item on the agenda: sorting through all these files.

There is an upshot to this type of admin work, like coming across the thirty year old file of a client you talked to yesterday. For someone at the junior end of the profession, it’s a lesson in client care.

Also, some souvenirs, like this piece of nameplate: relic of the long-gone Foynes sub-office.

Solicitors still have branch- and sub-offices, but these days they tend to be reasonably far apart. From the 1950s-80s, when car ownership was less common, many solicitors had a sub-office in a number of towns surrounding the home base and one afternoon of each week would be spent in Askeaton, another in Foynes (each of which only about 20 minutes from Newcastle West).

I’ll keep an eye out for the unusual and interesting for future posts in this second blog year.

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