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Perhaps I may be simplifying that part a little, but it makes it a little less daunting to do so. The fun has started in class – we are on our feet a lot more these days learning practical cross examination and questioning techniques, as well as how to open and close in the crown court. This is a lot harder than we all originally thought.

Trying to ask the right questions and illicit the right information from the witness is a skill that is made to look really easy by the experienced barristers that appear daily in court. The key to cross examination is never to ask a witness a question that you don’t already know the answer to. Undermining the witness and backing them into a corner with clever questioning is really fun (especially after having done other practical assessments like conferencing, which is positively dull compared to this).

Apparently when I was doing my questioning it sounded like I was telling my witness off, and I was quite disappointed to find out that I shouldn’t always take this approach. Oh well, I’ll have to save the drama for another day. They have stopped selling tea cakes in our school café which for many of us is catastrophic, so maybe I’ll go and reprimand the barista about this whilst pretending to be the barrister.

The mood within my class isn’t ridiculously competitive, but there is definitely more stress in the air as assessments and applications are nearing. The atmosphere can be compared to that found in the library at exam time; an air of underlying tension masked quite often with mild hysteria.

Perhaps I’m dramatising things a little (it was once said that I needed to be a little less ‘hello Wembley’ when doing advocacy) but we all know that the next couple of months are going to be slightly mad, and we must simply just get on with it.