The Perils of Penelope
‘Get me a Lawyer!’
‘But Harvey, you are a lawyer!’
‘I mean a good one!’
I’m still reeling from my Magistrates court summons for non payment of council tax. It’s infuriating from the standpoint that it’s not only grossly ridiculous, deleterious to my being a solicitor, it’s also horribly miss-applied.
I had sent my first council tax exemption form along to the office during the first request, some time around November, and had thought nothing of the following letters since the ball was surely footed within their own court. We received a ‘Too Late!’ final demand last week, (Why do Council Offices send out final demands on a Saturday when the banks are all closed and you have to then have your weekend ruined?) and managed to speak to a guy at Hammersmith & Fulham Council who told me that he would push the summons forward post-haste if I didn’t give him my credit card details.
Needless to say, I didn’t like being held to ransom.
So I got an electronic copy of the exemption and sent that off to the local taxation division as well – but that seems a little too complex for the peons over at LBHF.
The demand requests that I attend court the same day I have my advocacy final exam, which is amusing because I’m considering going, making my oral representations and getting one of the lecturers to come along and judge my competency accordingly.
Sadly such summons is insufficiently clear as to the next procedure, and so on Monday I shall be forced to again, not study and instead leap through more of their loopholes in order to avoid court. It’s at times like this I wonder whether I should bring an action back against them (or ‘countersuit’) and prove to them that they fucked with the wrong lawyer when they tried to bully me, or blithely comply and avoid the tedium of the courts system.
Part two of ‘Reading, Writing, Doocing, Image and Death’ shall appear shortly
