I fought the law..

There is a four-foot tower of textbooks that stands imperiously in the corner of my bedroom, a dusty memorial to the three years I spent fighting the law in Belfast.

However, not only is this papery column a reminder of a particular time and place in my life, it is also a monument to an imperfect decision I made aged 18, but one that I now realise I could not have made any differently.

Let me explain…

They say never to cover a judge with a book, or something along those lines, but that is exactly what I did when eight years ago I sat down to pick my degree.

Some would argue such reputedly life-defining decision should not be made on a whim, and rather, should be considered with the utmost care, observed and analysed from every angle.

Are they right? Probably, but my choice certainly wasn’t pondered over too painstakingly.

When my seven years of secondary school elapsed, callow, keen, and – just like the rest of the boys I was friendly with – wholly ignorant about what the inside of any course actually looked like, without insight or understanding, I alighted on law as the path I’d pursue. In the absence of any real information about what the degree entailed, a mirage had formed in my mind, mostly based on movies I had watched and stories I had been told.

Anyway, with nothing else to go on, I hung my future on a hook half-made in Hollywood, and took myself off to Queens to try become a barrister – whatever that was.

Soon after arriving, my fantasy collided with reality, and the latter quickly conquered the former. It became clear that I was tin-tongued and devoid of even a glimmer of courtroom-confidence, therefore was never going to be able to beguile a jury or ensnare a defendant.

However, with every life-sapping lecture and torturous tutorial, my locus of concern became less about for how many hundred years my name would live on in the footnotes of legal academia, and more about whether or not I would be fit to get through first year.

Jesus, it was tight going.

With so many foreign concepts to try to wrap my barely-adult head around, I felt like a toddler trying to understand algebra.

Constitutional law. The rule of law. Tort law. Common law. Statute law. Contract law. European law. B-blaw b-law b-law b-law b-law.

I had the intellectual appetite of a Jack Russell, but to prepare for every tutorial I was supposed to ingest a slab of legal literature fit to choke a lion.

Anyway, despite the recurring experience of walking out of class feeling thicker than when I went in, there were parts of the degree that were interesting, comprehensible, and, dare I say it, useful beyond the boundaries of course itself. The idea of proportionality, for example, is one I still occasionally find benefit in thinking about today.

It was a hard enough time, but a funny one, too, full of ridiculous ironies, not least the fact that of the 200 students that attended criminal law by day, about 20 per-cent then went and broke it that same night. On several drunken occasions I am sure I strayed queasily along that line myself.

But back to the point.

Do I regret choosing that course? No; I passed and it led me to where I am now.

Is there something I could have done that would have been a better use of my time and brought me somewhere even better? Who knows.

See, I don’t think we really make the big decisions we think we make in life.

We do the best with what we know at the time, but they almost make themselves. To regret a decision is to retrospectively judge ourselves for making a choice we could not have made any differently.

I realise this column was, for the most part, highly unrelatable. Don’t worry, there’ll be a return to something a more light-hearted, universal theme next week.

Until then, make a few bad decisions and feel fine about them.

Has this all been terrible advice? I don’t think so.