Week 10 - Greg + Kate
I met Kate through a mutual friend when I was living in Forest Gate in East London, where she also lived. We ended up becoming good friends and spent a lot of time in each other’s company before I decided to move to Manchester.
I was in London for the weekend for a friend’s 40th and Kate very kindly offered me a bed for a couple of nights. Staying a Kate’s is always a pleasure, not just because of her company, but because of the equally lovely surroundings: you get your own bedroom with a proper double bed, the thread count on the bed linen is somewhere north of 800 and the guest towels are always fresh, clearly having been boil washed after each use. Kate’s house is also immaculately clean and tidy which adds to the overall sense of calm.
I fear I might be cheating a little with this Greg Plus One as we didn’t go out for a meal, but rather stayed in and ordered a takeaway. This is clearly host’s prerogative, but was probably also influenced by my insistence that we shouldn’t go anywhere too fancy. We ended up ordering from Gezi Park, a Turkish restaurant in Wanstead and had the following:
Humus
Tabule
Babaganoush
Chicken Shish (x2)
Muska Boregi: A deep friend filo pastry stuffed with cheese, spinach, parsley and herbs
Flat breads
I’ve decided to pick and choose from various interactions over the weekend rather than solely focus on what we discussed during our meal.
Kate works extremely hard as a lawyer in the field of Civil Fraud. This principally seems to involve dealing with extremely rich people who have been defrauded by other extremely rich people, or governments who have been defrauded by extremely rich people. You’ve got to love extremely rich people. What I’ve come to realise is that there are few professionals who work longer hours than lawyers, especially when they are involved in a particularly gnarly case. In fact, it’s not uncommon for Kate to work past midnight for several days on end. I’ve never been a night owl and my powers of reasoning diminish rapidly after dark, so how anyone can consider complex legal arguments long into the night is beyond me.
When Kate’s not working her socks off, she likes to indulge in a little reality TV and is currently watching Love is Blind, which meant I was subjected to a couple of episodes during my stay. If you’re not familiar with the show, it works like this. A group of men and a group of women are locked in a Big Brother style house, with each only able to meet the opposite sex either side of a privacy screen, much like a confessional in church. Each man and woman meet for varying degrees of time and at some point one (usually the man) proposes to the other, the idea being that (you got it) love is blind. The trouble I have with most reality shows is that they are populated with people who want to be on a reality show. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, but they always go out of their way to explain that they’re not there just to be on a reality TV show, but to really find love. I find this hard to swallow as: there have to be easier ways to find love outside of the gaze of the public (if anyone knows what they are then do let me know); if it really wasn’t about the fame then a meticulously-curated social media presence wouldn’t be required upon leaving the show. If you do decide to watch, then I would suggest you avoid all the courting and skip straight to the weddings and/or post-show meet ups. This is where the real drama happens and means you don’t need to endure the inane candid-but-I-know-I’m-constantly-being-filmed conversations.
I’m not sure whether it was the duplicity on the TV or the talk of complex fraud, but our conversations reminded me of my time working in retail. Dealing with fraud is part and parcel of any retail business and large retailers will often have a fraud team. When I was working at M&S I received a call from the Employee Fraud Department to ask me why I had bought a sofa using my staff discount that had been delivered to an address that was different from the one on my HR record (I had recently moved house) - they were watching. I subsequently worked for another retailer who had a members’ club. Members were entitled to early access to sales, exclusive items and could attend sample sales. On several occasions there were arguments over items at sample sales and it got physical at least once when one member attempted to snatch an item from another. I guess some people would call the members passionate, but I would be inclined to use a less kind word. The lengths members would go to to receive preferential treatment was demonstrated by one member, let’s call her Mrs X. One of Mrs X’s friends contacted us to inform us that Mrs X sadly had very serious cancer and asked if we could send her some items to lighten her mood. We of course did and then entered into a dialogue with Mrs X as she wasn’t happy with the quality of the items she had received. We continued to communicate with Mrs X over several months and at one point were contacted via email by her father as he believed that we had treated her unfairly. A few more months passed before it came to light that Mrs X was in fact completely healthy and it was likely that her father’s emails had in fact been sent by her. She had successfully fooled us into thinking she was unwell, seemingly just to receive preferential treatment. It wasn’t just us she had mis-led, the other members she was friends with also genuinely believed she was seriously ill.
Kate and I also watched Adolescence together, a TV drama about a child who murders one of his classmates. It consists of four 1-hour episodes which we decided to watch back to back. Anyone who has seen the show would recognise that this takes quite an emotional toll. If you haven’t seen it yet and do decide to, then I would suggest that you do so over a few sittings. Watching a drama involving legal ramifications with a lawyer in tow is something of a double-edged sword. On one had you can ask questions to aid your understanding; on the other they are keen to point out any shortcomings in the plot, or of the legal representatives appearing on the screen. There is always a risk that an expert rationalises away the magic of the art and I may have (very diplomatically) mentioned this to Kate during the show. I did however learn that a good lawyer who advises you to answer “no comment” during a police interview would be unlikely to allow you to answer anything other than non-disputable questions (e.g. your name, date of birth, etc.) with anything other than “no comment”. This is to avoid something called adverse inference, whereby a conclusion of your guilt could be inferred from the questions you do and don’t choose to answer - e.g. if you’re happy to answer questions about your holiday to Malaga but answer “no comment” to all questions about the night of 16 November (when someone was killed) it might imply that you were involved in the crime. I also learnt that the difference between murder and manslaughter is intent - i.e. in order to be convicted of murder under UK law the prosecution must be able to prove that you intended to either kill or grievously harm the victim. This means it is almost unheard of for people to plead guilty to murder when the charge of manslaughter is also on the table.
After the seriousness of four hours of Adolescence, we needed some light relief so decided to watch an episode of Amandaland before heading to bed.
Thank you Kate for a lovely Greg Plus One, and an excellent weekend!
