A Festive Fable
PART ONE
The legal profession was dead, to begin with. Christopher Scrooge signed the burial certificate at the fixed-fee funeral, so there was no doubt about it. It was as dead as a door-nail.
Oh, but he was as mean and grasping an old sinner as ever claimed taxpayers' money for his Pimlico flat, was old Scrooge, with the suspiciously smooth foreheard and dead-eyed stare of a man to whom the milk of human kindness was but bitter gruel. Children shrank from him, dogs whined and turned away, and even hardened management consultants muttered curses under their breath as he stalked by.
Once upon a time, one blessed Christmas Eve, Scrooge sat busy in his Westminster counting-house, drawing up plans to repeal Magna Carta. His office door was open so that he could keep an eye upon his clerk, Des Cratchit, who sat shivering by a single candle.
The dreary hours skulked by, the sky darkened from lead to iron and the candle flame sputtered and died. With a scowl, Scrooge turned to Cratchit, who cowered before him and hastily pulled on his coat. "You'll want paying for tomorrow, I suppose?" said Scrooge.
"It is Christmas Day, sir."
"A poor excuse for picking the taxpayer's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge. "I shall have to cut our budget by an arbitrary percentage next year to make up for it."
The clerk smiled nervously and wished the old miser a merry Christmas.
"Bah Humbug!" said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough."
The clerk considered a rejoinder, but decided that in the interests of constructive engagement he should surrender abjectly, and shuffled home, hunching his poor thin shoulders against the wind.
Presently, Scrooge followed the example of his pitiable clerk and departed. As Scrooge stalked down the snowy street, glowering at children and muttering to himself, a young man holding a clipboard approached him.
"Good Mr Scrooge, can I trouble you to sign up for a direct debit to Shelter this Christmas?" he asked.
"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Let the idle poor go there!"
"Well, actually, since you outsourced them to G4..." but Scrooge had marched on before the young man could finish his observation.
Scrooge reached his lodgings, shook the snow from his cloak, clad himself in his Thatcher onesie and matching nightcap, and took to his bed.
He awoke some hours later, startled by an extraordinary banging at his bedroom door. The door burst open with a great wrenching noise and, to Scrooge's inexpressible alarm, a ghostly figure stumbled into the room, wearing a horsehair wig backwards and holding a great set of scales. The figure swayed perilously, dropped its scales and vomited copiously on Scrooge's bed.
"Terribly sorry about that," the spirit slurred as it righted itself. "I've developed a ruinous fondness for cooking sherry in the afterlife. In any case, it's only meet and fitting to extend the same courtesies to you as you did me in my lifetime."
"Who are you?" quavered Scrooge, at last. "What do you want with me?"
"In life, I was the bright-cheeked trainee solicitor, the grizzled Old Bailey hack, the grey-haired judicial grandee. But you chipped away at us, cut by cut, until I was no more. Now I am condemned to walk the earth without rest, filling out an eternal timesheet, unless I can undo the wrongs you did. Three spirits shall visit you. Expect the first tonight, when the bell tolls one. Expect the second when the clock strikes two. The third shall arrive when the stroke of three has ceased to vibrate."
"I thought it was supposed to be one a night, not one an hour," said Scrooge.
"You don't pay them for waiting time. We've had to cut corners," snapped the spectre and disappeared.
The second instalment of WaitroseLaw's festive fable will be published on Monday.