Sorry I have not been blogging for a while. The old story – too busy at the desk. I still shake my head in weary disbelief when I think of Petrocelli, LA Law, Sutherland’s Law et al. The hero in those shows only ever had one case to deal with per episode, where in reality the phone goes every few minutes (or seconds), your inbox fills up like a toilet cistern, the morning mail takes forever to open, process and respond to. The queue in the waiting room never goes down, and all day every day, the deadlines relentlessly creep closer.

In the reincarnated next life, I am coming back as a pizza stall operator. Food hygiene health and safety allowing, the transaction goes like this: customer comes in, orders pizza, pays, goes away. End of. I won’t have an ongoing relationship with them, I won’t have to Money-laundering check them, keep their cash, be secretive about what kind of topping they had, and retain their bill for 10 years until I can pay for it to be confidentially destroyed.

In our business as solicitors, continuity is the key. It can be a good thing – the majority of our business is repeat. Like most firms our bank of wills and title deeds is more or less money in the bank. It pays us to retain client data for future marketing, or just so a client can say that we are their lawyers, whether or not they need us this week or this year.

But there is yang as well as yin. When you lock the door of the office and turn off the lights at night, you don’t escape. Cases and transactions lurk behind the door awaiting the dawn and your return next day to carry on. Do you remember the guy who used to be on the telly on a Saturday night, whose shtick was to spin plates on the end of poles, building up to about 150 all spinning at once? He had to run from one pole to another relentlessly to keep everything centred and stable, not only exhausting himself physically but probably cooking his brain with the tension. He must now be in a nursing home slavering and occasionally murmuring “That one, and that one, and that one, and THAT one, dear God…”

The alternative image for me is that I feel myself trying to walk along, holding hundreds of strings, and the end of which behind me is a client , a case, a transaction, a problem , all dragging along. Like Jacob Marley and his chains.

That sounds very negative, but I am not being self-pitying. I bet all sorts of professionals and business folk have similar experiences. But what I and they have seen and done in our careers, which no-one before has ever had, is the rise of 24-hour availability.

We all have mobile phones. Most or at least many of us can access our e-mails from them. No escape. Even if we can’t, texts and calls can find us most of the time, so the traditional distinction between work in the office, and play away from it, has become at best smudged, and often enough blasted out of existence. Even in the office, work has speeded up by means of the e-mail attachment, which can be a 44-page lease that you can’t now pretend has not been received in the actual post.

This speeding up of acting and this blanket availability have in turn informed the clients’ expectations. They now want a reply today, within the hour, instead of by a sedate return of post. Until it tips over the edge and we enter the last days of ancient Rome (see previous blogs), we will continue to become a demanding society with requirement of immediate gratification.

It’s no accident that X-factor and BGT are so successful. You can go from nothing to everything in a matter of weeks. And the internet is such an engine of news and the instant spread of information it is giddying. I was on Newsnight Scotland a couple of weeks ago talking about legal implications of excessive health and safety rules (which started rather oddly with me being accused of being an ambulance-chaser before I had said a word). The next day I put the link to the BBCI-player on Facebook and my own firm’s website. Every week I put a link to my Evening Times advice column on our site. Bang! Anyone round the world can see these things immediately and forever.

I am at the age when I should start to think about an exit strategy, if the age of retirement intended by the Government doesn’t keep going up ahead of me like a mirage image of a beer-stocked bar in the desert. The only picture I can keep in my mind is that of a cyclist careering downhill with no brakes. Yes there must be a stopping point, but I can’t see it and I can only think that I will have to do a hell of a lot of work to come to a halt without injury.

Again I am not whining. This is the business we are in, and the pros very much outweigh the cons. Every day is still a challenge and brings new insights, knowledge, perhaps even wisdom, and no two days at work are the same. The trick is, and is going to be, to come out on top. You can’t let yourself be driven by events, dear boy, events, you have to take charge of your life and your career.

Enoch Powell said all political careers end in failure. But you know the lawyers’ version? Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal.