Spectacles

If you know me well enough to be so unfortunate to hear about my legal journey, you'll probably know of my admiration for Lord Denning, one of the greatest judges ever in English law. Debbie calls me his 'unsworn apprentice'; indeed if I were to have half his lordship's wisdom in my lifetime I should have had a more than excellent legal career.

Well this post has nothing much to do with Lord Denning nor my legal career, but more of what his lordship said in the course of his judgment of a 1954 case:

"It is so easy to be wise after the event and to condemn as negligence that which was only a misadventure. We ought always to be on our guard against it...We must not look at the [earlier] accident with [later] spectacles."

'If only I had known' is a phrase so oft used that it returns 96500 results on Google. Its context however is not best seen in relation to a search engine, but to life - more specifically time. Some people blame things on the fact of delayed revelation itself. Most condemn themselves after a delayed revelation. The Bible (to which Lord Denning certainly referred to) however confronts us with a logically sequential phrase, 'in due time'. Indeed "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven".

Dad used to say: ' 早 知 就 是 神仙' - if you had indeed known, you'd be a fairy. I'd say: fairies don't wear spectacles.