Apparently today is the busiest day of the year for divorce lawyers – everyone has had more than her/his fill of family over Xmas and has resolved to do something about it, so as never to have to endure the hellish season of goodwill in close proximity with his/her spouse (or whoever irks most) ever again. Not so you’d notice this phenomenon round my neck of the woods – us barrister types don’t get the new years resolutions walking through the door on the first Monday proper of the new year -we see it a few months down the line when the litigation has actually commenced and gathered pace.

What we do get in January is all the matters listed for the ‘first open date after 3 January 2008’ cramming up our diaries. Its traditionally a quiet month, but I don’t usually find it so, for this very reason – there comes a stage (in – ooh – about late October?) when everyone gets too lazy to calculate 6 weeks or 8 weeks and simply says ‘first open date after 3 January 2008’. And so it is upon us…

As for me, I’ve had plenty of time with family this holiday – long lost relatives, distant relatives (both geographically distant and distant as in second-cousin-once-removed, you know, the kind where you can never work out the actual name for it), and absent-but-much-talked-about-over-turkey-relatives. Me and the other half have busied ourselves with starting to track down might-be-alive-when-you-thought-they-were-dead-relatives, visiting the resting place of recently departed relatives, building bridges with those who have been fallen out with or who we have fallen out of touch with (along sadly with a little brand new falling out, but I suppose it wouldn’t be Christmas without it) and catching up with the relatives we can’t afford to fly out to see often enough. Most specially of all, we’ve been eating double helpings of turkey and whatever else is going in order to sustain the little soon-to-be-relative who will be popping out around easter.

On the way down the M5 for our third ‘Xmas day’ this weekend we tried and failed in our lighthearted challenge to identify which part of our family is the most dysfunctional or loopy, but we love ’em all anyway. For all its battiness, silly fallings out (and what can most neutrally be described as ‘unusual’ christmas presents), I wouldn’t divorce my family for the world. And besides, I’d better keep ’em on side – I’ll be needing the babysitters…

I know, a divorce lawyer who believes in family – sort of sick isn’t it?