C'mon mum!

Oh, c'mon mum. Stop looking at all those photographs of cats.

Actually, when I stopped and decided to take a photograph, the wee old lady was actually looking at cards with dogs on them, but by the time I'd retrieved my phone from my bag, she'd moved on to looking at some cats as well.

It was a good day in many ways. First thing, I phoned the police to tell them about the incident with the girl which I witnessed/participated in yesterday. It would seem there was no report at their end of a crime having been committed that my statement could be linked up to. Oh well, at least I felt I did my civic duty. Then my feet. I haven't said anything, as I don't want to pre-empt things, but for the last few days I've had considerably less pain from my right foot. For the last two days, I've also managed to wear shoes other than trainers, and while that has left me with a blister on my left foot, it hasn't resulted in foot/toe pain in the right foot. Somehow the biomechanical problems that left so much of the right foot so tender a lot of the time seem to have subsided or corrected themselves. My toes are no longer flying up. It's still hard to push the heel into the ground when I'm barefoot, but it's working on that along with gripping with my toes which seems to have helped. Eventually.

So yesterday I walked to work - in ordinary shoes via some parts of the East End between Broughton Street and Leith Walk (to avoid main roads as much as possible) which I'd never seen before. The benefits of being on one's feet. I also got my blip in St Andrew's Square. Later on, Mr A joined me and we went along to a lecture by Lady Wolffe, one of the Senators of the Court of Justice, who gave an excellent and well researched lecture on the case of Margaret Howie Strang Hall, who in 1900 at the age of 19, was the first woman who tried to become a Law Agent (now a solicitor) in Scotland. In fact, she was the first woman across the whole UK who tried, unsuccessfully, to become a member of the legal professions. It was continuing the same theme of the First 100 Years (of women in the legal profession) that marked the conference I went to in Glasgow last Monday (nicely written up here). Sarah Wolffe's lecture was interesting for her detailed analysis of the arguments and reasoning in the Hall case, from which I learned (or was reminded of) quite a lot, not least as it resonates directly with the project I'm working on right now, which is all about citizenship. The gist of the Court's refusal of Hall's petition was that she couldn't join the legal profession as women never had done, so the word 'person' in the relevant legislation was not to be construed as including women, only men. That same argument was made in numerous cases, until it was finally put to be in some Canadian cases in the 1920s. Because, for time immemorial under the common law women were not 'persons' (they had significant legal disabilities and were pretty much chattels), apparently you needed really clear statutory words to free them from the common law disability. Interesting stuff.

Afterwards, we went for a pizza.