I hope you will allow me, just for this week, to mention an essentially personal matter. On 19 March, I celebrated my diamond jubilee, sixty years as a barrister. On that day in 1964, I signed the Victorian Bar roll and became a barrister. It was so simple. I went to the Bar office which had a staff of two, took an oath to behave myself, signed the roll and then started learning the craft, or ‘reading’ as we called it, with my new master, Ninian Stephen, while I drummed up some work.