Animal Qc

Hardback

Condition: Good

GARY BELL QC appears to be a pillar of the Establishment - one of Britain's leading lawyers with his own BBC TV show an entry in Who's Who and a wife whose family are listed in Burke's Landed beneath the horsehair wig and silk gown is a very unusual barrister indeed - and his life story is astonishing and hilarious. Born to a teenaged cigarette factory worker and a nineteen-year-old miner he grew up in a condemned slum terrace and then a Nottinghamshire pit village and left his tough comprehensive without taking any exams. He followed his father down the mine but promptly quit because of his lifelong fear of the dark and spent the next decade either homeless or working in a strange variety of jobs. Asda shelf-stacker Pork Farms pie maker door-to-door rag salesman fruit machine technician fireman lawnmower mechanic bricklayer pet food warehouse fork lift truck driver he's done the lot (and was sacked from most of them for incompetence). Along the way he managed to rack up a conviction for fraud - he worked out how to fiddle those fruit machines - and was also a notorious football hooligan known as 'Animal' (though not for his fighting prowess he's a terrible coward). Finally pulling himself together in his mid-twenties he went to university as a mature student where he stuck out from his younger public school-educated contemporaries with his stonewashed jeans skinhead and moustache. So he 'decided to become upper-middle class' adopting tweeds received pronunciation and (strictly for his own amusement) an Old Etonian back story. He got so good at this that he went back to his 'old school' to play in Old Boys' Field Game fixtures and many actual OEs still swear they were at Eton with him