Expert Witness Read Online Free PDF Page A

big to find a motorbike that fits him properly. He also moans about the diminutive size of aeroplane seats, but he’s not alone on that one.
    Although some women wear heels to add extra height, I stopped doing that after I gave evidence in Oxford Magistrates’ Court. The court set-up was very strange, or at least that’s how I remember it. In England, Wales and Scotland, we stand up to give evidence unlike New Zealand, where the usual protocol is sitting down. Only once did I give evidence sitting down in England, and that was when I had to do some blood alcohol calculations in the witness box when I was seven months’ pregnant. I couldn’t physically reach the pen and paper I’d placed on the shelf inside the witness box where they keep theBible and oath cards. The judge asked if I’d like to sit down and I was relieved to say yes. It’s like going to the house of one of your granny’s friends — you don’t sit down in an English judge’s court unless invited to do so.
    This particular witness box had a very low front. It seemed to come up to mid thigh, and it’s high off the ground so you look down on counsel and the central court area. On this day however, I was wearing long black boots with four inch heels, so the edge of the box was about knee height. All I could think about was not wanting to lean forward too much in case I toppled out over the front and landed on the prosecution counsel; I had a touch of the vertigo thing going on. It was a typical English court situation — everyone ignored the elephant in the room, which in this case was the obvious discomfort of the expert witness (me) with the situation in the witness box. My evidence wasn’t of any significant consequence as I was basically confirming what the prosecution was saying — that the defendant’s account of alcohol consumption was so off the wall that had she consumed as much as she was saying, she would probably have been dead.
    To add insult to injury, I’d been late arriving in Oxford, had struggled to find a parking space and ended up putting the car in some faceless, grey, underground municipal dungeon. In my rush, I’d parked so far away from the court I had to catch a taxi to get there from the car park. Oxford has one of those hideous we-hate-cars attitudes and actively discourages vehicles in the city centre. All well and good if you’re a local or on a coach trip from Birmingham but a pain in the proverbial if you’re in a rush and trying to park. The problem was that when I’d finished teetering over the front of the witness box at court,I had no idea where I’d left the car. It was pouring with that special sort of grey, cold rain that soaks through your suede boots in 30 seconds flat. I was very late home and very grouchy.
    But back to how I ended up in Oxford with inappropriate footwear and a hidden Skoda.
    I think it was all just the roll of the dice. I started off training as a geologist and had an absolute blast in my under graduate years, charging around the European countryside looking for fossils and measuring dips and strikes (rock-related measurements). There had always been an assumption that I would go to university, and I never even thought to challenge it. I just went off to Southampton when I was 18 and came back when I was 21 and overdrawn. Well, my mum will tell you I came back more often than that, usually with a couple of bags of laundry, but I did (mostly) do the washing myself.
    As any graduate will tell you, a simple Honours degree is not enough to get you anywhere, so I needed to be more conscientious, do more studying and gain more qualifications. With this at the forefront of my mind, I returned home to the family nest, where I lived rent-free while stashing away whatever cash I earned as a legal secretary. After six months of hard saving, I had a quick look through the university prospectus and promptly went off travelling