I sometimes despair at the human race and just can’t believe how stupid some people can be. Laws are laws and sometimes I suppose there is good reason to break them, but to flout the law for seemingly no point, and then to post a video of yourself doing it on the internet so you can brag about it to your followers seems to me to be beyond stupid. And so this afternoon I have the dubious honour of defending some twenty year old bimbo brat who has done just that. To call her stupid would seem to be an insult to stupid people.

 

To be honest I can’t really be bothered with the obnoxious little brat and rather hope the judge throws the book at her, but it’s my job to defend the accused no matter how I personally feel about them, and if I can’t prove innocence then I should at least try to show some sort of extenuating circumstance in hope of a merciful outcome. And of course, maximum sentences don’t look good on a defence lawyer’s CV. But it really does seem a lost cause when your client has bragged all over the web about her contempt for the law and how it doesn’t have to apply to her.

 

The particular law in question here is the one that requires women to be blindfolded when travelling. To be a bit more specific, a woman must cover her eyes so that she can see nothing of her surroundings whenever she is engaged in any form of journey by way of any publicly owned or publically accessible land, highway, pavement, or pathway, and whether on foot or conveyed by any form of transport. So basically a lady planning to go round to her friend’s house for coffee may see freely in her own house and in that of her friend’s, but in between their garden gates she must be blindfolded.

 

Now I can see that for an alien freshly arrived from Uranus this might seem a rather strange, perhaps stupid, and maybe even unfair law. Why should anyone be forced to wear a blindfold, and why should it only apply to women? Well the answer to that began some years ago when there was something that was destroying our society. Something that was pitting us against each other, gnawing away at the very essence of human nature, and driving the two halves of the human race towards civil war. And the tragedy was that that ‘something’ had been born out of only good intentions, a noble and just cause that aimed to right many centuries of wrong. That ‘something’ was the coming of equality between the sexes, or perhaps more accurately, the unintended consequences of it.

 

When I was a child we had equality. At school my history lessons taught me of the centuries of oppression that women had suffered at the hands of men, and of how the brave feminists of the last century had fought to end it all. And with that injustice now consigned to history and with the new equality reining supreme you might have thought that everyone, especially the women would have been happy. But you’d have been wrong. Most people seemed to be distinctly un-happy with the situation. Far from bringing everyone together in a big hug of collective love and reconciliation, equality drove a huge wedge between the sexes. And the reason for this was that no matter how equal we became it seemed it was never equal enough. The fighting and the bickering intensified. Equality made the sexes into rival gangs. They came to hate, distrust and ultimately try to just avoid each other. It was not a happy time. Many people thought we had made a ghastly wrong turn somewhere and longed for a return to the old ways, when men and women at least sort-of got along, and sometimes even loved each other. But that seemed an unlikely scenario. The old ways required men and women to be different, and different fundamentally meant ‘not equal’, and that was an unthinkable idea. Equality was unquestionable. It had to stay, whatever the consequences.

 

And then someone said that a man and a woman could be equal, but if the woman was to be slightly hampered, say by wearing stiletto heeled shoes, then she could accept chivalrous assistance from the man without feeling that she was fundamentally inferior. And it would of course be incumbent upon the man to assist the woman, but there would be no implication that he was in any way superior. And so he could carry her shopping bags for her, she could admire his chivalry and respect, and they could both enjoy the sexiness of the shoes. The giving and receiving of assistance would nurture a relationship of mutual respect and appreciation, and the lives of both people would be enriched. Of course the person who suggested this was drunk at the time and only meant it as a joke, but in a society desperate to find a way out of the hole it had made for itself, the bizarre idea took hold and despite furious opposition it stubbornly refused to let go. Something had to be done and there were no other suggestions out there. The idea evolved and mutated a little and became the concept of Restraint, and after a long and passionate political battle it started to appear on the nation’s statute book in a rather unexpected form. It was not women’s feet that were to be restrained, it was their eyes.

 

So today we still regard men and women as being equal, indeed many would say women are rather superior given that they do so much despite the onerous restraints placed upon them by the law, and by its fickle and insidious ally, fashion. One of those restraints is the requirement to wear a blindfold while travelling. When it was first introduced, not surprisingly women hated it and there was widespread disobedience and protest. But slowly it came to be enforced and then accepted, and the needing, the giving and the receiving of assistance was indeed seen to be healing the wounds inflicted by equality. The gang warfare between the sexes died away, to be replaced with mutual respect and appreciation, and through the years, the blindfold has evolved from an authoritarian instrument of restraint into a much loved fashion accessory that no proper lady wants to be seen without. And of course the modern lady has not just the modern gentleman, but also modern technology to assist her when her eyes are covered. There is the self-driving car that can whisk a visually restrained occupant to where she needs to be, and can even park itself when it gets there. And if the lady is on foot then fashion comes to assist, providing that never-be-without accessory, the parasol, which when collapsed can transform itself into a telescopic white stick to feel the ground ahead while the lady’s phone can whisper unspeakably accurate, satellite-derived directions into her ear and keep her from getting lost. But of course if all that fails she can romantically enlist the assistance of a gentleman’s arm to hold on to while he guides her along, and perhaps even helps her maintain her balance if the heels of her boots happen to be of a delightful, but precarious nature.

 

Nowadays the humble blindfold is generally recognised as the simple device that has rescued and restored polite society, but it is still not universally accepted and liked by those who must wear it. So we have to be eternally vigilant against non-compliance and make examples of transgressors with stiff punishments and social affront. Which is why I just cannot understand the blatant stupidity of my client. Okay, so she’s young, but that’s not really an excuse. She took off her blindfold while her boyfriend was driving past the Houses of Parliament apparently because she just wanted to see what the famous building that ruled our land really looked like. I can’t imagine how I’m going to defend that. Why didn’t she just look up some pictures of the Houses of Parliament on the web while she was at home? Or if she’d wanted to see them ‘in the flesh’ then she could have just gone for a coffee in a nearby café with a view, where she could have legally removed her blindfold because the law would then have considered her to have ‘arrived’ and to no longer be ‘travelling’. And if she really had to have the full drive-by experience then for fuck’s sake do it discreetly, in the back of a car with dark privacy windows, not in your boyfriend’s convertible with the top down. And definitely, definitely do not wave and shout to the people in the street and take a video of yourself doing all this, which you then plaster all over social media sites just to show how cool you are. My client might think she’s cool, but she’s fucked up her life for sure.

 

I’ve defended Restraint violators many times before and the courts are usually sympathetic in cases of genuine mistake or emergency, although ignorance of the law is never taken as a valid excuse. The last time I had a lady who had fallen foul of the blindfold law the outcome was actually rather good. She had been walking home alone one evening, correctly blindfolded and following the directions from her phone when its battery had packed up and she found herself lost. This sort of thing happens a lot and the usual remedy is just for the lady to ask for help, and it is then incumbent on any passing gentleman to assist her. In this case, the lady did just that, but being as it was quite late at night there was no one in the street to answer her calls for assistance. The next step would normally be to use her phone to call for help, but of course with her phone out of action that option was not available. So thinking she was alone, she lifted her blindfold to take a peek around her. It wasn’t a very clever thing to do. Although she had walked the same route home many times before she had always been blindfolded and so was unlikely to recognise any landmark that might show her the way, but she looked anyway, and she looked straight into the lens of a CCTV camera. Busted. I tried to argue that it was an emergency and that she had no other option, but the court disagreed. It said it was not an emergency situation because there was no immediate danger and she could have just waited for someone to come along. The verdict was guilty, but she had taken my advice and had presented herself as contrite and remorseful, and had shown her respect for the court by remaining blindfolded throughout the hearing. It was her first offence, with extenuating circumstances, and so with just a suspended sentence she walked free from the court, feeling her way carefully down the front steps to the arm of her then boyfriend. They got married a week later and even invited me to attend. And I have to confess I was more than a little jealous of her new husband. She was a beautiful and lovely lady who looked stunning in her wedding dress, and she melted my heart by choosing to wear a blindfold under her veil and keeping it on all through the ceremony.

 

I somewhat doubt I’m going to get a similar result for this afternoon’s client. There is no question of innocence, with her own video, along with multiple CCTV images and numerous witness statements all proclaiming her guilt, and not much in the way of extenuating circumstance either. Rather the opposite actually. The blatancy of the offence, the bragging about it afterwards and the general lack of any remorse or contrition all add up to a pretty hideous cocktail. And despite my advice to her to be quiet, contrite and respectful during her trial, I rather suspect she’s going to act up and try to be sassy and cool to impress her internet followers, which seems to be the only important thing in her life.

 

I’m thinking about the range of sentences that the court will have available for her after she’s found guilty. In the early days when the law was ignored or defied by the majority of women, fixed penalty fines were the favoured option. They were very effective at grinding down opposition and bringing about compliance without overstuffing the prisons, but they are hardly ever used now. In these enlightened times when we all know what is at stake, breaking the blindfold rules is considered not just a legal offence, but a moral one too. Miscreants who consider their enjoyment of the view while they travel about to be more important than keeping society from slipping back into the dark age of equality can expect justice in the form of their own personal dark age. They’ll have to be blindfolded for a lot more than just travelling. Whenever they are outside of their registered home is the usual regime, but there is often an exemption for their place of employment if they have one. And this might be for months or years depending on the severity of the offence.

 

Of course simply commanding offenders to abide by the terms of their sentences is not always enough. Despite knowing that the police will be checking up on them, there are some convicts who still show contempt for the law, and for society by refusing to wear their blindfolds. Or worse, they try to get away with the most heinous sin of all, that of wearing a fake blindfold, one that appears opaque from the outside but actually allows the wearer to see through it as if it were just a veil. For these unspeakables there has to be something stronger, something with an element of physical enforcement and something that will mark them out as the vile miscreants they are. They require a blindfold that they cannot remove themselves. They require a hood.

 

I think this afternoon’s client will get to wear a hood. I will try to argue that it is her first offence and that it was just a spontaneous outpouring of youthful naivety but I’ll be amazed if the court agrees. It will almost certainly consider her offence to be a hideous and blatant act of social vandalism and one that is well worthy of a hooded sentence. The hooded offender is placed in a tight fitting hood which is locked in place by an integral collar and she wears it almost constantly until her sentence is completed. The only place the hood can be removed is at an approved inspection centre which the offender would normally visit every two months for a medical check and to have her eyes exercised by some fancy electronic goggles. The hood will have a large cut out leaving her mouth and jaw uncovered and there will be a couple of little holes under her nostrils so she will be able to eat, drink and breathe normally. Usually there is also a little opening at the back so she can have her hair outside in a ponytail. Her ears are of course covered and while she will still be able to hear, I’ve heard it said that it’s like hearing underwater and the sound of your own breathing inside the hood drowns out much of the sound from outside. I can’t imagine what it must be like to endure such a thing for months or even years on end, and I would think my client will be a very changed woman when she finally emerges, probably about five years from today. I’ve tried to explain it all to her but she just doesn’t seem to get it. She seems to think it’s all a game and an opportunity to be badass cool, but our well-ordered and happy society knows it must defend itself against her kind. She is in for a shock.

 

Well it’s time I was making a move. Lunchtime is nearly over and it’s thirteen minutes’ walk from my office building to the court. And never let it be said that I was late for court, or didn’t even bother to turn up because I didn’t give a toss about my air-headed brat of a client. And besides, I think it’ll be rather fun to see her face when the sentence is read out and I don’t want to miss that. I get up from my desk and pause by my office window to look down at the street below. It’s a lovely sunny day and all seems well with world. The people of the city are getting on with their lives and going about their business. Ladies are looking beautiful, sporting fine and fashionable outfits as they make their way along the street with well-practiced ease and elegance, guided by their parasol sticks and spoken directions in ear buds from phones hidden in handbags, or even by a gentleman who holds their arm and looks after them. On the opposite side of the street an autodrive car pulls up and reverses itself slickly into a parking space. The car looks sleek and elegant but it is put to shame by the lady who emerges from it. She is resplendent in a bright red suit, the skirt of which sheaths her legs tightly all the way down to her ankles. Her hat, boots and gloves are all in matching black leather and her blindfold is the same vibrant red as her suit. God but she looks sexy. She steps onto the pavement but is apparently unable to work out where to go. She talks to her phone and shakes her head in apparent frustration. And then she says something out loud. I can’t hear her words through the glass but I have a pretty good idea what she said. “Lady needs assistance”, or words to that effect. And immediately she has no less than three men buzzing around her, hoping to be able to help. The problem is apparently quickly resolved and the lady is escorted to the front entrance of the beauty clinic just three doors from where the car had parked itself. Proof if ever you needed it that Restraint has repaired the relationship between the sexes and been the saviour of polite society.

 

I stuff the papers for the case of the vacuous brat into my briefcase, gather up all the other stuff I need for an afternoon in court and then take the lift down to the lobby. Just inside the front door I stop and take out my phone. “Crown court, Tyndle Street,” I say to the phone, and while it works out the route I put on my hat and gloves. “Exit the building,” says the electronic voice in my ear. “Descend five steps and turn right.” I smile at how everything is just as it should be, and then from my bag I take out my blindfold for my walk to court. Usually it’s one thousand, seven hundred and sixty two paces if I don’t have to avoid anything on the way, but this is a new skirt I’m wearing and although there’s a little stretch in the fabric, it is rather tighter than my usual style. It feels like it might be close to two thousand paces today.