One of the first offices I worked in as a young lawyer were rented on a floor of a Dickensian building which, for the purposes, may be deemed to be within a two-mile radius of the law courts.

The rest of the space was inhabited by as interesting a collection of eccentrics as one could possibly wish to meet. In the basement were the firm’s mole-like bookkeepers, who sat on high stools and rarely saw the light of day. One of them was an enthusiastic photographer who, when one of the secretaries wanted to enter a beauty competition for something like ‘Miss Lincoln’s Inn 1966’, agreed to take her entry photographs.

He determined she would look best in her underwear, but unfortunately when she asked him for copies he was unable to deliver. Subsequent enquiries showed he was one of those gentlemen of the time who belonged to clubs where there were no films in the cameras, and where members lay on the floor in front of the models saying: ‘Look at me like a worm you want to tread on.’ He left under a cloud.

On the top floor was an alcoholic solicitor who, so far as I could see, had few clients, but passed the afternoons happily entertaining what my mother used to call ‘light ladies’. From time to time I would see him pushing an equally drunken woman up the stairs.

On one occasion when our mutual landlord remonstrated with him, he took no notice and the landlord remarked to me later: ‘Throughout the afternoon there was this rhythmic thumping on the ceiling. I think he was doing it deliberately so I could not concentrate on the very difficult conveyance I was drafting.’

Nor did the landlord have too much in the way of staff control. When the solicitor invited the receptionist to have a drink upstairs with him one evening, the landlord overheard and told her she was not to go. ‘It’s 6.15pm and I’m on my own time now, Mr Smith,’ she replied pertly, and off she went upstairs.

Many years later I met the alcoholic solicitor in the street and asked how he was. ‘I’ve been in the desert for some time,’ he said. For a moment I didn’t realise he meant he had been dry. After that we kept in vague touch. He never drank again and until his death ran a very successful niche practice.

I’ve no idea what happened to the receptionist, or the photographer for that matter.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor