Obiter had never understood why a bar president in France is called ‘le batonnier’ or ‘stick-person’. Unless it’s a reference to a slightly bigger version of a baguette called a ‘baton’, but that seems unlikely. And then enlightenment dawned when he met the president of the Paris bar, Christiane Féral-Schuhl (pictured), in London last week.

At the end of her two-year presidency, she told Obiter, she will be presented with a traditional symbol of office – a stick similar to the one that shepherds use for herding sheep or, as Brits would say, a shepherd’s crook. So French lawyers are like sheep? Obiter asked her. To which she replied: ‘You said it, M. Obiter, I didn’t.’