I find that I field complaints if I fall silent for a few days. It is, of course, gratifying that anyone should notice, and a word or two of explanation might pre-empt the assumption that I have packed up and gone home – or, rather, left home, since home is where I work.

The weeks leading up to Easter were pretty busy, not because of any great commitments of mine, but because of the buzz in the eDiscovery world about Judge Peck’s opinion in Da Silva Moore and the ensuing – and disgraceful – ad hominem attacks on one of the few judges who understands about the application of technology to the just, speedy and inexpensive obligation in Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Ciivl Procedure. The UK had its own share of activity, with a run of eDisclosure-related judgments after a long period without any.

Although I have not needed my passport since LegalTech, there was a long period in which there was always another video or webinar looming. They are fun to do, and a good way of getting messages to wider audiences, but they each have a back-story of conference calls and slide preparation whose drawback is not the aggregated time spent on them but the deadlines and the carving up of the days which they involve. In addition, there are conferences coming up between the end of April and mid-November which, to varying degrees, require planning calls and drafts now.

None of this usually interferes with the ordinary run of producing articles, which I am happy to do one sentence at a time if necessary in between other things. White papers are a different matter, requiring proper research, the assembly of sources, a structure, and time to stare at the screen whilst the ideas form. There were a clutch of those to do, and that requires switching off Twitter and email and ignoring everything else but the task in hand. I had long ear-marked the week after Easter as a good time to cut myself out of the information stream.

In addition, the first of the pending conferences is iCONECT’s Global Summit on Litigation Technology which takes place next week at Fort Lauderdale. I am honoured with an invitation to deliver a one-hour keynote speech at the beginning of the first day and that, like a white paper, deserves and requires serious planning. I set aside a weekend for it, reckoning to use the opportunity to transfer from PowerPoint to Apple’s Keynote.  It took me half a day to concede that you do not sensibly try and learn new tricks simultaneously with a major drafting exercise.

Domestic matters intervened to some extent: we had a long-planned trip to Devon which I recorded in my article Tripping down memory lane as we scatter ashes on Exmoor; my youngest son turned up for Easter, took one look at my iMac, sucked through his teeth and tutted, before setting to work to upgrade, protect and generally put it into order; my second son departed for an indefinite stay in Spain, leaving the piano to gather dust whilst occupying roughly one-fifth of the kitchen.

In the week that Tom Lehrer turned 84 (try We will All Go Together When We Go if you are unfamiliar with Lehrer’s genius), the news continues to defy parody. A self-styled anti-elitist (a.k.a. pro-mediocrity) protester called Trenton Oldfield disrupted the University Boat Race, having first posted a long rambling blog entry which looked like an extended parody of something by Private Eye’s Dave Spart; a letter in The Times pointed out the oddity of staging an anti-elitist attack at “an event in which the competitors are unpaid, [which] is free to all spectators, and has no dress code”. The dimmer kind of relativist turned out on Twitter to contrast the fuss about the Boat Race with the government “attack” on the NHS; anyone can play relativism, of course – we have just had the anniversary of the April 1940 Russian massacre of 22,000 Polish officers in and around the Katyn Forest, which makes any adverse consequences of NHS reform seem pretty trivial. The spittle-flecked haters of the far left delighted, in their stupid, semi-literate way, in the mere fact that what they saw as a toffs’ day out had been ruined. If Trenton Oldfield wants to make an impression about something useful, he might like to get in front of the competitors at the Bahrain Grand Prix.

One of the best cartoons of the John Major era showed the hapless Major walking past a banana skin on the pavement, then pausing and going back to slip on it. Cameron’s coalition government showed the same style by taxing pasties (but only if sold at above-ambient temperature) and giving the impression that pensioners were paying for tax breaks for the rich, while reviving New Labour’s discredited plans for spying on our every communication which they had attacked so fiercely when in opposition. Several supposedly serious politicians scrambled to be seen eating the vile-smelling combination of cheap meat, fatty pastry and burnt grease which passes for a commercial pasty. Add in the way in which George Osborne has conflated charitable giving with tax avoidance, and you see that there is no rational policy which cannot be screwed up by a combination of politicians, senior civil servants and spin merchants. At least the coalition has taken advantage of Chris Huhne’s absence pending the hearing of criminal charges (innocent until proved guilty, of course, but here’s hoping) to ditch the onshore wind-farm scam.

Light relief was provided by Jon Harman, Director of Media at the College of Law, who tweets in his personal capacity as @colmmu and who has an unerring eye for the beautiful, the thought-provoking and the plain wonderful in publicly-accessible media.  He first brought us a short film called Buenos Aires – Inception Park which makes you gasp at the cleverness of the editing which appears to bring roller coasters and the like to staid city streets. The sound-track song, a real find in itself, is “Worries” by Langhorne Slim. This morning Jon Harman points us to an advertisement for a Belgian television company A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square which I defy you to watch without your mouth falling open in wonder at the cleverness of it. One of my recent videos was for the College of Law; disappointingly (but entirely properly given its purpose and audience), it was a conventional affair, very professionally done, but just talking heads and a worthy line in questions and answers.

Now, what if we were to find advertising talent like that seen in the Buenos Aires or Belgian videos and apply it to the cause of promoting competent, proportionate and cooperative electronic discovery/disclosure? When they have done with that, perhaps they could turn to the UK coalition government, whose dismal showing owes more to lousy marketing them to anything else.

Back to my slide sets and white papers. My decks will be more or less cleared before I leave for Fort Lauderdale and I hope to catch up with some, at least, of the articles etc which have appeared over the past ten days or so. If I do not, my article of last night called Articles on eDisclosure, eDiscovery, Cooperation and Privacy by UK and US Judges captures the very best of recent comment.

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