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Toby Cadman Barrister-at-Law, 6 Pump Court, First Floor, Temple, London (2026)

24/08/2026

FROM THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE

EPISODE 7 - THE LOUNGE

Every one of these has ended in the same place, and I have never once told you where it is.

“They're boarding,” I say, and off I go, and you have been kind enough not to ask boarding from where. The answer is that I have been sitting, this whole time, in a departure lounge. The specific one changes. The lounge does not. I have written every word of this to you from a moulded plastic chair with a sightline to a gate, waiting to be called forward and processed and, eventually, frightened. The series is not called From the Departure Lounge as a flourish. It is a return address.

So let me, for once, stay in the room.

I have spent more of my life here than I have spent in some of the rooms of my own house. This is arithmetic, not sentiment. A hundred flights a year, give or take, for more years than I care to remember, and each one preceded by the regulation two hours of a man arriving early because arriving early is the one part of the ordeal he can control. Do the sum and it comes to a frightening number of hours in identical rooms in cities I could not, under oath, place on a map. I know the layout of an airport I cannot name. I could walk you to its quieter gents. This is the intimacy of the frequent flyer, and it is the loneliest intimacy I know, though, as you will see, loneliness and I have come to an arrangement.
Because I must now confess to something I have kept back through five episodes of otherwise full disclosure. Alongside the flying, the heights and the bridges, there is a fourth item in the portfolio, and it is the one that makes a room full of my own species a daily trial. Misophonia.

It is a real condition, and a properly named one, however much it sounds like an excuse invented by an irritable man. It means, in plain terms, that certain sounds other people make do not merely annoy me but reach in and pull a lever wired directly to rage. Chewing. Slurping. The wet percussion of a man enjoying his crisps. The bright, idiot pop of someone blowing a bubble with their chewing gum. And, chief among the modern horrors, the person who plays a video on their telephone at full volume in a shared room, holding it out like a small radio, in the apparent belief that the rest of us have been waiting all our lives to hear it too. I hold, with total sincerity and no expectation of reform, that this last one should be a crime. I have drafted the statute in my head many times. The sentencing guidelines are severe.

I come by all of this honestly. It is written, in fact, into my name. My middle name is Mace, after my great-grandfather, and family legend records that when Mace was first shown a television, late in a long life, he watched it for a while with mounting confusion and then asked the room the only question that mattered to him. Why, he wanted to know, did he have to sit and listen to people eating. He had waited eighty-odd years for the miracle of moving pictures beamed into the front room, and the first thing it did was chew at him. He was, I now understand, the founder of my condition and its first martyr, and I carry his name into every lounge in the world like an inherited allergy.

Which brings me to the particular circle of hell that is the business class lounge.

The premise of the business lounge is proximity sold as privilege. You pay, one way or another, to be gathered in closer with your fellow travellers, in softer chairs, nearer the food, and, for a man like me, nearer the sounds. The free buffet, which everyone else regards as the whole point, is to me a live-fire exercise: a long table specifically engineered to convert strangers into eaters, at close range, in stereo. I have sat in some of the finest lounges on earth, surrounded by complimentary champagne and warm nuts, rigid with fury at a gentleman two feet away working through a bowl of something with the enthusiasm of a cement mixer. There is no upgrade from this. First class would merely bring the mouth closer.

And so, to the one good thing I will ever say about the pandemic.
For a period, I still had to travel. The work did not stop, the disputes did not pause to let the world recover. But almost nobody else did, and the lounges emptied. For the better part of two years I moved through airports built for thousands and populated by dozens, and I want to be honest with you about how that felt, because it does me no credit at all. It felt wonderful. The great echoing halls stood silent. The buffet was mine. The nearest human being was a reassuring forty feet away and masked, which muffled even the breathing. I sat in that vast, ringing emptiness, a man in a hush that circumstance had built for reasons of global catastrophe, and I was, God forgive me, happy. I have never told anyone that the loneliest years of the century were, acoustically, the best of my life.

A Frenchman gave this room a name in gentler times. Marc Augé called places like this non-lieux, non-places: the airport, the motorway, the chain hotel. Spaces you pass through rather than live in, where you have no history and leave no mark, where everyone is anonymous and briefly nobody at all. He meant it a little sadly, as a diagnosis of the modern condition, the human being reduced to a boarding pass and a queue.

He is right, and this time I do not resent him, because the emptier the non-place, the happier I am in it. He mourns the anonymity. I would like it extended. For me the ideal lounge is one in which supermodernity has done its worst and stripped every last person of their history, their conversation, and above all their snacks, and left only me, placeless and unbothered, thinking clearly for the first time all day.

My wife does not recognise this version of me. She treats a departure lounge as what it plainly is, a corridor with shops, and moves through it buying nothing and wasting no feeling on it. When I once tried to explain that I found the empty ones almost holy, she considered it for the requisite second and said, “You don't want peace. You want everyone else to stop existing.” Twenty-seven years, and still the most accurate account of me ever produced, delivered without looking up from the perfume.
There is, even so, a peace to be had, and it is the peace of the condemned man’s last good hour. It ends the same way every time, not gradually but at a stroke, with a chime and a voice: the announcement that turns the room from a sanctuary into a queue and hands me back my fear with interest. The tannoy is the guillotine. Everyone stands. The eaters pocket their gum, the man with the telephone finally, mercifully, puts it away, and we shuffle together towards the one door in the building I do not want to walk through, briefly, at the very end, united, and blessedly silent.

So now you know the room these have come from. Not the mountains, not the bridges, not the countries I cannot name. This. A plastic chair, a watched board, a great-grandfather’s grievance in my middle name, and a man who fears the sky but dreads, even more, the sound of the person beside him enjoying a sandwich.

They're boarding. More from the next one.

18/08/2026

FROM THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE – EPISODE 6 – Chosen

People assume a career is a thing you build. Mine was a thing that happened to me, twice, in two countries, and I have been dining out on both accidents ever since.

I have told you a great deal, over these few episodes, about the flying and the heights and the bridges – about the machinery of dread I carry from one departure lounge to the next. What I have not told you is why a man so constitutionally unsuited to leaving the ground has spent his whole adult life doing precisely that. The honest answer is that two countries reached out and took hold of me, one at each end of the world I knew, and I have never fully recovered from either. One I chose. The other chose me. Between them they made everything that came after, including these.

The first was Bosnia, and I chose it, though “chose” flatters the decision considerably.

The truth is that I went because of my wife. The secondment, three months, they said, help stand up a bit of the legal apparatus a war had left in pieces, was the sort of thing a sensible young man turned down, and I was, then, a sensible (relatively) young man. I had reasons. I had a diary. I had, above all, an airplane to avoid. And my wife, who had understood the shape of my life some years before I had, looked at the offer and then at me and made the case in a single sentence I have never been able to argue with, which is a professional embarrassment given what I am paid to do.

So, I went. For three months. The love affair with Bosnia started on Valentine’s Day 2002, the day I arrived.

I came back, in the meaningful sense, about eight years later.
Because Bosnia in those years was not a posting, it was a whole world with the lid off, a country being reassembled in real time by people who were making the rules as they went, and the rules were law, and the law needed arguing, and it turned out I could argue it. Everything I now know how to do I learned in rooms in Sarajevo and Banja Luka and Mostar, on problems no textbook had reached yet. A three-month favour to my marriage became a career. I have met men who planned theirs more carefully and did worse, much worse.

The second country was Bangladesh, and I did not choose it in any sense whatsoever. It chose me, by a mechanism so undignified I can barely commit it to the page: a client, on the far side of the planet, with a problem and a search engine, typed some words into Google, and my name came up first.
That is the whole of it. First result. A lifetime’s professional identity, and it turned on where my name happened to fall in a machine’s estimation on a particular afternoon. As I’ve said more than once, my father wanted me to be a civil engineer, to earn my place by building something. I earned mine, it transpires, by search-engine optimisation I did not know I was performing.
They called. And to get there I had to do the thing I dread above all the other things: my first flight out of Europe. Everything before it had been the short hops of a nervous man staying close to home, an hour to a Balkan capital, eyes shut, breathing managed, back before the fear could properly organise itself. This was different. This was hours of it. This was the continent falling away behind me and something entirely unknown coming up ahead, and me strapped into the middle of it with a handle I was pretending was structural.

And then Dhaka.

I have tried many times to describe what it is to step out of an airport into South Asia for the first time, and I have never managed it, because the thing that happens is that every sense you own is spoken to at once, at volume, and asked to keep up. The heat arrives first, as a physical fact, a hand on the chest. Then the sound; a city of millions all doing something urgent simultaneously, horns and voices and engines and prayer, none of it apologising. Then the sheer, staggering, exhilarating density of people, more human beings in one street than my entire country seemed to contain, every one of them going somewhere with total conviction.

I stood in it, jet-lagged and terrified and forty years from the flat road to Waitrose, and I felt something I had not expected and have chased ever since. Not calm. The opposite of calm. I felt enthralled. I felt, for the first time in my life, that the fear and the wonder were the same instrument played from different ends, and that a man could not have the one without agreeing to the other.

Two frontiers, when I look at a map now. Bosnia at the far Ottoman edge of Europe; Bengal at the far edge of the old Mughal and then British world. Two places where empires had drained away and left the law behind them like a tide leaves a coastline, complicated and contested and full of things to argue about. I have spent my career walking those two shorelines, and I would never have found either if I had been left to plan it. One I was talked into by the person who knew me best. The other was handed to me by an algorithm that did not know me at all.
This is the part I keep coming back to, in the lounges, waiting to be boarded. We tell the story of a life afterwards as though it were a decision. But mine turned on a sentence from my wife and a line of search results, and everything since, every country I cannot reliably name, every road I have crossed with my eyes shut, every one of these, hangs off those two accidents like a coat off two hooks.

I am afraid of flying. I fly perhaps a hundred times a year. And I have finally understood why I keep doing it, against every instinct I own.

Because the two best things that ever happened to me were waiting on the far side of a flight I did not want to take.
They're boarding. More from the next one.

11/08/2026

FROM THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE – EPISODE 5 - The Black Mountain

I have already confessed to the flying. In the interests of full disclosure, the flying is not the whole portfolio.

There is also heights. And, separately and much worse, bridges.
I want to be clear that these are three distinct conditions and not one condition wearing different hats. The flying is a fear of the machine, actually not a fear of flying, but of turbulence and ultimately crashing. Heights is a fear of the edge. Bridges are a fear of a specific and unanswerable question, which is: what exactly is holding this up, and has anyone checked recently.

I should add that I love to drive. I have a car that I love. And my love of driving is defined by two things, knowing the road and it being flat. A man who has been to more countries than he can reliably name, and can only drive himself to Sainsbury's or Waitrose. My father wanted me to be a civil engineer. I have instead become a man who is driven across other people's engineering with his eyes shut.

The trip was around the Balkans, which is where most of my trips have been, one way or another, for twenty-five years.

The problem arose between Montenegro and Croatia. There is no flight. There is, in theory, a flight, in the sense that there are two airports and an intervening distance, but the connection involves going a very long way in the wrong direction and arriving the following afternoon in a worse mood.

So: a car, and someone to drive it.

I mentioned the plan to my wife with the airy confidence of a man who has not looked at a map. Would there, I wondered aloud, be mountains.

She did not look up.

“It's called Montenegro for a reason.”

Twenty-seven years of marriage, and she can still do that in under a second.

She was right, as she generally is and as she has never once needed to point out.

The road climbs. It keeps climbing. It does so in a series of hairpins cut into the side of the mountain, with rock on one side and, on the other, a low stone wall of the kind that would be entirely adequate if what you were trying to contain was a determined sheep.

Below that, nothing. Below the nothing, eventually, the sea, doing its best to look picturesque about the whole thing which my driver repeatedly tried to get me to explore. I could not for two very important reasons. One, I was terrified to look. Two, I had a blindfold over my eyes that made me look like some detained prisoner in a far-off land led by autocrats.

My driver took the bends one-handed, at a speed I would describe as conversational, while conducting an actual conversation on his telephone. He was, I am certain, entirely competent. He had done this road several thousand times and I had done it never, and between us only one of us was sweating.
This is the single advantage of not driving. You are permitted to close your eyes. I closed them a great deal. I deployed the Chi Gung breathing, which is calibrated for a temple courtyard and not for a Yugoslav-era guardrail, and I held the handle above the door in the manner of a man who believes the handle is structural.

We stopped at the top. A border crossing at the peak of the mountain was, in my view, somewhat intimidatory. Crossing into an EU territory meant I had to get out at the top of the mountain to have my photo taken. The view was, objectively, one of the great views of Europe. I looked at it for as long as politeness required, in the manner of a man being shown photographs of a party he was not invited to and got back in the car.

And then the bridge.

The Pelješac bridge is two and a half kilometres of road suspended over open sea, and it exists for a reason that ought to have endeared it to me. Croatia's coast is interrupted by a few miles of Bosnian shoreline at Neum. For years, driving from Dubrovnik to anywhere else in your own country meant two border posts and a queue. So, they built a bridge over the water and went round the outside.

A sovereignty problem solved with concrete. Twenty-five years of my professional life spent on such problems, and none of my solutions has ever been that elegant, or that permanent, or that easy to drive over at seventy.

You see it long before you reach it, which is the cruelty of the thing. It sits out there in the light, improbably thin, a line drawn across open water by someone with more confidence than sense. There is an interval, several minutes, in my case, in which you are simply travelling towards your own phobia at a steady pace, in the passenger seat, with no controls of any kind in front of you.

I closed my eyes at the first pylon and opened them somewhere on the peninsula. My driver said something I did not catch. I have no idea what any of it looked like. I have been assured it is beautiful.

Ivo Andrić, who won a Nobel Prize for a novel about a bridge, wrote that of everything a man builds nothing is better or worth more than a bridge. They belong to everyone. They are always built where the need is greatest. And unlike almost anything else we put up; they do not deceive.

He is right, and I resent him for it. He also never had to look down.

There is a bridge a few hours inland from there that proves his point, and it is the only one I have ever been glad to stand on. At Mostar the young men climb onto the parapet and throw themselves seventy-odd feet into the Neretva, which is freezing, for tips. They stand up there smoking, waiting for the crowd to thicken and the money to reach a level they consider appropriate. It is, in its way, a fee negotiation, and a more honest one than most I have been party to.

That bridge was shelled to pieces in 1993, rebuilt stone by stone, and litigated afterwards at very great length, as everything here is eventually litigated. Which is Andrić's point turned the other way up. If a bridge is the thing that belongs to everyone, then destroying one is the clearest possible statement that some people are no longer included.

I have spent a career on the paperwork that follows. And I still cannot cross one with my eyes open.

We came down into Croatia in the late afternoon, and I had a rakija on a terrace and my hands were, I am pleased to report, more or less my own again.

Somewhere in there is the joke this series keeps arriving at from different directions. I am afraid of flying. I fly perhaps a hundred times a year. And after four hours of Montenegrin gradient and one bridge I refused to look at, I sat there and thought, with total sincerity, the thing I never expected to think.

Give me a plane any day.

At least on a plane, nobody is expecting me to admire the view.

They're boarding. More from the next one.

02/08/2026

NOTES FROM THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE – No. 4 — Why Law?

Gate 14. Delayed. A colleague I have known for perhaps forty minutes asks the question people always ask eventually, usually somewhere between the second drink and the boarding call.
So why law?

It is a generous question. It assumes there was a decision.
Before the law, I was a fashion photographer. Before that — or possibly during, the chronology has softened — a graphic designer. There was a brief and improbable period in champagne, which sounds far more glamorous than it was and which I mention mainly because it is the only line on the list that ever gets a reaction. My father wanted me to be a civil engineer. I went to university to study business.

I hated business.

That is the whole of it, really. Not a calling. Not a documentary watched at fifteen that lit some quiet fire. A list of things I tried and put down, and one thing I picked up and didn't.

Now, there is a version of this story that works much better, and I have told it. It goes like this.

Photography teaches you framing; what you leave outside the edge of the picture is a decision, and it is usually the decision that matters. Design teaches you that an argument nobody can follow is not an argument. Champagne teaches you that you are always selling something, and that people buy the occasion rather than the thing. Business teaches you the machinery underneath the institutions everyone else describes in the abstract. Put them together and you have, more or less, a description of what I do now. Frame the case. Make it legible. Understand what is actually being bought. Know how the machine works.

It’s a good paragraph. I've watched it land at dinners.
It is also entirely constructed backwards. None of those things were preparation. They were jobs I was not especially good at and did not intend to leave in the direction I left them. The coherence arrived years later, retrospectively, assembled out of whatever was lying around, which is, I suspect, how most people’s coherence arrives. We are all reverse-engineering a straight line out of a set of accidents and then presenting it as a plan. The performance is so routine that we forget we are performing it, and then we sit on interview panels and ask young people to do the same trick, and mark them down when they can’t.

My father, for his part, was not being unreasonable. He wanted me to build things that stay up.

I have thought about that more than he’d probably like. Two and a half decades in international criminal law and public international law is, on the balance of the evidence, a career spent watching things not stay up. Institutions built with enormous ceremony and then quietly starved. Tribunals that close before they finish. Judgments that are correct and unenforced. Whatever a bridge is, this is the opposite of it.

He came round, eventually. I’m not sure he was wrong.
The actual answer, the one under the anecdote, is that in the second term of a business degree I did not want, there was a law module. And in that module, for the first time in my education, I encountered the proposition that a person could simply be wrong, and that you could demonstrate it. Not out-argue them. Not out-charm them. Demonstrate it, from the text, to a standard, in front of someone whose job was to say so.
I had never met anything like that before. I have not really got over it.

Everything since has been a long argument with how rarely that turns out to be true in practice.

So: not a vocation. An elimination. I did not choose law so much as run out of alternatives, and law happened to be standing nearest the exit.

Which brings me to the only piece of advice I’d offer, and it is faintly ungracious. Be a little suspicious of the ones who knew at seventeen. Certainty that early is usually inherited, and inherited certainty doesn’t survive contact with the work. The people I have come to rely on, the ones still standing after twenty years of adjournments, funding cuts, and clients who lie to you for reasons you eventually understand, mostly wandered in sideways.

Arriving by accident and staying anyway is the better credential. Anyone can start. Almost nobody explains why they stayed.

They’re boarding. More from the next one.

27/07/2026

NOTES FROM THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE — No. 3 On Waiting

Every barrister waits. It is the first thing the job teaches you and the last thing anyone admits. The pupil waits for work. The junior waits for the phone to ring. The silk waits, with a straighter back and a larger fee, but waits all the same. We are trained, from the outset, to sit very still in uncomfortable rooms and appear to be thinking. Much of the time we are.

International practice takes this modest domestic skill and elevates it into a vocation. The English barrister waits for a listing. The international one waits for a tribunal to convene that has been convening, in some form, since before he was called, and will still be convening, in some form, after he has stopped. He waits across time zones. He waits in languages he does not speak. He waits with the calm, load-bearing patience that the brochures, if we were honest enough to print brochures, would describe as saintly.

Which brings me to the comparison I have been quietly avoiding. There is a saint — Simeon Stylites — who sat on top of a pillar in the Syrian desert for thirty-seven years. Simply sat there. Waited. And for this he was made a saint, sought out by emperors, remembered for sixteen centuries. I have done broadly the same thing, in a departure lounge outside Vienna, for what felt like a comparable period, and received a rebooked connection and a voucher for a coffee I did not want. One of us understood the assignment. Again, it is not the one typing this.

The waiting comes in varieties, and I have become a reluctant sommelier of them. I have become a sommelier of another kind too, that also goes to waiting, but in more comfortable settings. That’s for another episode. Anyway, back to where I was. There is the wait for a tribunal to sit, which runs on a clock inherited from institutions older than the aircraft that brought you. The wait for a translation, on which a client’s liberty depends, turning quietly in an office in another hemisphere while you refresh nothing, because there is nothing to refresh. The wait outside the courtroom, in a corridor built by someone who assumed everyone in it had somewhere better to be — and I never do; being there is the entire job. And the purest form of all, the one this series is named after: the wait with nothing to occupy it but one’s own nerves, which I have documented previously and will not embarrass myself by revisiting.

There is also the wait nobody warns you about, which is being kept waiting by the very people you are waiting for. The client who will call back and does not. The body that will rule “in due course,” a phrase that in international law can comfortably outlive the person it concerns. You learn not to take it personally. You learn, in fact, not to take very much personally at all, which is either wisdom or attrition, and on a long enough delay the two become difficult to tell apart.

I will confess the thing underneath all this, briefly, before I lose my nerve. A career spent waiting is a career spent just outside the room where the thing happens. Always in the ten minutes before. The judgment takes a moment to read; the years leading to it are where I have actually lived. My family, who wait for me at the other end, understand this better than I do, and have stopped saying so, which is its own kind of verdict.

I am writing this, as it happens, from a gate whose departure time has now been described as “estimated” three times, each estimate more theoretical than the last. For once I am not restless. This, after all, is what the whole career has been for — sitting somewhere I would rather not be, waiting for something that is running late, doing it with a straight back.

Simeon had his pillar. I have seat 3A. More next week — schedule, and sainthood, permitting.

20/07/2026

NOTES FROM THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE — No. 2

“Fear of Flying”

This month I have been to Croatia, Botswana, Dubai (x3), Oman, Zimbabwe and South Africa. It is the twentieth. There are ten days left. There is, in principle, still time for more. I will visit Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo before the month ends, and perhaps back to the Middle East again.

I list them not to impress — the frequent-flyer tier does that, and it does it coldly — but to make a confession that undercuts the whole enterprise: I am, and have always been, more or less terrified of flying.

I remain fearful. Not in a way that stops me. In a way that simply accompanies me, everywhere, like a nervous junior. I have read the safety card in six languages. I know which sounds the aircraft makes on purpose and which ones I have decided, without evidence, are new. I grip the armrest during turbulence with the quiet dignity of a man who believes, sincerely, that he is holding the plane up himself. Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, en route to Madagascar, I performed this service for several hours and received no thanks.

This makes me, I have concluded, the Dennis Bergkamp of international lawyers — with the crucial difference that Bergkamp had the good sense to build a career he could largely do by coach. He looked at flying, decided against it, and won trophies from the ground. I looked at flying, felt precisely the same way, and then chose the one profession on earth that consists of almost nothing else. One of us is a genius. It is not the one typing this.

People imagine the international practitioner striding through terminals, unbothered, a citizen of everywhere. The reality, in my case, is a grown man in a creased suit doing discreet breathing (Chi Gung) exercises during boarding, who has been to more countries than he can comfortably name and enjoyed the airborne portion of precisely none of them. The work I love. The commute I endure. And the commute, inconveniently, is most of the job.

Ironically, I'm writing this week from a beach in Croatia, having spent the day flying as a tourist — on an airline I rarely use, for reasons that became apparent to my long-suffering family somewhere over the Adriatic.

Back at the airport now. There is a lesson in here somewhere about doing the thing that frightens you, but I am too tired to locate it, and my gate has just changed to one that is, on the evidence of the departures board, in a different country.

More next week — conditions, and my nerves, permitting.

Toby Cadman Barrister-at-Law

24/08/2026

18/08/2026

11/08/2026

02/08/2026

27/07/2026

20/07/2026

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