For many lawyers in Europe this is perhaps the most difficult time of year of all. A good deal of us have just spent precious time with our families and friends, exploring new foods, visiting exciting places, and perhaps revisiting some familiar ones too. Time to relax, kick back a little, read a good book, have long meandering conversations well into the night perhaps accompanied by a good bottle of wine or two. And then that dread siren call sounds, as we remind ourselves of the day job and the call to work and the office. The first day back looms and the weary thought of the long march of hearings and court deadlines right through from the end of August until Christmas.

This then is the perfect time to remind lawyers both young and those like me, not so young, of the critical need to sustain a balance of interests at work and outside of it, in order to keep your mind active, fresh and engaged. This is not just a recipe for a better life. It is equally critical to maintaining a good legal mind.

The statistics of burnout amongst young lawyers are startling and extremely worrying. A 2019 survey from the Law Society in England and Wales showed that over 90% of young lawyers experience stress and a significant proportion of those asked, described that condition as severe or extreme. In 2022, a worldwide survey of the International Bar Association a majority of lawyers under the age of 40 said they would consider leaving their jobs in the next five years. It can hardly be imagined that things are markedly better in India or that matters have improved in the last few years.

The simple point is that it is not possible to keep running endlessly on the treadmill of work and remain sane, healthy and above all interested in and interesting to your loved ones and friends.

This led me to organise a panel session in my chambers in London earlier this year, entitled, “Is This All There Is ?”

We gathered a group of barristers who did something unusual in addition to their work as counsel and we discussed whether this helped or hindered progression at the Bar. We had a distinguished KC who was also and a concert pianist, a thriving junior who wrote serious non- fiction history, another who was also a renowned photographer, our very own head of administration and of staff welfare who is a champion long distance open air swimmer and I chaired the panel. The audience asked us many questions about how we all juggled and managed. The common theme though was that one stream of activity gave energy to the other. In fact, we all agreed it reduced stress and vastly improved quality of life and our enjoyment of both career and hobby. It turns out that the old cliché of having to ask a busy person to do something urgently has much truth to it.

So what stops us all from doing this? It cannot be a lack of other interests, as surely everyone harbours some such outside obsession or passion. It cannot be a lack of ambition either because the fact of having made it through university, law school, and rigorous professional training makes that an implausible answer. It could be general fatigue, and the impression that there are not enough hours in the day to complete ordinary work tasks. This, however, should taken out of equation. Just as it is with a child having two stomachs, one for ordinary food and another for ice cream, an adult has energy for both work and passion projects.

A good case in point is my own summer holiday in Chamonix, France at the foot of Mont Blanc. In 2024 I founded an annual music festival there, called Chamonix Vallee Classics. It is a week of music of the very highest order and quality with some of the great musicians of the world playing in these glorious surroundings. I cannot for a moment pretend that it is not hard work. It also comes with its own stress, as top musicians arrive and dump their problems onto you without any prior warning. One arrived asking me to fix his broken-down BMW and another required that we find a page turner at the very last moment, which is not exactly easy in the middle of the Alps. Nevertheless, the core of the project is that it takes the listener out of yourself, you feed another appetite, become another person just for that little interval and in the process your mind has the space to grow. Ultimately it relieves stress and does not add to it.

So it is in this context that I wanted to mention something of the life of perhaps the greatest amateur of the legal world. A man from another century and perhaps another age altogether. I am talking of the famous barrister Alfred Wills, who in the mid nineteenth century took advantage of the lengthy summer court shutdown, which at that time was somewhere between two and three months’ duration and became the first Englishman to climb the Wetterhorn at a height of nearly 3700m soaring above Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland and so opened the golden age of Alpinism. A few years later, in 1857, he founded the Alpine Club in London, the world’s first mountaineering association. Wills climbed Mont Blanc countless times, together with his great friends Douglas Freshfield (of the world-famous law firm renown), Sir Leslie Stephen (founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and father to the writer Virginia Woolf) and the incomparable alpine painter Gabriel Loppe, who was himself the first to photograph the summit of Mont Blanc and who painted the sunset there on many an occasion. Wills proposed Gabriel Loppe as the first French member of the Alpine Club in London whom he aptly described as, “court painter to his Majesty Mont Blanc”.

Wills took silk in 1872 and then went on to become a High Court judge in 1884 in the Queen’s Bench Division serving there with distinction for 21 years. Perhaps the only, but not insignificant, black mark against this colossus, was that Mr Justice Wills in May 1895 presided over the trial of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency, which he famously described when he passed sentence of two years’ hard labour as “the worst case he ever tried”. Nevertheless, the outcome of this infamous trial did at least give us the, Ballad of Reading Gaol, penned by Wilde when in prison.

It was this parallel life in the high mountains that Wills was forever drawn to. In 1860 he built a house a dozen or so miles from Chamonix in Sixt Fer A Cheval which he named, The Eagle’s Nest which although now in something of a fallen state, is still magnificently located and can still be seen today. Sir Alfred Wills wrote a wonderful travel guide to the Chamonix Valley called The Eagles Nest, named after his country idyll. The account is now fabulously out of date, remarking on the horse and coach routes and schedule of the day, but it does give the general reader an inkling of the solace that he drew from this passion for the mountains and mountaineering outside of work.

In the Preface, Sir Alfred Wills set out the quotation included below as his credo which was itself taken from the great English romantic poet, Wordsworth, in his Lines A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.

“These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:”

We cannot all aspire to the heights of Sir Alfred Wills (pun intended), but we can be inspired by his example and use our passion projects, whatever they may be, to lighten the heavy weight and burden of work amid the din of towns and cities, that we encounter all too often in this unintelligible world. We should also use these lines to encourage others more junior in the office to have the courage to follow their dreams both in and outside of work.

Wishing everyone a healthy return to work from holidays.

David Joseph KC is a barrister practising at Essex Court Chambers in London. He also sits as an arbitrator. He is also the author of Burgenland, Village Secrets and the First Tremors of the Holocaust (Amberley 2023). David is the President and founder of Chamonix Vallee Classics (www.cvc-festival.com) which runs each year for a week in Chamonix from the end of July to beginning of August. The views expressed are his alone.