By Susan Freeman

As a lawyer you do become inured to all the unflattering lawyer jokes but it’s comforting to find that bankers and estate agents are now almost as popular as lawyers.
Even so, the results of the recent survey by the Bar Standards Board are fairly astonishing. According to their survey only a meagre 1% of adults trust estate agents.
Bankers are apparently almost as low in the public esteem with only 2% of adults trusting them. I haven’t enquired as to whether the public’s attitude to lawyers was monitored!
We have all had our fill of bad news stories recently so I’ve been trying to find some good news. I have to say it’s not easy at the moment and even a press search of the words ‘good news’ throws up the words ‘no good news’ on most fronts. One glimmer is the government’s last-minute decision to cut the planned 5% increase in business rates to 2%.
The British Retail Consortium rightly claims this as ‘good news for beleaguered retailers’. Also on the positive front was this week’s Property Week Awards Dinner which although a smaller less glitzy event than last year was probably all the more enjoyable for it.
This year there weren’t people crammed into the balcony areas of the Great Room and award winners were able to negotiate their way unobstructed to the stage.
The guest comedian Michael McIntyre -who closely resembles a dark haired Boris Johnson – drew the most laughs when, professing to know nothing about the property sector, repeatedly picked on one, John Richards, asking what he did for a living. Wisely I think in the circumstances, no audible response was forthcoming.
Had Mr McIntyre stayed around for the awards he would have witnessed Mr Richards pick up the coveted Developer of the Year Award on behalf of Hammerson which would have no doubt provided an answer to his persistent questioning.
Having battled through the G20 Summit protests and road closures to get to the Grosvenor Hotel, the 1000 strong attendance at the Awards Dinner was a triumph in itself.
The fact that we were not only not dressed down but were (in contravention of sensible advice from our HR departments) most definitely and defiantly dressed up in black tie for the occasion was a group protest in itself.
And concurrently with our dinner, another dinner was being hosted at 10 Downing Street for the world’s most powerful spouses and some of our pre-eminent women achievers.
I was delighted to see from the press that the property industry was represented (at least by association) by Dame Gail Ronson, wife our very own Gerald Ronson.
The only slightly positive thing I can say about the myriads of traffic cones cordoning off the prolific road closures and roadworks around Central London is that some of these have been recycled from M&S’s flooring off cuts in the interest of sustainability. Other than this, negotiating the streets London at present is a complete nightmare.
On the subject of nightmares, have you ever thought about who is your longest standing contact in the property sector?
I have to say that it’s not a subject I had thought about until Neil Varnham – shortly to retire as Retail Director of Henderson Global Investors – informed me recently that I was the person in the industry he had known longest. We met (in our teens obviously!) when he was a surveyor at the Pearl and I was a trainee lawyer whose secretary was the first Mrs Varnham.

And finally on the hot topic of ‘pre packs’ I was shocked to see that Postman Pat and Basil Brush have become the latest victims of the relentless ‘pre-pack’ having fallen under American control after Entertainment Rights, their owner, fell into administration. Can’t they be saved for the nation?