Allyson Colby, James Driscoll and Stuart Pemble are in high spirits at the end of another busy year, drawing on literary inspiration to unleash a Dickens of a Legal Notes Christmas special
It was Christmas Eve and Scrooge lay trembling in his bed. Jacob Marley had been dead these past seven years, but the phantom that had just visited him had Marley’s bristling pigtail and the same face, the very same face. It had been wearing Marley’s spectacles, his waistcoat, tights and boots – and the chain clasped around the phantom’s middle had clanked hideously as it warned: “You will be haunted by three spirits,” before floating mournfully into the bleak dark night.
Shaken by Marley’s visit, Scrooge was petrified when the bell tolled a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy one and a spectre appeared in front of him.
“Who, and what, are you?” Scrooge demanded.
“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” the spectre replied grimly, before whisking Scrooge back through events of the past year.
Christmas past
The spectre showed Scrooge cackling gleefully following the High Court ruling in EMI Group Ltd v O&H Q1 Ltd [2016] EWHC 529 (Ch); [2016] PLSCS 87. The decision that assignments of leases between assignors and their guarantors are void, if the lease in question was made on or after 1 January 1996, had not bothered him at all. As a landlord, what did he care? Never let it be said that Ebenezer Scrooge let anyone off the hook…
