You will probably remember Chris as the astoundingly talented artist who turned our university dissertation titles into pictorial masterpieces. Now, in an unparalleled piece of investigative journalism, Chris went along to the court case of a sword-wielding gang member and brought back a sketch of what the defendant was accused of doing.

I am temporarily unemployed, and after a whole week of watching Trisha, I decided the best thing to do was go to the Old Bailey to witness a murder trial. Well, not the best thing to do, but something better than watching shit daytime TV. Anyway, they wouldn’t let me into the high-profile cases because they were “family only”, so, settling for second best, I managed to sit in on an attempted murder trial.

The first thing I noticed was that the languid Sri Lankan chap being cross-examined was less than co-operative. He kept on pretending he couldn’t speak English and didn’t understand what was going on. But he totally could speak English, and spoke over the top of his interpreter repeatedly in order to express himself better. Because he was stalling so much I didn’t manage to establish much about the case before the judge got bored of his stalling and called a recess. I did, however, learn that he was convicted of his involvement in a gang brawl last year.

The facts of that previous case were: 25 of his gang ambushed a rival gang in north London, where this guy pounced on a rival and tried to hack his head off with a Samurai sword. His foe only saved his head from being chopped off because he threw his arms up in defence. The sword instead hacked through his arm and left his hand hanging off. Of course, the guy in the dock tried to deny any of this happened, but every now and then would drop his guard and blurt out something incriminating or just say, “If you say so.” For example, the lawyer quizzing him would say, “You and your gang planned this attack and went to the rival gang’s area in five saloon cars and pounced on them on the morning of [whenever the event occurred] where you tried to kill a man. That’s true, isn’t it?”, and the guy would just be like, “If you say so.” So it was pretty obvious he’d done it.

This previous case had dragged on for three months, I imagine in no small part owing to the guy’s reluctance to answer any questions. It must be really annoying for a judge to spend so many years of his life slogging away to become one of the most powerful men in the country only to have to spend every day dealing with dithering idiots pretending they haven’t committed crimes that you know they have committed. I caught the eye of the judge quite a few times because he was really bored, playing with his pen and looking all around the room. I reckon he was imagining what the Samurai sword attack looked like, or maybe planning a sordid sexual fantasy that he could carry out with one of his many mistresses. I doubt he reads Vice, but just in case he does, this is what I think the sword attack looked like, Your Honour.