Ross Macfarlane KC on his new short story serial in The Scotsman pays tribute to a colleague and friend

In previous years, the answer was simple. But this year, there’s a sense of sadness involved. This year, the picture invokes the memory of the loss of a dear friend.

Originally, the boxes in question - Edward Kane, Mr Beynon and Mr Collins were part-story, part in-joke. Edward Kane, Advocate is, of course, the featured character in the stories and Mr Collins is his friend. So far, so fictitious. The middle box name ‘Mr Beynon’ was taken from real life - my friend, Neil Beynon, Advocate. I had added it in the illustration as a wee friendship gift to him, to make him smile whenever the new stories came out.

Regarding the boxes themselves: until fairly recently, Advocates (i.e. Scottish Supreme Court lawyers) received work when solicitors placed work - ‘Letters of Instruction’ - into a wee wooden box with the Advocate’s nameplate on the front of it. The letter was usually accompanied by a bundle of papers bound in pink twine with the relevant papers attached. The boxes were located in the public corridors of Parliament House where solicitors’ messengers could easily place things into them.

Thus, in the Edward Kane stories, you find the struggling young Advocate constantly looking in his box to see if there is any work that day, that week or maybe that month! Of course, the system (and the box itself) was a thing of beauty - but it could never last. For good reason. A private letter to an Advocate about a case that’s worth millions of pounds. Do you really want all that precious information accessible to the public, lying in a box exposed to anybody who walks down that public hall?

It had to change, so now such letters are delivered to secure locations. But have a look today, and you’ll see that many of the boxes - with the names still on them - are still there, if only as a memorial to past times. That’s why I have always chosen the Advocates’ work boxes as the first illustration, a memory of the importance of those little receptacles of Hope (and often Disappointment) in the Advocate’s life.

This year it’s different. This is a sadder kind of memory. This year, we lost one of the names on those boxes. We lost one of my great friends, Neil Beynon, Advocate.

I first met Neil in 1996, when the Faculty of Advocates Choir was formed. He soon took over conducting the Choir and thus began a partnership where I would provide the Organisation (he would call me ‘The CEO’) and Neil would provide the Music, becoming the Advocates Choir Musical Director – and he proceeded to conduct the Advocates Choir for the following 20 years.

And what a time that was. Raising money for the homeless every Christmas, then taking the Choir all over the world to exotic locations:

- Notre Dame in Paris - winding our way through those creepy basement catacombs, then being led through a door and finding ourselves on a glorious, golden altar where - I kid you not - one of our choristers immediately underwent a religious awakening.

- St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican - we sang the morning Mass there. Three distinct memories: (1) The choir singing before us was The Vatican Choir, an all-male collection, average age around 97 years. Neil joked that we could drive a tractor through their vibrato. As fate would have it, the Advocates Choir sounded particularly good following them; (2) Some of the church wardens thought that one of our pieces was too long so they tried to snatch the sheet music from the top of the organ. I can see it now - Neil (literally!) fighting off two Men in Black with his left hand, while continuing to play the keyboard with his right; (3) After we had sung one piece - particularly well, I should say - the congregation suddenly burst into a lusty round of applause. Applause? During Mass. During Mass!! I was raised Catholic. I was convinced that we were all going to Hell...

- St Mark’s Basilica in Venice - this is where it gets spooky. I have sung in choirs for decades in dozens of different venues. But I have never heard an acoustic like that of St Mark’s in Venice. Here’s what happened: the Choir started to sing at the appropriate place in the ceremony. The building itself started to resonate. The sound bounced back to us. But the sound that came back wasn’t us. It wasn’t the Faculty of Advocates Choir that we could hear back. It was a much bigger choir, four or five times the size of ours, and with different voices. Singing there on the altar of that Byzantine cathedral, I had the strong feeling that we were being joined by other, ghostly, choirs that had sung there in the past in that very location. An eerie sensation that we were being joined by those choirs and that they had left a kind of spiritual imprint on the place. It still makes me shiver to remember.

Of course, much like those little wooden Advocates’ boxes, the Faculty Choir couldn’t survive.

Over a quarter of a century, we had been going great guns and had raised tens of thousands of pounds for the homeless, then Covid struck. And that was that. It had been hard enough cajoling and pleading with the odd Alto to commit to rehearsal and performance in the first place. Suddenly it was literally unlawful for us to be in the same room.

Then, no Choir as people drifted away and got on with their post-lockdown lives. Despite this, I thought that we might try one last hurrah for the Faculty of Advocates Choir. 2025 is the 150th anniversary of that great writer Robert Louis Stevenson being admitted as an Advocate to the Scottish Bar. I was preparing an event to celebrate this, with an evening of music and poetry.

Neil - as Musical Director - was central to the plans. We would get the Choir back together and perform some Stevenson-related music on the night. But it was not to be. Neil died suddenly at his home at the end of last month.

It’s hard to know how best to commemorate that long friendship except by getting his many friends together and making some music in his memory. To that end, I managed to arrange a memorial Mass for Neil, where the Faculty of Advocates Choir would re-assemble for one last time and sing for Neil at that Mass. Bitter-sweet memories of Notre Dame, St Peter’s and St Mark’s. The Memorial Mass for Neil will take place at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh on 13th December at 10am.

In the play, Henry V, Shakespeare has the king say: ‘Old men forget. Yet all shall be forgot…’ I suppose that having Neil’s box in each introduction illustration is just my way of saying: ‘Yes – one day, all shall be forgot…but not quite yet…’

(And you can still see those little Advocates’ boxes as you walk along the corridors of Parliament House)

Starting on Monday until Christmas Eve – Ross Macfarlane KC’s daily Christmas serial: ‘Edward Kane and the Voice of the Spider’