September is here, the leaves are falling and so is the rain. So to bring some cheer and distract you from the onset of winter, The Source has dredged through the legal blogosphere to bring you this week's mildly amusing legal tidbits.

Bogus barrister

A man pretending to be a barrister fled a Plymouth court last week after being rumbled by a sharp eyed judge, who spotted that he was wearing a barrister's wig with a solicitor's gown. The horror.

And it was not only his sartorial mis-step that alerted the excellently named Judge Wildblood. When the fake barrister - calling himself Michael Evans - was asked some basic legal questions, he was stumped. And he was equally bamboozled when Judge Wildblood then asked whether he was a barrister or solicitor. Apparently perplexed at the nuances betwixt the two callings, he shouted "no" and ran from the court.

The bogus barrister has now been reported to the Law Society and the CPS and, if found, may face the charge of "wilfully pretending to be a barrister", an actual offence under the Legal Services Act 2007.

Dodgy vicar of the week

When Reverend Alex Brown started presiding over marriages at his Sussex church, the numbers of those getting hitched shot up 30-fold. Between 2005 and 2009, the Reverend carried out about 383 marriages, compared to 13 ceremonies performed over the previous four years. Some might see this as happy tidings in a society increasingly drawn to co-habitation over marriage, perhaps putting these remarkable statistics down to the Reverend's cupid effect on his community.

Not the police, however. They called it conspiring to breach immigration laws and sent the Reverend down for four years for conducting 360 sham marriages between illegal immigrants and EU citizens. One bride apparently told police that she had to hand back her dress hours after the ceremony and one groom was said to have gone under the name "Felix Spaceman".

And, in what has to be one of the more unusual crime triumvirates, an immigration solicitor and a Ukrainian factory worker were also convicted alongside the Reverend for their parts in the escapade.

Not in my back front yard

David Alvand is probably a man who enjoys his own company. Neighbours in Plymouth complained when he built a 12 foot wall of concrete and breeze blocks around his back garden. Twelve years later, the ensuing legal matter was a stone's throw from reaching the ECHR and Alvand came close to getting locked up. Nosy neighbours are such a pest. So perhaps it was no real surprise that Alvand also planted leylandii in his front garden when he moved in in 1991. For those without green fingers, leylandii are incredibly fast-growing fir tree type things which have led to endless over-the-fence bickering. And even a death or two.

As you can see, these are now hefty specimens, making his house look like a giant green mushroom sprouting from a grotty pebble-dashed villa. The honest burghers of Plymouth are - unsurprisingly - somewhat unimpressed remembering, perhaps, the twelve years it took to get his version of the Berlin Wall dragged down. Still, Plymouth's favourite sociopath thinks he's being victimised and that his neighbours have a "vendetta" against him. Given that they presumably never get even the merest glimpse of him, it's difficult to see how this could be pursued.