Random reminder

Press, 23 June 1981, Page 24

Random reminder

MENS REA IN CORPORE SANO

A Latin-language tag which educated people, intelligent people, and lawyers will recognise. (Not that we would wish to bring lawyers into further disrepute, by rudeness. Mere accuracy would suffice.) The tag means "A guilty mind in a healthy body” (which should save a lot of scrabbling around in pigskin briefcases, looking for Hindes Law Dictionary) and four student ears, bright red, might have heard it murmured the other day by the otherwise impassively sealed lips of an entirely gentlemanly Power Board meter-reader. -;

In the columns of a family newspaper like “The Press,” far be it from.us to speculate upon what the students had been up to. But the “corporibus sanissimus” were due, perhaps, to there being too many vitamins in student food these days. As for the “mentes reatium,” there might just have been a hint of a triangle. The footsteps in'the shingle as the

meter-reader dodged the delphiniums were (they thought) recognisable. The pause (as of one hunting for his key), the knock and ring, followed by the little hum and the tap of the foot — all these (they fancied, panic-stricken) were characteristic of a, how shall we put it?, a friend. A two-metre, eighty-kg, swiftreactioned. trigger-tempered Rugbyplaying friend, who had not been, how shall we put it?, who had to been expected to be coming. What the students should have done, was take a few seconds to organise their' thoughts. What they did do was act independently, without consultation, and far too fast. What the meter reader saw, as the door to the hallway was flung open by a young gentleman wearing a towel, was a young lady transferring a bundle of gentleman’s habiliments desperately out of her room. And what the young lady was wearing was nothing at all.