Last week I received the news that I’d failed to convince another interview panel that I was the candidate for them. Which means that I’ve now had 13 unsuccessful interviews having made 102 unsuccessful applications. Yes, 102 applications! And still no pupillage. I’ve been too nervous, too confident, over-prepared and under-prepared. I’ve cracked gags and I’ve been deathly serious. I’ve tried firm handshakes, limp handshakes, bounding puppy-like enthusiasm and wry, world-weary cynicism. None of it has worked.

And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of application forms and interviews. I’m sick of hopefully checking my email every hour for developments. I’m sick of my mum’s well-meaning friends lining up awkward lunches with their nieces/neighbours/plumbers who once went out with a barrister.

Perhaps the worse part of my current state of limbo though, is watching my peers soar ahead as I fall increasingly far behind. At work (as a paralegal), I find myself getting bossed around by trainees several years younger than me. And in a particularly unfortunate karmic twist of fate, I last week found myself under the supervision of a woman (now a go-getting, power-lunching associate solicitor) who I’d once had a brief fling with at university.

I once looked forward to spending free time with friends, but it’s now a a tortuous experience spent on the fringes of their gleeful conversations about newly purchased Georgian conversions in Islington and all-expenses-paid jollies to New York. Nodding along inanely, I silently pray for a global property crash while gloomily contemplating that the closest I’ve ever come to a business trip was dropping off a file at a partner’s house in Muswell Hill.

Of course I could swallow my pride, grovel to a few law firms and probably get a training contract somewhere. Within a few months I’d have a career path and a shot at getting on the property ladder. The problem, at the risk of alienating many of the people reading this, is that I don’t want to be a solicitor. I really don’t. Most solicitors I know hate their jobs. They like the money but find the work tedious, the corporate culture bland and dispiriting, and are tired of the ridiculous daily rivalry to see who can get home the latest. Okay, being a barrister is no easy option, but everyone knows that they do the interesting stuff.

There is, however, the secret gnawing concern that I may not be barrister material. David from Manchester wrote in the comment section on an earlier article, “Have you ever considered that you are simply not good enough?” Thanks David. And yes, I have - it’s a real worry, and I realise that as time goes by I increasingly resemble a self-deluded tone-deaf karaoke singer who keeps trudging along to Pop Idol auditions.

Other people urge me to keep going. “You only need one successful application!” they say, before launching into improbable stories of how they bagged a pupillage 15 years after finishing the BVC despite being laughed out of 46 of their 47 interviews and told by all their primary school teachers that they’d never be able to read.

Clinging on – just – to these mythical tales of hope, I’m going to give it until Christmas. If I don’t have a pupillage by then, I’ll ceremoniously burn my BVC textbooks, solemnly hand in my Middle Temple membership card and go on my hands and knees to a struggling law firm whose partners hopefully haven’t stumbled over this article.

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