Justice is like pornography. People know it when they see it. In the same way, when they don't see it where they hoped to, some people call themselves bananas. So the miracle of justice is not that we accept it as a concept. We all have an inbuilt understanding of fair play. The miracle of justice is that we accept its rulings when they go against us.

We do so because of the severe architecture of most courtrooms, their customarily inadequate heating, their guards (with access to handcuffs, the prisons system and sometimes guns) and the presumption that senior legal professionals will have relevant degrees, long experience and wigs.

The wigs worn by judges and barristers in British courts since 1685 are hot, heavy, prickly and expensive, indicating sacrifice on the part of the wearer to a nobler cause than mere comfort or convenience. They frame and anonymise his or her visage, turning it into an oracular conduit for the wisdom of the ages. And they look scary and preposterous. Authority demands nothing less.

Mercifully, wigs are to be retained in criminal proceedings. But in family and civil courts, after a long struggle by the Lord Chief Justice, who might reasonably be supposed to have had weightier things on his mind than his pound of horsehair, they are to be scrapped, along with black judicial gowns in favour of wiglessness and streamlined new navy gowns designed by a woman better known for her “funky British clothes for funky British girls”.

The stage is set for anarchy. Did no one tell his Lordship about Samson and Delilah?