After being a magistrate for nearly 30 years, I've loads of stories.

But perhaps one of the stories that stays with me was not inside the courtroom, it was actually in a training session. I used to train new magistrates, and my co-trainer was this guy who was just wonderful. He was a black guy, I'm Jewish, and we were talking about prejudice.

And my colleague looked at everybody, all these new magistrates, and said “Hands up those who don't have prejudice.”

And everybody stopped and thought, and one lady put her hand up.

And I said “Don’t you have any prejudice at all?”

She said “No, not at all!”

And my colleague said “Are you sure you don't have any prejudice? Because it's very dangerous not to recognise the fact that you may have prejudice. And if you do have prejudice, the best thing you can do is deal with it. If you don't recognise that you're prejudiced, you'll never deal with it. And that in itself is dangerous.”

I learned a lot from my colleague. It made me stop and think. It was a lesson - and it was a very gentle, strong lesson and made everybody stop and think.