Monday, 12 October 2026 — A belated entry
William Shakespeare died more than four hundred years ago.
He never had to telephone His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service. He never listened to a recorded voice asking him to select an option from a menu. And, so far as I know, nobody ever subjected him to sixty consecutive minutes of hold music.
Yet by the end of Monday, I was beginning to suspect that Shakespeare understood my predicament rather well.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Act I: To Press One, or Not to Press One
My Monday began with what seemed a relatively straightforward objective.I needed to locate the court records behind an old MS90 conviction — an offence involving failure to provide information about the identity of a driver.I dispute that I was responsible for the alleged offence. The conviction appears to have contributed to the revocation of my full driving licence, and I had only recently become aware of the proceedings.
The circumstances surrounding that period of my life were complicated. COVID had disrupted almost everything, and I’d changed addresses several times. I cannot yet say precisely what happened to the original notices, or why the conviction came to be associated with me.That’s what I’m trying to establish.
Surely, I thought, the court would have a record.I telephoned HMCTS.Immediately, I encountered my first obstacle.
The automated telephone service wanted to know whether my enquiry concerned the Single Justice Procedure.Now, many relatively minor motoring offences are dealt with under that procedure. But I didn’t know whether mine had been.
And that was rather the point of calling.
Unfortunately, the automated system offered no option for “I don’t know; could somebody please tell me?”
It offered Yes or No.
To press one, or not to press one?
I spent approximately half an hour waiting to reach the relevant departments. In the end, neither could provide the historical MS90 case information I needed.
The first act concluded without a case number, a court record or even a clear idea of who might possess either.
Act II: A Welsh Voice and a Circular Journey
By about 10am, I decided to try DVLA.If the conviction had resulted in penalty points and the loss of my driving licence, perhaps the agency responsible for maintaining driving records could identify the original endorsement.
Unfortunately, the person I spoke to couldn’t locate the historical information I needed.
There was, at least, the consolation of a pleasant Welsh accent.
The adviser suggested contacting the penalty office and gave me a telephone number.
Excellent, I thought. A new lead.
I dialled it.
And found myself listening to the very same automated service with which I had begun my morning.
I had completed an entire administrative circuit and arrived back at the entrance.
Had Shakespeare written this scene, I suspect the audience would have laughed.
I was less amused.
But the adviser had inadvertently given me something useful: the name of another department.So I searched online and found various contact numbers for penalty offices, many apparently concerned with collecting payments rather than investigating old cases.
Eventually, I found a number for a North East England penalties office, based in Lincoln.
Onward to Act III.Act III: The Hour of Waiting
The next telephone call involved approximately another hour on hold.
There is something peculiarly exhausting about waiting on a telephone.
You cannot quite concentrate on anything else, because at any moment the music might stop and a human being might answer.
You must remain alert enough to explain a complicated situation immediately, yet passive enough to endure the same short piece of music repeating indefinitely.
It is neither proper rest nor productive work.
It is a kind of administrative purgatory.
When I finally reached someone, they were helpful. Unfortunately, the office no longer held the historical penalty information I needed.
They could identify a more recent matter, but not the old MS90 case.
Another dead end, or so it seemed.Then came the most useful suggestion of the morning.
Because I had recently become aware of the historical matter through enforcement agents — commonly known as bailiffs — I should try contacting the court enforcement team.
This was a department I hadn’t thought to approach.
After all, I was trying to investigate the origins of a conviction, not pay an outstanding penalty.
But perhaps the people responsible for enforcing a decision would retain information that the people answering general court enquiries could no longer find.It was worth one more call.
Act IV: Enter the Enforcement Team
By this point, it was approaching midday.
I telephoned the enforcement team.Another hour on hold.Another hour of listening for the tiny interruption that might signal the arrival of an actual person.
And then, finally, something happened.The adviser could see information relating to my historical MS90 matter on their system.
For the first time that day, I was speaking to someone who could read back details connected to the very case I had spent the morning trying to trace.
I still didn’t have the complete court file, and the information did not resolve the question of whether the conviction was correctly attributed to me.
But it established a tangible trail.
There was information in an official system. There were references I could use. The matter was no longer just an old endorsement I was trying to explain.The adviser supplied two enforcement account numbers, each consisting of eight digits followed by a letter.
As I understood the explanation, the numbers related to different periods of records, one before 2022 and one afterwards.These were not necessarily the original court case numbers or Unique Reference Numbers. But they were identifiers that another department might be able to use to locate the underlying matters.
That was progress.The next step would be to take those references back to the Single Justice Procedure service and ask it to identify the proceedings associated with them.
For any conviction of which I genuinely had no knowledge, I also need to establish the appropriate procedure for making a statutory declaration, including whether any application would now be considered late.
Each case must be identified separately. A single account reference may not tell the whole story.
Still, after several hours, I finally had something more useful than another telephone number.
I had a lead.
And the strangest part was where it had come from.
The enforcement team — the very part of the system concerned with collecting the consequences of a decision — had been the first to help me trace its origins.
There is an irony there that even Shakespeare might have appreciated.
I had spent the morning looking for the beginning of a legal process.It was the people dealing with its ending who could point me backwards.
Act V: The Law’s Delay
By nearly 2pm, I was mentally exhausted.
On paper, I had spent only a few hours making telephone calls.
In practice, those hours had involved repeated explanations, uncertain departmental boundaries, long periods of forced attention and the constant possibility that each call would lead nowhere.
I had begun with a simple question: where are the records relating to this conviction?Several hours later, I had two account references and a possible route to obtaining them.
That might sound like modest progress.To me, it felt like winning a small battle.
I couldn’t face another call that afternoon.Later that evening, I watched a documentary about Shakespeare and the many actors and directors who have interpreted his plays over the twentieth century.
There was discussion of Macbeth, among other works, and it reminded me of a line I’d encountered in Hamlet.In the famous “To be, or not to be” speech, Hamlet lists some of the burdens people endure:
“The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office…”
The law’s delay.
There it was.
Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare was already describing the frustration of waiting for legal processes to deliver something resembling resolution.
Of course, he wasn’t talking about call centres or automated menus.
But the underlying experience seems surprisingly familiar.
The difficulty of obtaining answers. The distance between an individual and an institution. The feeling that the machinery of justice moves according to a timetable entirely unrelated to the urgency of the person caught inside it.
I had been thinking about the legal system as an engineer.On Monday, I found myself thinking about it as a playwright might.
A succession of characters entered the scene. Each knew something, but nobody appeared to know the whole story. Each directed me towards another character. The audience — in this case, me — waited for the plot to advance.
The difficulty was that I wasn’t watching a play.I was trying to find out why my driving licence had been revoked.An Unexpected Lesson
If anyone reading this is trying to trace an old magistrates’ court matter, particularly one that has reached the stage of enforcement, Monday taught me something worth sharing.
The court enforcement team may be able to identify historical matters that are difficult to locate through general enquiries.
That won’t necessarily be true in every case, and enforcement account numbers aren’t substitutes for the original court records.
But if a matter has been referred for enforcement, it’s worth asking whether the enforcement team can provide references, identify the originating court and explain how to trace the underlying proceedings.
In my case, it was the first genuinely productive route I found.I still have questions about the MS90 conviction, the notices that may have been issued, the addresses used and the consequences for my driving licence.
I don’t yet know whether the explanation is an administrative mistake, an incorrectly attributed allegation, a failure of communication or something else.I intend to find out.
And I intend to document the process, because somebody else may one day find themselves in the same position, facing the same telephone menus and wondering where to begin.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of Monday wasn’t that nobody wanted to help.
The people I eventually spoke to generally did try to help.
It was that the information appeared to be divided between systems, with no obvious route for an ordinary person to discover which one held the answer.
A system can contain the information you need and still make that information extraordinarily difficult to obtain.
Shakespeare understood the law’s delay.
I wonder what he would have made of the hold music.
To be continued.
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