1 September 2015
Dere CIPA, This is my Mum writing, to you to say that I cannot come in to the meeting’s in London today becuas I am to grumpy. someone have complaynd that I am bein to freindly with iPReg and that is not rite becuas Counsel dus’nt want me to be frendly with IPREG and i am only their to do what counsel sais I shud and not to do my own adjenda and stuff!! And my Mum, sais that is unfare becuas otherwighs how am I supost to be In Chahj of the Instagram or am i not in Chahj afterorl and if so plees cud someone giv me my life back. As its a long way, to go to lunnden and I wud of had to got up at 5.a.m. in the Morning witch, is two urly wen you are grumpy!! she sed i am not too go there and I am to stay and do sum sunbayvin wereby it is better that way and I can get less grumpy If you have a problem with this you shud contact the Under Sind, who is my mum and she ses she wil sort you out. Yours Respectfuly ex-seterah, Mrs Brewster (Mrs)
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31 August 2015
I make good use of the final day of summer, which has been blessed with a bank holiday and the weather to match, by recording and posting my second YouTube® video. Now I am doubly famous. This video is about how wonderful it is to be a patent attorney and how diverse and welcoming our profession is if you are brave and assertive enough to join it. My youngest son helps me record the video and my eldest daughter helps me locate and transfer the resulting electronic file before Windows® 10 can take care of it for me. We use a process called AirDrop. This is basically like holding your tablet above your laptop and blowing on it, so that all the files drop out and land on the laptop hard drive. When the file lands, I realise that I look as sleep-deprived on this video as on the one we recorded last Wednesday. I am steadfastly eyeballing the point at which, being used to old-fashioned cameras, I expected the tablet’s camera to be. It was not. Therefore I appear both sleep-deprived and shifty. I fear this may dilute the message I am trying to convey, ie that I have The Best Career Ever In The World. This video does not go viral either. 30 August 2015
It is a wet and boring bank holiday weekend. The supposedly maternal part of the household, ie me, is busy doing CIPA-related work, ie emails to Mr Davies. My eleven-year-old son announces that he is going to cook tea today. This means, basically, that I am going to cook tea today but it is going to take twice as long. In the mind of an eleven-year-old, cooking tea is a fairly straightforward process. You begin by picking dishes from an old book of frighteningly complicated tapas recipes, because that will vex your parents. Then you reach for the largest, scariest knife in the kitchen, a whole garlic bulb and what must surely be an explosive combination of herbs and spices, and you wait for the grown-ups to swoop down and take over the dangerous bits while you do the stirring. Once you start cooking, however – and I use the term loosely – the recipe book is something you only look at after you have exhausted your other main source of information, which is the grown-ups, who, to be fair, are easily exhausted. And a grown-up is someone you only ask after you have already done something irreversible, like breaking an egg into a bowl of salad. Washing up is something you allow grown-ups to do in order to reduce their anxiety, as is wiping food preparation surfaces, opening tins and slicing the parts of an onion closest to your fingernails. You also need to know about bowls. Bowls come in a range of sizes, but mostly are too small for the stuff you put in them and this too is something you only find out once you have already done something irreversible, like emptying a pan of liquid into the bowl that is too small for it. So generally you should ask a grown-up what size of bowl to use, although only after you have used three others. Other things you can ask grown-ups include When shall I put the meat in? Where do we keep the Diced Carrots? And Should I have taken the skin off? Timing is something you don’t need to worry about, because as everyone knows, the meal will be ready at tea-time. So there is no need to read the bits in the recipe that say “allow to stand overnight” or “simmer for 2 hours”, much less the references to pre-prepared things, which it is the grown-ups’ responsibility to have pre-prepared anyway. Finally, wine is what the grown-ups use to help them concentrate but you are not allowed to put it in the cooking yourself. The earlier you start on the fingernail chopping and egg-breaking, the earlier the grown-ups need to start on the Concentration Juice. When they start putting the Concentration Juice in the washing up water, you need to find an older sibling who can walk you to the fish and chip shop, and stay there until the kitchen has been refurbished. 26 August 2015, 3 pm
We record a video. The star of the video is me. In the video I am asking people to please take some notice of the Bye-laws review and not regard it as boring old procedural stuff. In this way we are hoping to elicit excitement and delight in the opportunity to help reshape CIPA’s structure and functions. The video goes on YouTube®, which I guess makes me famous, in a way. But I am horrified to realise how much it shows on camera if you have been missing out on sleep and are trying to manage on only one can of Red Bull® a day. I guess that teaches me to try to do anything important during the afternoon nap period. The video does not go viral. 26 August 2015, noon
Now we are meeting with the top bods from IPReg and ITMA. We are very nice to the IPReg bods and they are very nice to us. We share lunch. Although we have our own plastic cutlery, obviously. I am chairing. I wield the ceremonial gavel and my plastic cutlery in my usual statesmanlike manner, and I do not let anyone start on their lunch until we have made some of the difficult decisions. I also insist that they eat their main courses before the biscuits. But I do not need to wield the ceremonial mallet, and I take this as a Good Sign. We talk in a nice grown-up way about how we can disagree with one another over regulatory matters without people needing to throw their Royal Charters (all hail!) and their regulatory toolkits out of the pram. It seems there is a Proper Procedure for this and apparently it does not involve the word “plonker” at all, which on one level is disappointing but on another is reassuring because I would not want to over-use the word “plonker” and there are plenty of other situations in which it is more needed. At the end of the meeting we wipe our fingers on our paper napkins and shake hands and it is all most cordial. And because I am there, as ever, as the Token Ingénue, I begin to think that perhaps the world is a decent place after all, even without a Presidential tractor or anything resembling a pittance of a salary. As usual, I probably haven’t a clue what’s going on. 26 August 2015, 11 am
The VeePee, the Chief Eggsek and I are talking about how to make the role of CIPA President more manageable; at the moment it seems time-consuming to say the least, possibly even life-consuming. Otherwise there may come a time when the only people we can get to be Pee are those who have nothing better to do, and someone who has nothing better to do than be the CIPA Pee is inherently a little bit suspect. But perhaps the job does not need to be as onerous as I make out. Perhaps if I were more efficient, and spent less time faffing, I would be able to fit it into two days a week instead of 5½. Perhaps I could send fewer emails. Perhaps I could stop saying yes to things. Perhaps I could refrain from meddling in stuff other people are doing. Perhaps I could just stay at home more. There are some things that would certainly make the President’s life easier:
These are of course in my dreams. And I have strange dreams, particularly since I became Pee. 25 August 2015
My inbox is indeed full to overflowing. I spend most of the day working my way through about half of what’s in there and adding things to my to-do list in response. I have to add them to next year as this year is too full. Part-way through the day, I attend a lunch for retired CIPA members. We are thinking of setting up a retired members’ network and this initial sandwich-fest is intended to gauge enthusiasm and garner ideas. There are not many people there, as most retired members are quite rightly on holiday most of the time. But the retired members who are there look very well on their retirement and they offer to help with CIPA things, like invigilating and mentoring and lecturing. When they are around, that is. Actually, in view of the amount they go on holiday, they may as well help with international liaison as well. I tell them I have a specific project for them, which is to write up their memoirs before we all forget what CIPA used to be like in The Good Old Days. Next year it will be the 125th anniversary of our Royal Charter (all hail!) and I would like to publish a book of anecdotes and photographs and interesting facts to mark the occasion. Like, what was it really like to be self-regulating? And, who decided to let women in? Who designed the Presidential swimming gala medal? Why is there a ceremonial mallet? One of the retirees remembers being on a CIPA float one year, in some kind of parade, and that he was dressed as a fire extinguisher. Nobody’s memory is good enough to counter this outrageous allegation – and the implication it carries that CIPA members have in the past knowingly engaged in undignified floating, in unseemly apparel to boot – so he is charged with going away and finding some evidence. A used fire extinguisher costume, for instance. |
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