14 July 2016, 6 pm
I have found gin. It just so happens – and honest I had nothing to do with the choice of venue – that the terribly terribly posh hotel where the Gala Dinner is being held has a terribly terribly good bar with a terribly terribly fantastic plurality of gins. It has terribly terribly expensive prices too, but this is not my problem because I am meeting the Pee and he is buying the drinks. I pick a gin called Monkey 47 and it is so nice I drink it neat with nothing more than some ice and a slice of orange, and then spend forty minutes trying to make a lone bottle of tonic look sophisticated. The Pee also looks like he needs a drink. He has not been able to go on holiday recently and he is fed up of Brexit impinging on his Presidency. It was supposed to be a quiet Presidency, of the type euphemistically referred to as a Period of Consolidation, in which Mr Davies had instructed everyone to leave him alone while he swept up after me. Brexit has put paid to that. After the gin, I feel up to swanning around being Immediate-Past-Presidential in my pleated corpse. It is genuinely lovely to see so many familiar faces gathered together, even if I can’t remember all of their names. It is also genuinely reassuring to see that Mr Davies is dressed. I do lots of pretending to be sociable, and other people pretend to be sociable back. I tone down my usual ribaldry in case one of the can’t-remember-whos turns out to be a High Court judge or something. I see that I am the only patent attorneyette wearing a pleated corpse. In fashion terms this is a Good Thing, because believe me there is nothing worse for a lady than turning up in the same frock as somebody else and realising you are wearing yours the wrong way round.
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14 July 2016, 4 pm
My posh frock has been following me round all day in a suit carrier, and looks bedraggled. I decide that my hotel is not the type that will lend me an iron and so the best way to deal with the creases is to lie down heavily on the frock like a kind of human trouser press. I am quite pleased with the result, which is that I fall asleep for half an hour and wake to find that the frock has been pleated into the shape of a corpse. So now it is time to put on the pleated corpse and pretend to be sociable. For this I need gin. But the hotel does not look like the type that will lend me a minibar either. Unlucky Gary was under strict instructions to keep the cost down and I am just grateful he remembered to book me a bedroom as well as a wardrobe. 14 July 2016, 3 pm
Unlucky Gary points out that while I have been busy enjoying not being at CIPA so much, the Gold Leaf Man has visited. He came in the dead of night, waved his magic wand around, nicked some of the committee meeting biscuits (or perhaps that was someone else), and then – hey presto! – my name was there on the list of Past Presidents in CIPA Hall. Immortalised, that’s what I am. In the annals (yes, annals) of CIPA history, unpleasant though that sounds. Our Institute will never be able to forget that for one terrible year – which to Mr Davies seemed like three – it found itself in the hands of a madwoman. I am proud as punch. I had thought that even if they could bring themselves to add my name to the list, they might well have put it in brackets or something, or added an asterisk and an explanation at the end. But of course there was no explanation: no one at CIPA, not even Mr Davies or the current Pee, can think quite how it happened. First there was some straw on the floor, then the Red Bull® fumes, then before they knew it task forces started popping up everywhere (da-da-da-DA!!), and suddenly they had a biscuit-pilfering, rubbish-talking, boundlessly-but-unjustifiably optimistic VeePee hurtling towards them. I suspect many on Council were caught off guard in the same way that we were when the UK voted for Brexit. I like being immortalised. But it is probably not something you want to do more than once in your career. 14 July 2016, 1.30 pm
I am drafted in to chair a meeting of the IP Administrators’ Committee. The real Chair has a migraine, and was in such pain that she didn’t even see the danger of asking me to look after her committee for her. Luckily it is a small meeting and I am able to defer most of the agenda items until after the migraine is over. Part of the meeting is about our Administrators’ Conference, scheduled to coincide with the Big CIPA Congress in September. Amazing Dwaine reports that delegate numbers have already exceeded those for the Big CIPA event. Mr Davies is so jealous that he leaves the meeting in a huff to buy a new shirt. For tonight is the night of the Grand Gala Dinner to celebrate the 125th anniversary of CIPA’s Royal Charter, and it is decreed in the stars that this shall be a Black Tie Occasion and although Mr Davies has been planning it for months, and was indeed its perpetrator, it has only just this afternoon occurred to him that he needs to be dressed when he arrives. 11 July 2016
Some EPO people phone me, to talk about recruitment into the IP professions. I tell them about IP Inclusive, which has spawned another brand name Careers in Ideas to raise awareness of jobs in IP. I tell them we would like to include information about becoming an EPO examiner, since this is also a Career in Ideas even if you do spend most of your time denouncing those ideas for lack of inventive step. I do not tell them about the poster that is being redesigned by patent attorneys, not yet anyway. The EPO people say: This is great! We are keen to recruit more examiners. We are particularly keen to recruit English examiners. We will even teach the English examiners a third language for free, and help them learn their second language properly, also for free, if it encourages them to join us. Although they would never admit it, I suspect the EPO have ever such a slight bias towards the English language, due to most of their international customers – not to mention most of what you can find on Google® – using it. They tell me how lovely it is being an EPO examiner, and what a good employer the EPO is, with an equal opportunities policy and a keen interest in diversity and inclusivity. Everyone politely skirts around the fact that EPO employees have been striking for months, that they spend their generous lunch breaks sabotaging their own President’s bicyclette, and that all of them nurture a probably not unconscious bias against Frenchmen with Italian-sounding surnames. 6 July 2016
I dial in to the July Council meeting. I am absolutely not following the tennis at the same time. No, genuinely: I am not. Because BT have just upgraded us to their new, superfast, obviously more expensive, broadband supply. And as a result we have no broadband at all, superfast or not. The BT engineer suggests we purchase a booster to help the BT hub shout louder at the computer in the next room. Might I suggest that BT purchase a booster so that the signal reaching the hub is more than a pathetic whisper? 5 July 2016, 2 pm
The Pee and I, with Mr Davies for moral support, meet the committee chairs. We ask them what they are up to these days. They say: Mainly we are up to worrying about Brexit. We show them the CIPA Strategic Plan which sets out CIPA’s priorities for the next three years. They are unimpressed. Objectives and Priorities and Road Maps and even Ms Sear’s Learning Outcomes, if written pre-referendum, are fundamentally useless now. All that any of us are going to do for the next three years is worry about Brexit. It is an excellent way of getting out of stuff that you were beginning to wish you’d never set as an objective. I must remember that. 5 July 2016, 10 am
I am chairing a Plenary Meeting of the diversity task force (da-da-da-DA!!). One of the attendees has expressed excitement at the chance to attend his first ever Plenary Meeting. But actually, a Plenary Meeting is not that exciting: it is just like any other meeting except with a longer list of apologies. In the meeting, we decide what we are going to do next to promote diversity. We do not decide which of us is going to do it, because everyone is too busy doing things like attending plenary meetings. This is a pain, but unavoidable in the modern world. It will not stop me creating some decent-looking minutes which make it seem as though the task force is still gamely tackling the injustices of the IP world. We also look at a poster which we have had designed, for the purpose of promoting careers in IP to schoolchildren and teachers and careers advisers. It has been created by professional designers and before they created it they talked to lots of schoolchildren and teachers and careers advisers and drew on their wealth of experience in designing similar such things for other people. But we are not going to let them off without a fight. It is not masculine enough, say some. It is not techy enough, say others. The writing is too big. Or too small. There is not enough space between the words. The logo is wrong. Various people add helpful suggestions as to how the professionally-designed design could be tweaked, supplemented or indeed completely redrawn. I sense a camel emerging from a committee and it is not going to happen on my watch. We will go with this one, I say. It having been professionally designed and all, on the basis of consultations with our intended audience. On whose wavelength the average IP professional is not. And we will see what kind of feedback we get. And then we can think about redesigning if necessary. Because I say so. I try to look fierce. But it doesn’t come off very well through my new varifocals. I do not point out the irony of wanting to redesign the poster to make it appeal to the people we already have in the IP professions, when what we are trying to do is bring in a more diverse pool of recruits. Subtlety has no place in a Plenary Meeting. 2 July 2016
It is my turn to take the wheelchair and the anorak out. We go into the village, to let my mother talk to passing strangers and look at colourful things in shop windows. She tells the passing strangers a whole load of tosh but she formats it as memories, which is confusing for all concerned. Especially when the memories putatively involve me, along with various offspring I have never had, jobs I have never done and places I have never been to in my life. My mother is good at concocting these types of memories because she benefits from selectively blocked input channels (ie she does not listen and she will not wear her glasses); completely unfiltered output channels; and in between them a CPU made up of random thought generators and soup. She has always been like this, but now she has a lifetime’s worth of selectively blocked inputs floating around looking for random connections, and it is only because she is old that she doesn’t get knocked into the middle of next week for it. 30 June 2016, 5 pm
The son returns with the wheelchair. Also with Grandma and her anorak. Suspiciously, the wheelchair is covered in sand. It turns out he did not think of the beach as “off-road”. He says the wheelchair didn’t work properly on the beach. So Grandma had to get out and walk. Super. |
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