2 November 2016, 10.30 am
I arrive late for my first meeting, due to having shopped for my tea on the way in. My tea is going to be six packets of Hotel Chocolat® goodies, and a plastic pot of well-disciplined, accurately chopped fruit from my favourite self-service check-out. The New Reconstructed Me is taking life a little easier these days, and rather than getting up half an hour earlier in order to make time to buy human essentials (ie chocolate), I am arriving at meetings half an hour later. The committee whose meeting I attend half of is the Congress Steering Committee. This noble group did a fine job of steering the 2016 Congress into port without me, while I was malingering at home surrounded by flowers. Therefore I do not think they really need me around to help steer the 2017 Congress. Judging by the looks I get when I enter the room, this thought is widely shared. Mr Davies looks as if he’s seen a ghost. Having been away from CIPA for a while, I have resolved that in my first few meetings I will shut up and listen and try to work out what’s been going on in my absence. But I have never been good at shutting up and listening, and nor am I accustomed to knowing what’s going on. So within a few minutes of arrival I blurt out an absolutely stunning idea for a theme for next year’s Congress. There are polite sniggers. The committee has already come up with this theme for itself, thank you. Which justifies the earlier thought about not needing me around any more. For the avoidance of doubt, the theme for the 2017 CIPA Congress is going to be to remind people that the UK exists and that it still does intellectual property. IP is in fact possibly the only facet of international trade in which a post-Brexit UK stands a fighting chance of success. This is because since the dawn of time we have been carefully building relationships with our international counterparts and explaining to them how much better the UK’s IP laws are than anybody else’s. And also because everybody in IP is a little bit stand-offish anyway, so being out of the EU is not going to look unduly unsociable in a room full of patent attorneys.
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