3 June 2015, 2.30 pm
It is time to man up and chair my first Council meeting. How hard can this be? I think to myself, as I sit chewing my nails in a corner of the CIPA stationery cupboard. I have chaired task forces and committee meetings and countless meet-the-members’-biscuits events. I have presided over family mealtimes, for heaven’s sake: surely it cannot be that bad? So I take a deep breath, and in I go. When you chair a meeting you have to strike a difficult balance between allowing everyone to be heard and getting stuff done. True to form, I succeed in doing neither. In my defence, if you allow everyone to be heard when the “everyone” is 26 cantankerous patent attorneys, you might as well bring a camp-bed into the meeting room and stay for a week. When I get a spare moment between agenda items, I glance round the room. Some people look bored. Some look cross. Some look like they are checking their emails. Some of them have drawn breath and are about to speak; they are mostly the ones who have just finished speaking on the previous item. Several are talking amongst themselves. I glare at all these people. They glare back. I take this to mean that there has been some form of procedural impropriety, and that I have caused it. On the plus side, we finish bang on 5 pm, and I only have to use the ceremonial gavel three times, one of which is to wake myself up. And it was not entirely unproductive, this meeting. For instance, we have decided: · That the three year strategic plan will last us three years, which it was designed for, so we will not need to waste any time doing a Not-a-Council-meeting with flip charts and balloons this summer. (Shame!) · That if the UK comes out of the EU, there will be gloom and doom for ever more. · And that this is outrageous. · But that we must think very carefully before admitting as much to the outside world, and in the meantime the committees will give some thought to quantifying the gloom and doom so that when we formulate a CIPA policy on the subject, it will be unassailably accurate. · That various other terribly tedious things are OK not to talk about. · That various other potentially tedious things are also OK not to talk about because nobody has read the relevant papers. · That we will all meet for drinks at the Seven Stars afterwards. I do not go to the Seven Stars. I think perhaps the others will want to talk crossly to one another about my abysmal chairing, and I would rather not hear them doing it.
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