10 July 2015, 10 am
I am on the phone to the UK’s IP attaché in China. An IP attaché is a person, not an item of luggage, and in this case he is the fantastic Mr Tom Duke, so I am more than happy to spend my morning talking to him about how the IPO and CIPA can work together to strengthen Anglo-Chinese relations. I say, We must make sure it is the Brits who get the Chinese-originating EPC work, not the Germans. Mr Duke says Absolutely, but there are certain diplomatic protocols and I am here to make sure we don’t end up going to war again. He tells me and some other CIPA folk about a trade delegation that is going to China next week. Apparently I am to write a letter to my counterpart over there, ie to the Pee of the Chinese equivalent of CIPA. But someone else is going to write the letter for me because it is easy to offend people from other countries when you write like I do. Mr Duke does not want to take any risks. 10 July 2015, 12.30 pm Right now, I am supposed to be at a lunch for the President of the IP Federation. But I have bottled out of travelling to London. The UK’s rail network, which we have established is not run by either red people or green people, has organised a strike in order to reduce its usual services by half. Since the trains normally have only half the number of seats for the people who want to sit on them, I figure that if there are only half the number of trains, that’s, er, well, a lot fewer seats to go round. Even for a lunch that has a reputation for being a thumping good event and one that you would not normally want to miss for the world, there are some types of commute I would rather not indulge in. On the plus side, because I am at home I get to watch Andy Murray, live, in yet another of his Wimbledon triumphs. Which is also only half what I would have liked it to be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
July 2019
Categories |