30 November 2016, 11 am
What better way to spend a bright, sunny, frosty morning than staring into the frosty faces of a room full of marketing managers and trying to make them laugh with my feeble attempts at making fun of the patent profession? I can tell the marketing managers are themselves thinking there must be better ways of spending the morning. I am the warm-up act. This was Mr Lampert’s idea. He thought it would be fun if I kicked off today’s meetings – which are centred on the “Promoting the UK IP professions abroad” initiative – with a light-hearted look at how it began. I tell them the truth. Then I tell them the key messages we came up with about how brilliant the UK’s IP professionals are. Which is also the truth, although it is the truth as written in my Secret Diary the day after the first round-table meeting, and sometimes the truth in my Secret Diary has an ever-so-subtle Andrea slant on it. The audience is wondering who allowed this clown to take the stage and how dare she make fun of the patent profession’s lack of self-awareness. The current VeePee, Mr Jones, stands up after me and he finds it hard to mask his own bewilderment. I don’t know what to say about Andrea, he begins. For this read: I know exactly what to say about Andrea but it would be unprofessional to say it in public; come talk to me over lunch and I will gladly elaborate. It seems churlish to point out that it is only thanks to this clown that the IP professions got together in the first place to talk about a combined approach to promoting themselves abroad. That was in November 2015, and in view of the Brexit debacle and the uncertainty over the UPC, we are going to be mightily glad we have something to say for ourselves when we visit foreign lands. So I know exactly what I would say about Andrea which is that at least she Gets Things Done. Still, I think you are supposed to Get Things Done in a slightly more dignified fashion and I concede that the mode of my arrival onto the CIPA scene, not to mention my subsequent period of office, was ever-so-slightly Trump-esque.
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