14 July 2015
The Onssek, Mr Mercer, picks me up from Oxford station and we go for a drive round the Oxford Science Park. Of course we are not supposed to be driving round the park, we are supposed to be going to meetings on it. But we are not getting on very well with Mr Mercer’s satnav. It is of Germanic construction and it is rather dictatorial. Disobedience is not an option. Dithering gets short shrift. When we are ten minutes late we finally take charge of our own destinies, and ring up the folk we are meant to be visiting. Only to find that we are in fact right outside their front door. People should label their front doors better. 15 July 2015, 7 pm Yesterday and today, the Onssek and I have visited CIPA members in six different firms. Some of them say they do not need CIPA. Some of them say they do need CIPA, but CIPA needs to get its finger out, for instance over being too much in London or not being rude enough to IPReg, or not making sure that the whole wide world understands how brilliant chartered patent attorneys are. Most people, though, are just content to let CIPA get on with Good Stuff behind the scenes. They do not really know what this Good Stuff is; they are just happy someone else is doing it. They understand vaguely that the Good Stuff is related to what Mr Lampert writes about in his whizzy e-newsletter and Mr Davies writes about in the Journal. They are not sure it is particularly related to me, though they are prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt because I’ve made the effort to venture into the wilderness to visit them, and no one in the history of the Institute has done that before. Personally, I am unconvinced that Oxfordshire is a wilderness. The journey from here to London is not much longer than the journey from my home in the Wess Curntry to the nearest place in the Wess Curntry where there is an actual functioning cash point. I am staying the night with friends in the wilderness in Berkshire. I am not convinced that Berkshire is a wilderness either, although the inhabitants of the village in question are doing their best to pretend it is, by installing chickens and pigs and duck ponds. I think it is cheating to install chickens and pigs and duck ponds without also installing farmers and track’urs and kerb-to-kerb cow pats. And the charade breaks down completely when the Waitrose® home delivery van turns up with emergency supplies of baby shallots to eat with your recently-installed chickens. My friends are impressed by the fact that I am a President of something. They ask if I have a Presidential escort and should they have rolled out the red carpet for me? I say, really, it’s not that big a deal. I might be a big fish, I say, but in a very, very small pond. Kind of like that duck pond over there, next to the pigs and the Waitrose van.
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