3 January 2018, 10 am
And so Christmas is over, and it is back to CIPA for the First Wednesday of the Month meeting-fest. Everybody thought the President would postpone today’s Council meeting until next week, when people would have just about got over their New Year’s hangovers, but the current President is made of stronger stuff and he does not tolerate slacking. Other than the Christmas tree, which no one can yet face removing, there is a distinctly unfestive air at CIPA HQ. This suits me just fine. I did not feel that festive before Christmas either, even the day I somewhat daringly wore my Christmas Jumper to a Council meeting. Mr Davies adds to the sense of solemnity by warning that the tree had better not still be up the next time he comes into the office or there will be Trouble. It is a hollow threat. There is always Trouble when Mr Davies is in the office.
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13 December 2017
What I am feeling miserable about today is the IP Inclusive Annual Report. This too is getting increasingly terse, especially when my companion the hot water bottle goes cold. It is not really an Annual Report because we have never done one before, either last year or the year before or the year before that. But the others have told me to go away and write one because they thought it would keep me off their backs for a while. It is also so that IP Inclusive can be more Transparent. Instead of being run by a Ruthless Dictator who does not tell people what she is getting up to during her evenings and weekends. I am beginning to realise that the more time and energy you put into organising stuff during the year, the more time and energy you are going to have to put into writing about it in the Annual Report. Therefore, it would actually have been much better if I had done very little during 2017, because then I could write a really short report and still have time to help decorate the Christmas tree. I resolve not to do anything at all during 2018. Then I write a short Annual Report for 2017 saying that although lots of stuff happened, we do not have any details because the Pixies did it all. Possibly my hot water bottle needs topping up again. Happy Christmas everyone. Humbug! 12 December 2017
I have a bad back. I am hunched over the keyboard feeling sorry for myself. My emails are getting increasingly terse. When someone wrote to suggest he wanted to float his latest piece of spam to the top of my inbox, I nearly wrote back telling him what else tends to float to the top and to go spend more time with it. I checked myself in time, and instead sank the offending email to the bottom of the recycling bin. Quite how it can be recycled I am not sure, but I am guessing Microsoft will think of something. They have plenty of platforms for rubbish. I check out the NHS website to see what serious and potentially fatal illnesses my bad back might augur. But the NHS take a robust stance on back pain and essentially tell me to go away and stop being silly. Pretty much everyone suffers from back pain and pretty much nobody knows why. It is pretty much never caused by anything serious – unless you count the failure of the body’s central support structure as serious – and it pretty much always goes away if you leave it a few weeks. No you should not bother your GP about it and no you should not go to A&E. Unless of course the back pain is associated with other more worrying symptoms, such as for example being unable to breathe. Paracetamol it is then. 6 December 2017, 5.30 pm
The meeting has been going on a long time. There was lots to discuss although I forget now what most of it was. Brexit and Bye-laws and regulation and the strategic plan; the usual stuff. The President tries to be upbeat about the lengthy discussions by referring to ideas positively “crackling” around the room, but he is not fooling anyone. We are not crackling. We are wilting. My Christmas jumper is looking forward to Twelfth Night already. There is a Christmas happy hour after the meeting. Mr Davies and I take a detour via an associations bash which he has assured me is a great party, because he has a mad plan that he can get rid of me to another association in order to make things more efficient at CIPA. But the great party is dark and hot and noisy and crowded. My Christmas jumper proves to be inappropriate attire. I am hungry, but it is the type of event where platefuls of snacks float past you at random moments, and if you are not quick enough they float on by, leaving you feeling even more hungry and also left out. And I only have Mr Davies to talk to, and Mr Davies is looking miserable. Also there is not much gin on offer, which turns out to be a bit of a problem. Once the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent, and Mr Davies has given up trying to introduce me to anyone on account of they have all been quicker at getting away than even the floating snacks, we head back to the CIPA happy hour after all. The CIPA happy hour has already been going on for longer than an hour, and it goes on for far more than an hour after we arrive. There is gin by the gallon. Several people collaborate to ensure I am never more than half-way down one glass before the next one arrives, which I think is very solicitous of them. Then they ask my views on things and enjoy the spectacle of me trying to string answers together. I console myself with the fact that the questions are not particularly well strung together either. It is great fun being back with the CIPA staff and I enjoy myself immensely, even though there is still nothing to eat. The Christmas jumper comes off for good. There is even a little light festive dancing. I hope no one remembers it afterwards. If they do, I will say it was the Pixies. 6 December 2017, 2.30 pm
For today’s Council meeting, I take a risk and wear my Christmas jumper. There was a time when this would have provoked outrage from my sober-suited colleagues, but it is a measure of how quickly a Past President can disappear into obscurity that today, nobody even notices. These days they have enough on their hands with the VeePee’s pink-and-purple fetish. The new IPReg Chief Eggsek is here as our Special Guest. This is not a privilege. Not even when certain Council members put on their best festive clothing for the occasion. She looks uncomfortable. We do not help by making her wait outside until we are ready to call her in – because you cannot have outsiders listening in on sensitive Council business such as Apologies for Absence. Our Special Guest has brought a presentation with her. Ms Russell, who was last year given the role of Mr Davies’s PA (this is also not a privilege) has loaded the presentation onto the CIPA IT system so that it displays nicely on the screen at the head of the table. We ignore it. Instead we fire random questions at our guest, to try to catch her out. It is excellent sport and results in a far more festive atmosphere than my jumper was able to engender. Every now and then she wearily moves on to the next slide, but not with any expectation of talking about it because we are already poised with our next set of questions. Many of these questions are what might loosely be termed “rhetorical”. They begin, for example, “Yes, but what you have to understand about our profession is…” After half an hour or so, our guest understands quite a lot more about our profession than when she first arrived. But it is not necessarily the things we thought she should understand. Following the departure of our Special Victim I mean Guest, we turn our attention to a most important decision. We must approve the renaming of the IP Exploitation Committee. There has been a feeling (sorry, no, a rational belief) that the term “exploitation” has negative connotations. It might imply that we are cynically manipulating our IP in order to make other people’s lives hell. And as everybody knows, there is nothing at all cynical or manipulative about an IP strategy. No sir, IP is All About Altruism. The identification of an alternative name apparently caused the Exploitation Committee a great deal of anguish. This I can believe. But at last it has decided to become the IP Commercialisation Committee, or Comm Comm for short, and Council is happy to approve this alliterative alternative once it has had a good long look at all the supporting evidence, in particular the Wikipedia® definition of “commercialisation”. This is all the fault of the Meeja and PeeArr Committee, which is very sensitive about sending out the wrong messages, particularly after Yours Truly was the President and sent out the wrong messages pretty much everywhere she went. The Meeja and PeeArr Committee has itself been renamed once – when CIPA suddenly twigged that there were other types of Meeja, not just the Press – so it has scant sympathy with other committees going through the process. I remember when the Regulatory Responses Committee became the Regulatory Affairs Committee and everyone thought it would thenceforth be much more exciting and derring-do. In fact nothing changed at all, and I suspect the same will happen with the Comm Comm. 5 December 2017
I chair a webinar on mental health. The speaker is from LawCare, a charity that supports legal professionals who have had enough. LawCare runs a helpline, and in theory this helpline is available to CIPA members too, only word has been slow to get out and patent attorneys who have had enough are still often told to man up, stop snivelling and make sure not to miss that further processing deadline. Together, the speaker and I try to tell our listeners that it is OK to suffer from mental health problems, really it is. But it is better if you can avoid doing so, by keeping a sense of perspective about your work/life balance. Just because you have bucket-loads of stuff on your to-do list does not mean you should stop exercising, going outside, seeing your friends, eating or other basic functions. If you choose to stop sleeping in order to make more time to check emails, for example, you have lost your sense of perspective. If you choose to stop showering so as to stay at work longer, you have also probably lost your sense of smell. If this happens, you must forthwith set up an out-of-office message saying: “Go away. I am sleeping/showering and will not have access to emails until I wake up/dry out.” At the end of the webinar, I ask the audience to send in their questions. But the IT system will not let me see their questions, so I have to make up some of my own. I ask: How do you know when someone is suffering from stress or mental illness? I am aware, you see, that not everybody weeps and throws stuff around like I do when they are stressed; some of them just quietly hide the office actions in a drawer and pretend that everything is fine, until one day they simply do not come to work and you discover the office actions along with the lunches they stopped having time to eat. The speaker says I have a good voice for asking daft questions. She says I ought to have my own radio show. But I cannot think The Andrea Brewster Show would have a huge audience. I know very little about even less, and that is not usually enough. Following the webinar, I narrowly miss going for just one drink with Mr Davies. Which definitely makes it easier to keep a sense of perspective. Instead, mindful of my work/life balance, I return home to attend our local “Festive Night” with the family. On Festive Night both of the charity shops stay open late and the church sets up a stall selling mulled communion wine, or at least that is what I assume it is. All 100 metres of the high street are closed to traffic for two hours, to allow throngs of festive and piously-mulled pedestrians to navigate their way between the charity shops. It is quite an occasion. My son has brought a friend with him. Both are overwhelmed by the underwhelmingness of it all. They share a can of fizzy drink and a limp festive burger, but they decline to visit Father Christmas and at thirteen years old, I cannot say I blame them. Father Christmas has established his grotto in a corner of the village beauty parlour and is now surrounded by a bevy of well-manicured tinsel-festooned helpers. Someone is handing him cupfuls of mulled communion wine. He looks as though he lost his sense of perspective several hours ago but is not particularly mourning its passing. 1 December 2017
As advent begins, I join a telecon about a Chinese New Year celebration. This will be IP & ME’s first event and it will help white Caucasian IP professionals understand why it is good to work with Foreign People occasionally too. There will be Chinese-themed refreshments and Chinese-themed decorations, and a massive, massive Chinese dragon, and fortune cookies with IP-themed messages inside, such as “This year you will get many patents granted” or – perhaps more realistically – “You will see great uncertainty about the UPC”. A nice firm of lawyers has kindly agreed to host the event, but we have not yet broken the news to them about the massive, massive Chinese dragon and the fortune cookies. 29 November 2017
Over a hot chocolate (hers) and an orange juice (mine), I meet the new IPReg Chief Eggsek for a nice little chat. She is very friendly. She knows I am only the EyeEyePeePee now and that even Mr Davies has stopped worrying about the amount of trouble I can cause. She is, however, quite interested in my wicked plan to gather benchmarking data about diversity in the IP professions. She says that diversity is not her highest priority at the moment, there being other important things to do such as regulating patent and trade mark attorneys and keeping a Register thereof. So she is more than happy to let IP Inclusive get on with the namby-pamby stuff instead. If I want to gather diversity data, wickedly or unwickedly, I am welcome to get on with it. After the orange juice, I have lunch with an old college friend, and then hot-foot it to a namby-pamby IP Inclusive workshop. The workshop is about the business case for diversity. In other words, it is supposed to establish that diversity is not namby-pamby at all, but crucial to economic success. There are many arguments in favour of this view, and our speakers put them across well. All I have to do is act as though none of this would have happened without me (the event I mean, not the economics). It is a role I am accustomed to playing. The workshop is what you might call an intimate gathering, due to the non-attendance of a lot of the people who had registered. But it is extremely productive, as are most meetings with fewer people than you had initially feared. There are elevator pitches, guided group discussions, flip charts and plenary sessions: all the accoutrements, in other words, of a damned fine conference. At the end there are some excellent ideas on the flip charts, which I photograph so as to turn them into something useful later. There is of course no guarantee that this will work, but I will give it a go. The “drinks and networking” session that follows is similarly intimate (ie small), if not more so. Very little gets drunk, and very small but intimate networks are formed between people who largely knew each other beforehand anyway. At least we are going to get home in good time. And tomorrow I will feel fresh enough to start work on the flip charts. 21 November 2017
IP Inclusive’s Women in IP network are celebrating their first anniversary. They have put on a panel discussion about climbing up the career ladder. Obviously this is not just a women’s problem, although when you raise your eyes to the upper echelons of the IP professions you can still find the odd scrap of evidence that it is more of a problem for women than for men. The panellists, of both genders, dispense helpful guidance. They say you need to make it very clear to your superiors that you want to progress up the career ladder, otherwise your superiors might quite reasonably assume you are happy to stand at the bottom holding the ladder steady for other people to climb up past you. They say you need to let people know you do not regard it as an honour to be in charge of cleaning the bootprints off the bottom rungs, otherwise they might quite reasonably make it your Job for Life. They also say you need to shout a lot about all the wonderful things you have done to make you worthy of climbing the ladder, otherwise your superiors might quite reasonably not realise you have done them. They explain that you need to have “champions”, to remind your superiors what you have said, in case they have quite reasonably forgotten. It seems to me that if your superiors are so dense they cannot see or hear these things for themselves, then you fully deserve to climb up the career ladder past them and indeed to push them off as you go. But I do not voice this opinion, because I fear it may be a little controversial. As everyone knows, I am a shy and retiring kind of woman, with an aversion to controversy. There are a few Men in IP at the event. We try not to make them feel too uncomfortable, but in the context this is a big ask. There is, however, a consensus that if we are going to make progress on the issues facing Women in IP, such as gobsmackingly dense superiors, we need to involve the Men in IP. So after the panel discussion, when everyone goes to the next room for drinks and canapés, we make sure the Men in IP come too. And while they drink, we tell them about all the wonderful things we have done, and they try hard not to quite reasonably forget. The room gets warm with all the effort that goes into this process, but it is a convivial kind of warmth and if this were all you could see of the IP professions, you would be forgiven for thinking everything was fine. 16 November 2017
Today I am to be decorated. Which kind of makes it sound like I will be wallpapered and given a fresh lick of paint. I hope Her Majesty’s choice in wallpaper is better than my parents’. In terms of home decor, I had a traumatic childhood. The day gets off to a good start: I get to say “Buckingham Palace, please!” to a black cab driver. He looks me up and down, takes in the precariously-perched fascinator, the ludicrously tiny handbag and my obvious unfamiliarity with my footwear, and nods knowingly. He then deposits me and my proud family in the middle of the Buckingham Palace Roadworks, which have been laid on specially. “The Queen’s not home,” he says. What, because of the roadworks? “You see that flagpole? – The Royal Standard’s not flying. She’s not there.” Maybe she’s just popped out for a skinny latte? “Most prob’ly gone to Sandringham. She likes it there.” I am tempted to ask how long it will take to drive to Sandringham. But my husband is already paying the fare and bundling us out. So in the end, I am presented with my OBE by Prince Charles, not The Queen. He is a terribly charming man, and experienced at making twenty-second bursts of extremely small talk with award recipients in the gaps between their curtseys. He also has a lot of staff around him, to make sure everything goes to plan. Some of them are there to brief us on how many steps forward we must take and when, and how many steps backwards, and when and how to curtsey, and how to address His Royal Highness, and where to b****r off to when He has finished with us. Some of them are there to protect Him, should any of us turn nasty and draw weapons out of our tiny handbags. Some of the Prince’s staff are there to sweep up straw and stray bits of fascinator. And one of them I am sure has a bottle of hand sanitiser at the ready, in case His Royal Highness has to shake hands with someone unsavoury-looking. Four or five of them are beefeaters. They are dressed even more stupidly than I am. But they have evil-looking pikes at their sides, which are probably quite effective against a tiny handbag or a fascinator. When it is my turn to approach the royal dais, and shake His Royal Highness’s hand, I am momentarily lost for words. He makes some small joke about patents and I am struggling even to remember the name of the Intellectual Property Office, and then I realise I have forgotten to say Your Royal Highness and I am so deeply mortified that I can feel my fascinator curling. The Highness intimates that potentially patents are very important. Clutching at this metaphorical straw, I agree with Him whole-heartedly. Then I remind His Royalness that IP is going to be even more important post-Brexit. There is a sharp intake of breath from the beefeater with the hand sanitiser, and he raises his pike an inch or so off the floor. There is probably some unwritten rule that you are not allowed to mention Brexit in the presence of royalty. I decide not to ask the Prince if he can arrange for Brexit to be stopped, and instead mumble a couple of Your Royal Highnesses, and one more for good measure as I retreat backwards from the dais, then I curtsey obsequiously and stumble away. In an ante-room somewhere I am reunited with my tiny handbag and ushered to a seat at the back of the ballroom. The back of the ballroom is cold. Apparently Prince Charles likes to keep the windows open. This is inconsiderate I feel, bearing in mind that most of the female award recipients have little more than a flimsy frock and a fascinator to keep them warm. The ceremony goes on and on, with countless people stepping up to make extremely small talk with HRH and an orchestra making soothing sounds from the gallery above. I am really not surprised The Queen has moved out for the day. Afterwards we join a queue to be officially photographed. This queue takes even longer than the investiture ceremony. We are not allowed to take our own photos; instead we have to wait to be seen by the Official Palace Photographer, and then we have to stand in the Officially Approved Grouping at the Officially Designated Corner of the Royal Back Yard, and adopt Officially Approved Poses. We will be allowed to purchase the photographs later, at Officially Approved Exorbitant Prices. Thus photographed, AT LAST we are allowed to exit the Royal Back Yard and go for our lunch. This, for me, is the best part of the day. In the back of another black cab, I swap my inappropriately petite shoes for a pair of comfortable boots, and the tiny handbag for a rucksack containing a can of Red Bull®. I feel much better after that. Shoving my OBE badge into the rucksack, I concentrate on trying to get warm again. We have a fantastic lunch, my family and I. My children are drinking non-alcoholic cocktails, mainly because they are supposed to be handing in university course-work this evening. So I drink enough for all of them. And when I decide I like the flavour of one of the non-alcoholic cocktails, I ask the waitress to do me a version with gin in, and she is happy to oblige, which is a sure sign that this is a Good Restaurant. My children roll their eyes at the yet another Mum Moment. I may have an OBE, but they still cannot take me anywhere. |
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