26 February 2016, 1 pm
We made it to our appointment. Mr Lampert made it too. The VeePee, however, overslept and finally responds to our emails saying we are to pass on his apologies. In his defence, he has spent the last few days in Washington trying to get the whole world to agree on a harmonised grace period. I imagine that could well make a person loathe to get up of a Friday morning. Anyway, our appointment is with the Society of Chemical Industry. The SCI has an extremely posh building on Belgrave Square, right in the heart of where my son and I were last week taking photographs of F-type Jags. Belgrave Square is a leafy green square which is quite literally crawling with F-type Jags, and Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces, and which is further encircled by the most splendid buildings one could hope for, their facades sporting colonnades and flagpoles and other most British-looking embellishments. It is the type of square which makes you realise that Britain really doesn’t need the European Union, so long as you don’t care about the plebs. The SCI has some tenants in its extremely posh building. And it has some space for some more tenants. And to cut a long story short, it has hatched a plan with Mr Davies which involves CIPA telling the landlord at 95 Chancery Lane to stuff his market rates and his badly-carpeted corridors and his deelapidayshuns where the sun don’t shine (ie in the CIPA library) and moving to Belgrave Square. Because it is a lovely building, with plenty of lovely office space and some wonderful rooms we could hire now and then for meetings and seminars and parties I mean OGMs. And when we hold our seminars and, er, OGMs, we can invite the industrial chemists along too, which is called Synergy. Or Self-Catalysis. Or something. I can imagine what certain members of Council will say to this plan. They will say: but Belgrave Square is not near to the Inns of Court. It is not near to where the barristers live. It is not near to where the judges live. Ah, but, Mr Davies will say, it is nearer to where the government lives, and The Queen. It is more splendid-looking. It contains some chemists, which is called Synergy or Self-Catalysis or something. It has a board of past-Presidents on its wall, just like ours only BIGGER, and a picture of The Queen too, just like ours only less frumpy. On the walls up the splendid staircase, there are line drawings of famous chemists. And the beards on these chemists are one hundred times more impressive than anything ever seen on a patent attorney. It has a flagpole, for heaven’s sake. We could get ourselves a CIPA flag!! Also, Mr Davies will say, the rent would be considerably cheaper. And in addition, we would not have to pay to rent badly-carpeted corridor space, and we would only need to rent the posh meeting rooms and lecture halls when we actually needed them for posh meetings and lectures, which is better than at 95 Chancery Lane where we pay for a massive red-walled hall and then hold committee meetings in it which involve five people, a coffee pot and a telephone. It is just not good business, he will say, to pay the Chancery Lane market rate for a big empty room that occasionally gets to house five people and a coffee pot. And which has a naff front entrance that looks like the side-door to a pub (correction: that is the side-door to a pub) and a load of scaffolding outside and office space that depresses the hell out of our employees. However many legal bookshops there are up the road. The SCI people treat us like royalty. They have laid on a massive picnic to show they can do In-House Catering. There is a waiter to bring the food to our seats and refill our glasses, which I have to say is different to any picnic I’ve ever been on. There is also a massive amount of food, because the VeePee is not there to eat his share. We get shown round the building and given complimentary copies of their journal and treated to a presentation about what the SCI does. Apparently its members are some of the most important people in the chemical industry. Would we really prefer to rub shoulders with barristers?
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