1 June 2015, 7 pm
I have a very kind friend who has a very nice flat in London, and he is letting me borrow it to save me travelling all the way from the Wess Curntry every time I need to be Presidential. This is the kind of thing you call a Godsend, even if you do not believe in God or if you do, you suspect that he would not spend his time finding flats for people. So now I am an actual proper Londoner for a few days. This is a scary thought, not least for the other Londoners. Within a five minute walk of my temporary home, I can get to four different late-opening supermarkets, eight different coffee shops and at least twenty restaurants. Not to mention two tube stations and several bus stoppy-looking things, and what’s more some actual buses at the bus stoppy-looking things, which would be unheard of where I come from. There is a cinema close by, showing films that won’t reach the Wess Curntry till 2017, and a theatre down the road showing Michael Flatley’s bottom. I could get a takeaway which I wouldn’t even need to take away. Day or night, I need never want for anything. Is this what life is like for people who live and work in London? Is it really this easy? And if so, how does anyone from London ever contrive to be late for a meeting? I feel almost young and carefree, except without the being young bit. Also the CIPA Pee is probably not supposed to be carefree without Council’s permission. Still, it is the closest I am likely to get to a decent mid-life crisis, and I may as well have it while pretending to help CIPA.
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1 June 2015, 9 am
Workshop day arrives, for our second EPO oral proceedings course. A change of agenda means that this time I am supposed to be playing the role of an opposition division member rather than just swanning around stealing biscuits. I get away with it, luckily, because my co-star, the Amazing Gwilym Roberts, has accidentally read the papers beforehand, so all I have to do is take minutes and look disapproving from over the top of my glasses. After the mock hearings, we give the delegates feedback on their advocacy skills. Then they give us feedback on our course-organising skills. They are cross because we did not warn them how long it would take to prepare. They manage to make this sound like a substantial procedural violation. I am tempted to point out that if, like me, you have not read all the papers in advance, then you will not know what’s going on in the hearings, and whilst that is OK if your job is to be the course leader and look disapproving, it is not so good if you are a delegate and your job is to learn something from the experience. Still, if you came to the course thinking you could attend a hearing without adequate preparation, even a hearing of the mock type, then presumably you will have learnt something very important today. It is indeed sobering when your opponent brings out a piece of prior art, embellished with Post-It® notes and pink highlights, and you can’t remember having seen it before in your life. 28 May 2015
Another day of emails. Especially the ones reminding me that I have forgotten about the other ones, with the attachments I was supposed to read but didn’t. I will never get through them all. But if I have learnt one thing from pretending to be in charge of an IP practice, it is this. 25% of leadership is just being there when people need you. The other 75% is not being there when people think they need you, but actually ought to man up and get on with it themselves. I expect this to work at CIPA as well. 27 May 2015
I dial in to a meeting of the International Liaison Committee. I have not been to one of these before, so I am almost excited. International liaison is a high priority for CIPA. But in the CIPA tradition, and indeed in true British spirit, it has always been done on a shoestring and through the goodwill of a few stalwart volunteers. So, if we are visited by strangers from distant lands, we make sure to give them a nice cup of tea and a biscuit when they arrive, and we take them to CIPA Hall to see the very red walls and hear talks about added subject matter, and we provide them with packed lunches in brown paper bags with hard-boiled eggs and Penguin® biscuits. The talks are written and delivered by stalwart volunteers, and some other stalwart volunteers are there to applaud and make the UK patent profession look bigger than it is. And the eggs have been stalwartly hard-boiled by volunteers too, and the Penguin biscuits are from the Cash and Carry, and we hold a raffle at the end of the talks which helps to fund the tea and biscuits. When it is time for us to visit foreign lands ourselves, to spread the word about the wonderfulness of UK patent attorneys, we ask around if anyone from CIPA happens already to be going to the foreign land and whether a stalwart volunteer from the International Liaison Committee can travel as a stowaway in their luggage. We try to take some CIPA tie pins with us as gifts, but we don’t always get away with it because a tie pin is a potentially lethal weapon and the Civil Aviation Authority gets nervous about potentially lethal weapons. How times have changed. Anyway, it doesn’t seem right somehow, for such an important part of the Institute’s representative role to be a low budget affair. So now we are going to have some more strategic terms of reference, and perhaps even some Sherpa groups and an over-arching roadmap, and we are going to go to Council and say: Oy! You pay a Shouty Person to shout at journalists and you pay Ms Sear to shout at everyone who doesn’t have a Learning Outcome, and you pay Mr Davies to, er, well, you pay Mr Davies anyway, so now how about paying someone to hard-boil our eggs for us? Some of the stalwart committee members are uncomfortable with these developments. But others are well fired-up and I can tell they are ready to turn CIPA’s international liaising efforts into the most exciting, high profile multi-cultural activity outside of the Eurovision Song Contest. Good on them, I say. It is time CIPA stopped going around the world selling raffle tickets and smelling of hard-boiled eggs: we must be a Force to be Reckoned With on the world stage, otherwise the Germans will pour scorn on us for being half-in and half-out of the EU and not having any taste in packed lunches. 23 May 2015
Another thing that happens when you are President is that someone sends you an agenda for the Special Occasion you’ve agreed to go to, and you discover that part of the Special Occasion is in fact a speech you are going to make. And this leaves you with a rather uncomfortable feeling, because you can hardly write back and say No, really, I think you misunderstood; I only intended to turn up and stand around a bit. So today I find myself writing a speech about diversity, and all the fabulous things we are doing to improve it, because the breakfast meeting that starts at a time no one should have invented contains an address by the CIPA President. And the CIPA President is me. I am a bit short of metaphors, which is unlike me. So I end up with gardening, because the Chelsea Flower Show is on. Improving diversity is like growing plants, I write, despite the fact that I have never been able to grow plants without them stopping growing and starting dying, or occasionally coming up as something different altogether. I say you have to prepare the ground for the plants, and then you have to nurture them as they grow. I think this is quite a good metaphor for a profession where some people think that women should stop crying and kids in inner city schools should work harder. Nurturing things is surely a laudable activity (apparently it even works with children) and I am happy to tell other people to do more of it. 22 May 2015
When you become President, your inbox explodes. My emails fall into several categories:
When you are President you are supposed to deal with all these things and also you are supposed to be Sensible. I don’t know why: it is not in the Charter or the Bye-laws or anything. I never signed a document saying I Hereby Agree to be Sensible for a Year. I am considering asking Council: What if I were to do my Presidential things properly and sensibly first, would I be allowed to act daft for the rest of the day? I think that sounds fair. 20 May 2015, 12.30 pm
I walk down the Corridor of Power to see the CIPA Membership Team. We talk about regional representatives and how many happy hours we are going to let them organise each year before we start to get suspicious. We think perhaps three. This is real power, deciding how many happy hours people are entitled to. I could get to enjoy this. 20 May 2015, 2 pm The lovely people from ITMA come to visit. They say Congratulations on being President, ha ha, serves you right! And now you are President, they say, you can come to our annual drinks party. So now I know I have arrived. They also say they will be coming to our Pickled Parts of Patent Attorneys Party, which sounds like a tongue-twister although doubtless not such a tongue-twister as it will be by the end of the party. 20 May 2015, 8 pm I return home as Pee, to the entirely predictable jubilant reception from my family. My long-suffering husband arches a single eyebrow to remind me of both his long suffering and his husband-ness. My eldest son, who is training to be an android and is very nearly there, looks up from his maths revision and then looks down again: I am nothing like as interesting as a regression curve. My teenage daughter doesn’t even look up from her GCSE revision, which seems to be largely Facebook®- and Instagram®-based, but later announces that she is going to a revision barbecue and won’t be back till some time after her business studies exam. My eleven-year-old son, who is so keen to become a teenager that he finds a new facial hair virtually every day, tells me about his latest facial hair but is not hugely impressed with the news that I am President of the Charted Instagram of Pattern Journeys. I ask him how his day was at school, but it appears this is information which he only imparts on a need-to-know basis, and since I do not even know where his classroom is, he concludes that I do not really need to know what he does there. In any case, he is far better friends with the President-twice-removed, a certain EyeEyePeePee, than he is with me, because the EyeEyePeePee is fond of trains and guess what, my son is fond of trains too, especially after the EyeEyePeePee emailed him a list of the ones he might like to ask me for at Christmas. The cat-that-shows-me-its-bottom shows me its bottom twice in honour of the occasion. I take this to be a good sign. Although not a particularly attractive one. My eldest daughter, who used to be my son, is no longer at home anyway. But it has to be said, her support is about as heartfelt now as it used to be when she was here. If you'll excuse my sarcasm. 21 May 2015 I am feeling jaded. I put this down to my London diet. My London diet consists largely of plastic pots, or rather the contents of the pots; obviously I do not eat the pots themselves. Whilst I am sure these things are nutritionally sound, they all appear to be marinated in loneliness. They might just as well be labelled “Sad Person’s Salad” or “Tiny Hotel Room Sandwich”. They can’t be good for the hormones. Still, at least I get to walk the Corridor of Power and control the allocation of happy hours. It’s not all bad. 20 May 2015, 9.30 am
I have decided that, as President, it would be good to know about all the CIPA committees and who’s on them and what they do. So I have summoned the committee chairs – by which I mean the people in charge of the committees, not the things they sit on – to a meeting to explain themselves. The first thing they do is complain that there are no biscuits. Action point: establish new Biscuits Committee forthwith. Then they complain that the CIPA staff do not organise them enough, so that they do not always know what to do and when. Action point: purchase pocket diaries and pencils for all committee chairs; hire more CIPA staff to tie knots in handkerchiefs for them. Next they complain that even when they know what to do and when, they do not have enough committee members to do it with. Action point: advertise committee vacancies in the jobs pages of the Journal, calling them once-in-a-lifetime opportunities rather than unattractive millstones, and trying not to sound as desperate for help as we usually do. The great thing about the meeting, however, is that we discover all sorts of areas where one committee can pass part of its workload to another committee. Action point: each committee to take three pieces of work and pass them to the next committee along; repeat as necessary until all committees are busy passing pieces of work and everything is about to be progressed by someone else. |
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