25 February 2016, 5 pm
Mr Davies has meanwhile found the ideal way of making the massive party look respectable. He has re-branded it as an OGM. He cunningly gets me to chair this OGM, so that I am complicit in the whole sorry affair. Of course what it actually is, is five minutes of procedural guff followed by an hour and a half of free drinks and canapés. This is such good fun that I almost forget I am meeting one of my sons for dinner and Mr Davies actually does forget to get on the train he was supposed to be catching to Stevenage. The free drinks are good but the canapés have been miniaturised again. I suspect EyeEllSee involvement. Luckily, I tell people, once the new Bye-laws come into force we will no longer have to do these OGMs full of procedural guff. We will be able to skip straight to the free drinks and canapés. And we will not have to ask people to put ticks in boxes to approve the election of new Fellows because there will be a proper procedure for this which happens, like it does in any normal organisation, without the need for quorate meetings and ballots. Someone says: but I have come here specially to hear my name read out and sign the magnificent, cobwebbed, five-volume book of CIPA members that Mr Davies brings with him to every OGM. And Mr Davies looks a bit sheepish and says, ah, yes, The Magnificent Book. He says, I have not brought it with me because it is Very Special and we cannot risk losing it. How can you lose a five-volume book, I wonder? Mr Davies says you would be surprised; we have lost it twice already. Mr Davies promises to take the book specially to the disappointed new Fellow who wanted to sign her name in it. He will instantly forget having said this and thanks to the free drinks, she will no doubt instantly forget why it was she was so keen to sign the book anyway. Such is life.
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25 February 2016, 4 pm
Mr Davies has told everyone at the East of England regional meeting that the President is unable to attend. This is an excellent way of keeping people on their toes, because when I do turn up mid-way through the seminar, everyone is taken by surprise. (Mwa ha ha!) I detect just a hint of awkwardness, as though Mr Davies has been telling them things he should not have been telling them, or they have been discussing what a rubbish Pee I’m being, or more likely that they have planned a massive party tonight at CIPA’s expense and will now have to find some way of making it look respectable. I arrive in time for a fascinating talk about the Internet of Things. Prior to this talk, I did not really know what the Internet of Things was. Now I do, and I am deeply worried, because the Internet of Things is a most sinister concept. It is basically something that connects all of your household appliances – from your printer to your electric toothbrush – with Google®. So that you can be charged for new ink cartridges even before you realised you needed them, and so that if you are not brushing your teeth properly, Amazon® can send you a book about periodontal disease and fresh supplies of mouthwash, and book you an immediate appointment with the dental hygienist. And eventually your central heating system will know more about your diary than you do, and your doctor will know your body mass index from your bathroom scales, and your fridge will be restocking itself accordingly. On the plus side, you will never run out of anything again. Your every wish will be anticipated and supplied by remote-controlled drones who know your exact whereabouts. You will not be able to have an affair, or top your mother-in-law, or plot terrorist activities. Or rather, you will, but Google will know about it. And Amazon will send you all the equipment you need, charge it to your credit card and then update the National Crime Agency. On the minus side, your relationship with Amazon will become even more cripplingly intimate than it is now. And by hacking into the Internet of Things, other people (for example your teenage offspring) will be able to inundate you with toilet roll supplies, burn your toast or lock your TV onto the Dave® channel, just for a laugh. Or, worse, they will take the Denial of Service option, which in the context of toilet roll supplies does not bear thinking about. 25 February 2016, 11 am
At the appointments panel meeting, I ask dumb questions which no one else thought worth asking. It transpires they were indeed not worth asking. We decide to interview six people, three of whom we are all agreed are Very Good and three of whom we are all Not Quite Sure About. Interviewing someone you are Not Quite Sure About seems a daft idea to me, but the others assure me that sometimes you become more sure about a candidate when you meet them and they make you see how stupid you’ve been. I say that happens whenever I meet someone, but it does not mean I would appoint them to be the new Chair of IPReg. 25 February 2016, 9 am
Mr Roberts has had an idea. I always worry when Mr Roberts has ideas. It means he hasn’t enough work to do and is going to cause trouble at CIPA until he does. This new idea is a series of pieces in the Journal entitled “Six things we love about…”. Mr Roberts has got the ball rolling with a “Six things we love about auxiliary requests”, there being some concern that the EPO might stop allowing them, which would basically be the end of the world. He has some ideas for other things we might find six things to love about. And after the six things we love, we should identify one thing we hate. For example: one thing we hate about auxiliary requests is that you always get the third one muddled up with the seventh. Personally I think he may have got the balance wrong. A typical patent attorney is more likely to be able to find six things to hate and one to love, or perhaps 6.5 things to hate and 0.5 of a thing to love. About anything. Mr Roberts thinks I could do a piece entitled “Six things to love about being the CIPA Pee”. Ha ha. The only thing I can think of to love about being the CIPA Pee is that it only lasts a year. This is perhaps not entering into the spirit of Mr Roberts’s idea. But he is an eternal optimist, and I’m sure if I faff about for long enough he will think of five more things for me. Being able to work with the brilliant, creative Mr Roberts will be one of them. Being able to drink cocktails with the brilliant, creative Mr Roberts may be another. 24 February 2016
Once again I am sifting through CVs. Tomorrow we are going to short-list for the new IPReg Chair appointment, and decide which of the applicants we are brave enough to meet in person. So now it is time to decide whether they really do have strategic transformational leadership skills and portfolio stakeholder governance challenges, or whether they just spilled a packet of alphabet sweets over their CVs and accidentally got lucky. The problem is, I am not sure I would recognise a strategic portfolio transformational stakeholder leader if it bit me on the behind. Not that I am expecting people to bite me on the behind during an interview for the IPReg Chair, obviously; what I am saying is that my own lack of experience of non-executive transformational portfolio governance might make the interview tricky to conduct. But doubtless I will add value to the process, as usual, by asking dumb questions which no one else thought worth asking but which turn out to yield valuable insights into critical issues such as cake-eating capacity or namby-pambiness. I presume that is why I'm on the appointment panel. 23 February 2016
Today I am busy making Plans. There are plans for: namby-pamby webinars on unconscious bias (which of course doesn’t exist in the IP professions); a joint seminar with the Licensing Executives Society (who are not real lawyers because they have not passed P6); our oral proceedings course (which takes place twice a year but feels like six times a year); another round-table meeting on promoting the UK IP professions (a task which could be difficult if The People don’t vote the right way on 23 June); and a visit by American attorneys (to whom we have to present a very united, European front and some pastries to show we are still trading with France). All of these plans involve exchanging lots of emails with lots of people about venues, prices, content, speakers, registration procedures and whether or not to miniaturise the refreshments. Then there are also the emails about agendas, for meetings with ITMA, the IPO, IPReg and – scariest of all – Council. People will keep writing to ask what I want put on agendas. Well I don’t know, do I? Can’t we use the same one as last time, now we know it works? Agendas are pointless at CIPA anyway. Nobody sticks to them. You might just as well use the following, which is pretty much what we do at committee meetings these days:
Finally today, because it is part of the President’s job to make everyone at CIPA feel loved, I devote a fair bit of time to emailing people saying what great stuff they’re doing and thanking them for doing it. They know I have absolutely no idea what it is they’ve done, or why, but they also know I could not have done it myself. If nothing else, I will be remembered as a very grateful President. 22 February 2016, 1 pm
Now we have brought the poor, disorientated Japanese attorneys to one of the Inns of Court so that they can see what it is really like working in the law in Great Britain and why the British are not particularly impressed when it comes to the EU courts of justice. We treat them to a charming buffet lunch, which is largely curry, to show that the British need not worry about the EU anyway because we are truly cosmopolitan, having spent much of our history colonising the rest of the world and the last century watching them monopolise our takeaway industry. The Japanese return the compliment by giving me a ceremonial Japanese fan. I suggest to Mr Davies that somebody should be employed to stand beside the President at all times, wielding the ceremonial fan. He explains the number of levels on which this is a bad idea. The trouble is, there is also a large throne in the lobby of the Inn of Court and I am beginning to think that surely it is not too much to ask for the CIPA Pee to have a throne of her own and a tiara and a somebody to stand beside her wielding a ceremonial fan. Surely now, is it? 22 February 2016, 2 pm The afternoon is a CPD seminar. Now it is the turn of the Japanese attorneys to tell us a thing or two about developments in Japanese IP laws and procedures. It is humbling, how well the speakers handle our language. Not only is it a foreign language; it is also inconsiderately expressed using a different character set, which though limited to a mere 26 symbols nevertheless manages to use them in such an illogical range of combinations that not even the natives can pronounce, let alone spell, all of them. In addition to speaking excellent English, our visitors also seem to know the EPO Guidelines better than we do. And the EPO Guidelines are not just written using a different character set, they are also written using a completely alien, some might say imaginary, set of logical constructs. Yet still the Japanese understand them and we do not. After the seminar, there are drinks and canapés. The EyeEllSee have planned every last detail of these canapés, so it is important that we like them. They include miniature fish and chips and miniature roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, to show our visitors that the British have wonderful food of their own but can also make it as dainty as patisserie when they want to. Personally I do not hold with miniaturised Sunday dinners. A one-inch high paper cone containing two chips and a cubic centimetre of battered fish, which is hardly worth the effort of battering anyway, is neither a canapé nor a meal, it is an insult. It is doll’s house fare. It is hamster food. It is someone in the kitchen having a laugh at my expense. A President should not have to eat such apologetic miserableness. Somebody should be wielding the ceremonial Japanese fan at my side, placing the ceremonial tiara on my head and spoon-feeding me caviar. On second thoughts, not caviar, because that is miniaturised eggs; perhaps caramel custard tart instead. I will suggest this at next week’s Council meeting. 22 February 2016, 10 am
We are entertaining the Japanese attorneys. We greet them with pastries, to show how European we still are. But we serve the pastries with instant coffee granules and a jug of hot water, to demonstrate that, pastries aside, Britain still goes its own way over the fundamentals of life. In the morning session, we tell the Japanese a thing or two about developments in UK and European IP laws, with a strategically brief reference to the EU referendum and how the Prime Minister is telling the stupid people to vote. Luckily, the EyeEllSee cleverly took our visitors out for dinner last night and made them drink so much champagne that now they are barely aware they’re in Europe at all let alone whether they are going to stay there. The mercilessly red walls of CIPA Hall and the mercilessly awful instant coffee are all part of the disorientation tactics. By the time we line them up in front of the board of Past Presidents to have their photos taken, they are half afraid we are going to shoot them for disloyally visiting Munich on their way to London. They look as though jet lag might be one of the pleasanter things to have happened to them on this trip. 20 February 2016
The Prime Minister announces the EU referendum date. He makes it clear that although it is of course up to The People, The People would be stupid not to vote to stay in the EU because Britain will be far better off within the Community now that he has told the European Parliament what’s what. And we all know that The People are not stupid. I get the impression that Mr Cameron has not yet given masses of thought to the IP implications of a Brexit. But I’m sure he will do before 23 June. Meanwhile, with impeccable timing, CIPA is about to host a delegation of Japanese IP attorneys. We will be spending tomorrow discussing all manner of IP issues with them, and naturally they will ask why we are even bothering, in view of the UK’s forthcoming undignified erasure from the map of Europe. It is time to think quickly about some positive messages, for example:
I am relieved to hear that the pollsters will be providing us with regular updates on how stupid The People are feeling, so that we can keep track of how likely we are to wake up on 24 June unable to get hold of a croissant for breakfast. The pollsters are not stupid, although they have been known to be very badly wrong. 16 February 2016
I go to London for the day. Only this time, it is not for CIPA; it is a Family Outing. I have with me a teenage daughter, a nearly-twelve-year-old son and a rucksack containing lashings of Red Bull®. The rest of the picnic would have taken too long to make and so in the interests of efficiency, we are going to borrow a picnic from Burger King® instead. Burger King is conveniently situated just where you get off the train at Paddington, and unlike my kitchen, it is already set up for making food. I show the children what my journey to work is like these days. To make the experience more authentic, I fall asleep on the train. They don’t notice, because they are plugged in to electronic gadgets, charging themselves up for the day. In London, I show them Hyde Park, and the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Bridge and the London Eye and even Buckingham Palace. I take them on the Underground, which I expect to enthral them, bearing in mind the nearest we get to public transport where we live is hitching a lift on a passing tractor. But they are not especially interested. It turns out that what my son really wants to do is take pictures of expensive cars. We spend quite a bit of time wandering round Knightsbridge and Mayfair, seeking out F-type Jags and posing for selfies next to them. I think you can probably be arrested for this type of thing, or at the very least removed from the scene by an impeccably-dressed security guard, so I am relieved when we finally make it back to Paddington. We borrow a pizza for tea, take the train back to Brizzle and then climb into my nowhere-near-impressive-enough car to complete our journey. The only way my car comes even close to an F-type Jag is in its emissions levels, which have recently turned out to be a grade or two higher than your average hatchback, thus making it just that little bit special. |
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