6 November 2015, 2 pm
The Chinese visit over-ran. A black cab driver then treated me to a guided tour of London’s road closures, diversions and traffic jams, with a complimentary ticker tape of political comment. The net effect is that I have arrived back at the EPO proceedings workshop a little later than planned, to wit, after the lunch break, and politically flustered. I sneak back sneakily into the canteen, and help myself to leftovers. Although I am not obviously connected to a conference, and indeed could easily be the local bag lady, the staff appear happy to let me do this. They even clear my plate away afterwards. It strikes me that this would be a good way of getting a free lunch most days of the week so long as you were good at bluffing. And after my conversation with the Chinese visitors, I regard myself as a bluffing aficionado. 6 November 2015, 5 pm I have spent the afternoon wandering between mock opposition hearings to see how well the delegates are doing and to make sure the tutors are still awake. In each of the hearings I helped myself to a biscuit or two, to supplement the lunch leftovers, so that by the end of the afternoon I am strung up like a toddler on Haribo®. In the final plenary session, the tutors and I share the benefit of our Great Wisdom and Experience around presenting at oral proceedings. I actually have very little Wisdom and Experience in this field myself, but as we have already established, I am good at bluffing. The delegates probably think I have taken part in 500 hearings and won them all. There is little to gain, I feel, by correcting them. My words of wisdom are about putting your key points clearly and concisely. There is nothing worse than an advocate who makes a good argument in the first thirty seconds and then spends another five minutes repeating it, embellishing it and eventually grinding it into an unrecognisable mush. Good arguments are not like homeopathic remedies: they do not benefit from dilution. Their vital energy is not released by adding gesticulations and sock fluff. To emphasise my own clear and concise key point, I tell the delegates about my lunch-time meeting with the Chinese. About the need to express yourself in bite-size chunks and then wait, for agonising minutes, listening to the echo of your own inanities while the interpreter struggles to translate the sock fluff. You have to make your point clearly and then move on to the next, I say. You cannot waffle. Interpreters don’t do waffle. Mr Roberts gives me a look that says: now it is time for you to shut up too. I give him a look back that says: you are only here for the entertainment. I’ll bluff as much as I like, thank you.
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6 November 2015, 9 am
Once again it is Workshop Day for our course on EPO proceedings. The delegates look bleary-eyed, as though they have just arrived in Munich on the first flight of the day. I am gratified to see that they are throwing themselves into their roles like this. Even to the point of not having read all the papers yet. Since I have been up since 4 am, I have little sympathy with their bleary-eyedness and we launch straight in with a hard-hitting talk about written submissions and auxiliary requests. This bit is always good fun because our tutors include barristers (who think auxiliary requests are a sign of weakness), patent attorneys (who daren’t leave the house without them) and a former Board of Appeal Chairman (who will not let you file them anyway). And Mr Roberts, who doesn’t take anything seriously. 6 November 2015, noon I have sneaked out sneakily from the workshops – from which, to be fair, no one will miss me – to meet with some visitors from the Chinese IP Office. I have left Mr Roberts with instructions to keep the delegates entertained. He seems more than happy to rise to this challenge and I have no doubt that by the time I return, no one will be taking anything seriously. The Chinese visitors are polite and smiley. There is a slightly awkward moment when I offer them a drink but no one from the CIPA group seems prepared to operate the hot water dispenser for them, but I think we get away with it. (I presume that, because I am the only female in the CIPA group, it is expected that I will deal with the hospitality and hot water side of things, but since I am also the only President in the CIPA group, I feel obliged to stay in the doorway greeting people instead.) We give a short presentation about how fantastic CIPA is. CIPA has been going since 1882, we say. Although obviously, we say, not all of us remember that far back. We say: CIPA is full of top-notch, world-class patent attorneys. Better than the Germans. We are much better at arguing than the Germans. Although history might suggest it’s a pretty close call. The Chinese, however, are not really interested in CIPA; they want to know about IPReg and the PEB and who gives UK patent attorneys their registration certificates. In reply to their many probing questions, I make up many authoritative-sounding answers. I do not tell them about the presentation evening where we hand out blank sheets of paper, rolled up with pretty pink ribbons, to the people who’ve passed their qualifying exams. I have a hazy idea that the real registration certificates are prepared by the IPReg Pixies, but I am worried this idea might lose something in translation so I keep it to myself. At the end of the meeting, Mr Lampert (who is not only our Chief Shouty Person but also our Chief Smiley Picture Taker) takes a photograph of us all looking smiley together. The people from the Chinese IPO give us a beautiful gift. I have no idea what the beautiful gift is, even after they have explained it to me. But it is in a beautiful box and the beautiful box has the word “calligraphy” on the front so I think it may be more up-market than a UK IPO mouse mat. I will open it later. 31 October 2015
I check out my IPO party bag. In it, there is an IPO mouse mat, an IPO coaster, an IPO bookmark, an IPO notebook and an IPO picture of a Welsh troll bridge. The picture is printed on wipe-clean fabric, so I think I am supposed to use it on the dinner table to catch the gin and tonic drips. There is also a booklet of fascinating facts about IP, and another entitled “IP Basics: Do I need a patent?”. I will read them both and add them to my CPD log. Although these are all lovely presents, and no doubt kindly meant, I admit to feeling a little disappointed that there are no sweeties or toys, no badges, no slices of cake squashed inside damp serviettes. Still, they will come in handy for the trick-or-treaters tonight. 30 October 2015
Today is the day of the Grand CIPA Outing. A group of officers, staff and committee folk are taking a trip to the IP Office in Newport, which is, strictly, an overseas visit and therefore worthy of Great Excitement. (Especially since we don’t have permission, making it also, strictly, an act of rebellion.) For once, my journey is easier than everyone else’s. I can have a lie-in, go for a run and redecorate the front room, all before I need to even think about putting my smart clothes on. The others have to catch the 0815 from Paddington to Deepest Wales, which to be honest still doesn’t sound very onerous to me, though I accept it must be harder travelling against the prevailing winds and battling homesickness all the way. I suspect that they all sit in the same carriage, so that they can sing holiday songs as they go, and share their fizzy pop and the packets of crisps their mums told them to leave until lunch time. When you go to Wales, you have to go trip-trapping across a troll bridge, and just when you think you’ve got away with it, you find yourself at a troll booth and the troll says Who’s that trip-trapping over my bridge? and you have to pay him £6.50 otherwise he will gobble you up. The people on the train avoid the troll by going through a deep dark tunnel under the Severn Estuary. The troll can’t be bothered to say Who’s that swish-swashing in the mud and murky water under my bridge? so he leaves the tunnel alone. When we get to the IPO we play party games and the IPO give us a picnic lunch, and there are more packets of crisps to make up for the ones we ate before we were supposed to, and at the end everyone gets a party bag to take home. We also have some really constructive discussions on the IP issues of the day, and on opportunities for collaboration, and we see some demonstrations of the IPO’s new online tools, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear about those, so let me tell you about the party games instead. The games are run by a Facilitator. A Facilitator is a person who is qualified to turn business meetings into Interactive Discussion Forums through the medium of entertainment. The main party game today is called “What Makes A Good IP System?” It begins with some Elevator Pitches from people who already have some ideas on the subject. In an Elevator Pitch, you are allowed to talk but only for two minutes and only on one subject, which is really tricky for a patent attorney. After the elevator pitches the Facilitator puts us into groups to come up with ideas, and we have to write our ideas onto laminated pictures that he has pinned up around the room. Each picture shows an IP ship trying to sail across the IP seas, with a load of anchors holding it back, and we have to identify what are the anchors holding us back from having a Good IP System, apart from clients being stupid and pretty much everything else being outrageous. Then we have to choose names for our ships. And then we have to vote for which group’s name is the best, and we are given toy money with which to express our preferences. Only a Facilitator could get away with this, I am thinking. But at least he didn’t blindfold us first. 27 October 2015, 10 am
I have put a lot of time and effort into CIPA work over the last eighteen months. I have spent many nights away from home, and many hours packing and travelling and unpacking again. I have attended countless meetings and answered thousands of emails, most of them politely. I have worked hard to progress initiatives that many Council members had not the slightest interest in helping me with, because – as one of them once explained to me – they have proper jobs to do. And I have incurred plenty of costs that I have never thought to reclaim, for example the plastic-potted food that I have to buy for my sad person meals in the London flat; and cleaning materials (because when you borrow a friend’s flat, to avoid the cost of a hotel room, you have to clean it and change the bedding and do the washing); not to mention a dry cleaning bill to make my eyes water. And because I do not have a proper job, these extra expenses do actually matter. You can see, then, why I am cross about being criticised for taking the initiative, over a trip to build relationships with senior USPTO officials and AIPLA representatives. A trip that took me away from home for six nights, just days after another set of meetings had kept me away for three nights. In fact, the more I think about the criticism, the crosser I get. So I have decided: I will go on strike. I will not do any CIPA work at all for a while. I will cancel the meetings and ignore the emails, and stay at home where I can eat cheap casseroles with the family and get the kids to help with the cleaning. I will wear jeans all day, because jeans do not need dry cleaning, and I will refuse to spend my evenings packing suitcases and my mornings driving up the M5 in the dark before anyone else is awake. So there! 27 October 2015, 11 am OK, so there is a flaw in my plan. A large number of the meetings and teleconferences in my diary, and of the emails I need to answer, involve some genuinely nice, helpful, hard-working volunteers who have also sacrificed much for the CIPA cause, and whom I will let down if I go on strike. How can I possibly do that? 27 October 2015, 9 pm I have just watched the film Suffragette, and I have decided that instead of going on strike (which makes life difficult for the good people), I will just become extra-specially militant. Though I can’t quite see myself jumping under a horse, I am taken with the idea of storming a Council meeting with slogans and placards, or dropping parcels of dynamite into committee meetings. I could wear outrageous clothes, and say outrageous things just when people were expecting me to, er – well anyway. There is an argument that people only elected me because they thought I might shake things up a bit. I am thinking, if my role as Pee is going to be difficult and miserable, I may as well do some fun things now and then to compensate. 25 October 2015, 12 noon
Other things I failed to get permission for:
25 October 2015, 8 pm Ahhhh… A proper gin and tonic at last. You can have a gin and tonic in Washington. You can have a gin and tonic on a plane. But so often you get the gin that carries a picture of one of Her Majesty’s Yeomen Warders, wearing Her Majesty’s dressing-up clothes, and such a gin tastes a bit like Her Majesty’s silver polish. Add tonic and you have a composition suitable for use in descaling a kettle, which is no fun to drink when the sun’s past the yardarm. It will come as no surprise that at home, I have a choice of eight different gins. I cannot decide between them, so I have one of each. I wonder vaguely if I should have sought permission for this, but conclude that there are some aspects of my life which really are none of CIPA’s business. 26 October 2015 I find it difficult to wake. Because of the jet lag, obviously, not the eight different gins. Eight gins is a mere aperitif. I can prepare a whole notice of opposition after eight gins. Although I have to remove the insults before I file it. |
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