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.
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