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.
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