30 November 2016, 9 pm
I am dining with the Past Presidents of CIPA. Every year this noble brigade gathers together to celebrate the fact that they no longer have to fulfil any Presidential duties. By way of sport, it is customary for them to invite the current President to tell them what is going on at CIPA these days, and then to re-enact the Council meetings of their time by heckling and inciting wrath and generally stirring the Pot of Presidential Pestilence. But more on that later. I should point out that in line with this tradition, although against some of their better judgements, they duly invited me to their dinner this time last year. In line with various other CIPA traditions, or perhaps by way of additional sport, they held their dinner in a gentlemen’s club. And whilst I was assured that Special Dispensations could be made to allow me into this hallowed environment, I felt obliged to point out that it was against my personal and professional ethics to enter into discriminatory environments, however hallowed, and even dispensatably. So, basically, I didn’t turn up. And someone else had to tell them what was going on at CIPA and no doubt it was a good thing I wasn’t there to hear the response. But I digress. I have been welcomed most nobly into this year’s gathering. There is another Presidentess there, and she looks fiercer and more Past-Presidential than I do, so there have been no brandy-and-cigar moments and indeed no funny business at all. I have dined well. The company has been enjoyable. And the slight wooziness I am experiencing is only partly due to finding myself in a room full of past incarnations, like a Doctor Who Christmas Special, the other part being due to the many gin and tonics it took to incite me there in the first place. I regret neither the incitement nor the gin. We have finished our desserts and the current Pee, Mr Rollins, begins his speech about what is going on at CIPA these days. After a while I note that the dessert and the wooziness are taking their toll, and that at least half of our eminent Past Presidents are nodding off. Each in turn wakes to receive the circulating port decanter, and then returns to slumber having passed it to the next. The decanter goes clockwise. Of course. A Past President who did not know that would be an imposter indeed. Then Mr Rollins reaches the point in his speech that is about Regulation. Suddenly, all of the Past Presidents snap out of their reveries and into action. They begin to contribute expressions of outrage from all sides of the table. Each has known all along that This Would Happen, and each has a suggestion about how Mr Rollins can Put Regulation In Its Place. Some of these suggestions date back from before we had a Legal Services Act and some of them from before the UK abolished hanging as a punishment for causing offence to right-minded gentlemen. The discussion does indeed begin to sound very like a Council meeting. Mr Rollins looks perplexed: he was not expecting audience participation. I look relieved: I am glad I avoided doing this when I was the Pee. This is, however, better-natured than your average Council meeting, because no one is taking minutes, no one is asking us to stick to an agenda, and no one requires any concrete outcomes, other than the abolition of all things Regulatory of course. I begin to wonder whether our actual Council meetings might be more productive if we were to adopt a similar format – including the port-passing protocol. The Past Presidents tell Mr Rollins that in this room there is a wealth of wisdom and experience, and that he should turn to them as often as he likes during his Presidency for Sound Counsel and support. Mr Rollins says thank you, he will. No he won’t. If there were Sound Counsel to be had in a roomful of sleepily cantankerous Past Presidents, some of whom remember a long way back but many of whom have forgotten the Legal Services Act 2007, then every President would seek it. But I have not known this to happen, ever. Even I, who was a rubbish President and had to ask other people how to do pretty much everything, never called on the Past Presidents’ Brigade. Life is too short to ask a plurality of patent attorneys for advice. Possibly life and death together are too short for that.
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