1 February 2017, 5 am
I get up before the streetlamps come on and head to CIPA Towers for a day full of meetings. I have applied a new HRT patch and calmed down a bit since last week. Mr Davies still looks scared, though, on my arrival at the Congress Steering Committee meeting. When CIPA moves house – which it is going to have to do by the end of this year – Mr Davies is going to make sure no one tells me the new address. 1 February 2017, 2 pm I attend a meeting of the CIPA Benevolent Association. I was roped into being one of its trustees at the Past Presidents’ dinner last year, after I’d had a vulnerability-and-tonic too many. “It is not at all onerous,” they said. And a week later, Companies House wrote to remind me that I was personally responsible for the charity’s paperwork being in good order, on penalty of criminal sanctions. So today we are meeting to check that the paperwork is indeed in good order. There are only six of us, one of whom is Mr Davies anyway, and his paperwork is never in good order for anything. My own paperwork is only in good order because there is so far relatively little of it, other than the letter from Companies House and some brief accounts and activity reports. But I make a brave stab at appearing trustworthy and responsible, and this seems to satisfy the others. It does admirable work, the Benevolent Association. It has a pot of money from some generous donors, and out of this pot it provides assistance to CIPA members and their families who fall on hard times. Very few people know about this, and very few people need to. There are, I suspect, many CIPA members who cannot imagine how a patent attorney can ever fall on hard times. But then, these are not the people who have to hoover their own offices, empty their own bins, mend their own photocopiers, file their own tax returns, organise their own payroll, and plunder their own petty cash tins for a pint of milk on their way in to work. They are not the people whose petty cash tins contain just about enough for a pint of milk and a first class stamp to Newport, because they are not the people who have to chase their own clients through farmyards and caravan sites to get their £420 bills paid. There are other CIPA members for whom this quiet little charity has been the only thing keeping them from living on a caravan site themselves. Even with Companies House breathing down my neck, frankly, I am proud to be involved.
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