24^th October 2022

Our meeting had a theme of “Once More Into The Breach” and was run by Andrew Miller, who gave us an almost Shakespearian introduction to his theme and ran the meeting with his normal style of fun and confidence.

We have had hybrid meetings for some time now, but this meeting in particular showed how effective they are with a number of people joining on line rather than in person.

We had two speeches the first on Leadership styles by Donald entitled “Mo Drama – From Da Bahama” and the second was on “A valuable lesson” by Andy Howarth, on his experience on his recent first aid course.

Andy Howarth beat Donald Sweeting to win the best speaker award: a GREAT RIVALRY was on this day born… LOL.

Following the speeches,  Macaulay ran a unique (as least in my experience) Table Topics.  He asked 5 willing volunteers to speak on topics based on Halloween and then, asked each of the people to come up again and answer the same question.  This gave each person the normal TT experience as well as letting them have some prep time for the 2^nd session.  It was a well thought out and delivered session.

The winner was Melanie Brookes 

And then there was the Evaluations, and as ever, these were informative and fair.  The winner of best Evaluator was our Table Topics Evaluator Jean Stewart.  Sadly, technology stopped us from getting a picture of Steve giving the ribbon to Jean on line.

It was also the first meeting after our Area Club contest, which Donald (TT) and Steven (Humorous Speech) represented us.  It was a tough contest and Steve went through to the Division as 2^nd place speakers.

Elizabeth Mead our Area Director presenting the awards to Mr Steven Bisby and Mr Donald Sweeting, both our participants who entered the contests today.

Overall, a great fun night, with laughs and lessons for all

Surprises come in all forms, good, bad and of course the opportunities to try something new.  Well our meeting on Monday started with a surprise in that we were not in the normal room, but rather downstairs in the ‘Beatles’ (the band, not the insect) area of the Regent Hotel.  This did throw our Hybrid meeting organization into a bit of disarray but Stephanie (Zoom master) and Steve, our President and Toastmaster for the day, met the challenge and got things sorted very well. 

We had an Ed slot from Andy on the humorous speech contest.  It focussed on the importance of contestants creating a good speech first and foremost, with at least a fair part of it based on humor.  This was in prep for the next meeting (26th Sept) which is our local humorous and TT speech contest.

It was, as ever, a good meeting, well led by Steve as Toastmaster, with 2 good speeches, an interesting table topic’s session from the ever inventive Val,  based on Fables and a good turn out.

The winners were:

Best Evaluator  – Lianna (Speech Evaluator for Stephanie)

Best Table topics – Donald

Best Speaker – Stephanie with a short speech entitled Keep it positive.

The Venue:

Next meeting is on the 26th Sept, it is a competition so please come along and support.

The meeting after that, on the 10th October is our open night, so again, please ask anyone who you think might benefit from coming to pop along.  More details to follow on this.