Meeting Report – 3rd August 2017

 

By Susan Rayner

Our first meeting into August with Annalise providing our members and guests with a warm welcome.

Our Sergeant at Arms Adam R kicked the meeting off telling us about our facilities at Ripley and also the importance of keeping our phones turned off.

Adam then handed over to myself Susan Rayner your new President, where I took the opportunity to remind you all of the importance of a back pocket speech, as we unfortunately had three people drop speeches this week.

Our Toastmaster for the evening was Neil who introduced his team with great enthusiasm. Eddie was Timekeeper, John V the Ah Counter and Nick the Grammarian. They all did a wonderful job.

Leading the warm up was myself this week by asking if there was a childhood skill or sport that you had given up that you wished you had not.

Richard G gave us a Hot Tip about how best to use our arms purposefully and not worry about leaving them at the side of our bodies.

Our first speaker was Sue Shaw who gave a speech from Humorously Speaking # 3 Make Them Laugh with a speech “Relief”. This was a superb speech which delivered a very serious subject in an assuming and entertaining way, it reminded us to continue to support charities and how reliant they are on our pennies to keep them going.

Next was Richard Murray with #1 of High Performance Leadership Manual with a speech titled “The Future is Looking Bright”. Opening the speech Richard invited us to a party, where the mayor would be in attendance. He then proceeded to inform us of his plans for a new Beckenham club.

The speeches were evaluated by Karen and David Hampton Green respectively.

Dave Henson started the table topics just before our break, as with only 2 speeches this week, it meant that we had an extended table topics which allowed all members and visitors able to undertake a table topic, Dave’s theme this week was to see a subject from someone else’s point of view. Jenny Taggart had the rather challenging task of evaluating all the table topics, which she did in time and providing everyone with a commendation and recommendation. A text book evaluation.

Our General Evaluator for the evening was Tony Smith who gave us lots of useful feedback.

We then had the presentation of awards, with Richard Hampton being presented with best table topic award.

I then reminded everyone to consider bringing a speech forward or getting ready with a back pocket speech and then drawing the meeting to a close by and inviting everyone to come to the next meeting on 17th August at Ripley.

A big thank you to all those who took on roles, gave speeches and helped to make the evening a great success.