 | | | | Feel free to contact us with any questions, suggestions or feedback. | | | | | | | Meeting of 19th August 2008 | | | | Speakers of Croydon met on 19th August 2008 at Cornerstone House.
Abbi Greene brought a guest, Simon Wilcox. Also present were a returning guest, Andrew McLean and Remi Ladega's sons Temi and Tireni.
David Langworthy opened the meeting, and for a warmup asked those present to relate a recent incident where they had been nervous about something, done it anyway, and felt triumphant afterwards.
The toastmaster of the day was Sudanta Abeyakoon who explained the purpose of Toastmasters to our guests and introduced the Timekeeper Andrew Turner and Grammarian Philip Freeman.
Because of absences, there were only two prepared speeches.
First was Abbi Greene's fourth speech from the Competent communicators manual. The goal of this speech is to focus on the speaker's use of language, descriptions and rhetorical effects. In a speech titled 'Why Raw Food', Abbi chose a topic allowing for vivid descriptions.
Vanessa buck was giving her second Advanced Communicators Bronze speech and had the goal of making an entertaining speech drawing material from outside her own experience. She gave a speech called 'How the Other Half Live' full of amusing anecdotes about the peerage and based on a book called 'Stately Secrets'.
Frank Thatcher evaluated Abbi's speech, and Vanessa's was evaluated by Satyen Deepchan.
After a short break, the meeting moved on to Table Topics. David Langworthy was the topics master and introduced the theme of the evening, which was that he would make a statement that seems obviously correct and the speaker had to disagree strongly. Of course this led to much humour. Asked to contradict the statement that a man looks ridiculous in a bikini, Frank Thatcher argued that men should wear bikinis everywhere, all the time because everyone's body is beautiful. Satyen Deepchan was told that you should never throw eggs at politicians but insisted that the current ones deserve it. Temi Ladega spoke eloquently on why tomato sauce is the perfect accompaniment for breakfast cereal. Andrew McLean told us that there was nothing wrong with wearing a top hat to the theatre even if it inconveniences the person behind you. Simon Wilcox said that showering with your clothes on is in fact the right thing to do becauase it is green and because of the wonderful clinging sensation. Philip Freeman spoke on why it isn't necessary to give up your seat to a pregnant woman, and Tireni Ladega on how wearing string vests made of stinging nettles is an excellent deterrent to pickpockets. Andrew Turner evaluated the topics speakers.
The Grammarian was Philip Freeman; the timekeeper Andrew Turner.
Remi Ladega delivered an excellent general evaluation, also giving us her views on the importance of evaluations and how each evaluator should observe the speaker and deliver the evaluation.
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