It might have been cold in Ewell last night, but there was a warm welcome for all at Epsom Speakers.

We welcomed three new guests to our meeting; Jack, Debra and Brian. We also had our District Director Florian Bay and our area director, Vaneshan.

Debra started the meeting as our Sargent at arms, only the third time but she takes control well.

After winning a holiday, our President Dave was somewhere warmer, but Mark Peacock stood in for a warm welcome to us all.

For this meeting we were put in the hands of Gillian Prior as our Toastmaster. She was helped by her team for the evening;

  • Kat Romananska had the stopwatch, lights and ‘squeaking pig’ to keep us all within the time during the evening. 
  • John took control of the video camera to record the speakers and evaluators.
  • Patrick Ebbs took the responsibility for collecting and counting the ballots

Gary Argent gave us a great warm-up challenge and I am please to say this video has been made public.

When everyone had completed their warmups. Our Toastmaster introduced our 4 speakers.

  • Fatai Dabiri
  • Matt Tuff
  • Julia Belling
  • Charlie Warshawski

These were followed by the four evaluators.

  • Mark Peacock
  • Amanda Zwarts
  • Costa Nicolaou
  • Penny Williams

We are also able to release the speech by Charlie and his evaluation from Penny

After the guests were introduced, we had our break with tea, coffee and biscuits.

The second half is handed over to the table topics master. This gives the opportunity for stage time to those not already taken speaking roles, with an emphasis on encouraging our visitors to give a go. You need only speak for 1min up to 2min 30seconds, but, as I always warm people, that first 1 min seems to take forever!

It was great to see so many guests having a go and then all the participants were evaluated by our Topics Evaluator, John.

This then left the General Evaluation to cover everyone who had not yet been evaluated and we were pleased that our District Director, Florian Bay, agreed to do this for us, and to release this as a public speech.

Mark Returned to the stage as stand-in President to award the Ribbons and close the meeting.