We had another energetic and fun packed evening at Epsom Speakers Club on Monday 2nd October. After the excitement of the humorous speak and table topic competitions, it was going to be hard to keep the energy going. With everybody’s valuable input, we managed to have another amazing evening, with learning, laughter and more learning and laughter. The evening was a great success.
Paul D did another great job at setting up the room and organising the guests. Wasn’t it great to hear Clare, our general evaluator commend the club on a super warm and friendly welcome. That really is where the club can build from strength to strength as we keep our guests entertained and enthused by a warm Epsom Speakers welcome. The standards at Epsom Speakers are on the rise again, as we see new members improving at an explosive rate.
We then had Doris guiding us for the evening as the Toastmaster. Doris did show us her experience as a Toastmaster and kept the meeting to time, as well as adding some of the Toastmaster philosophies to her well-oiled performance. Doris introduced her team for the evening, namely Lloyd as timekeeper, Rohan as ballot counter and Sheena as videographer. And what a splendid job they all did. The frog was particularly busy on the warm up.
And the warm up role was taken by a first timer and newest member of the club, Julia Belling. I remember when Julia first came to Epsom Speakers and she had trouble with introducing herself as a guest and said she wanted to improve her confidence in public speaking. Well Julia has definitely done that. Julia chose a topic where everyone seemed comfortable talking about and did manage to leave us with a joke at the end of the session. Well done to Julia for her first time at the warm up role.
Then came the speeches, and what a line up we had. Amanda started the proceedings with her speech on Books, and really did let us know about her passion for reading. Justin let us know that we should all inject enthusiasm into our speeches, and did it with some wonderful vocal variety. I spoke about my awakening to a new me, and how we can move into a more compassionate and empathetic world. And Charlie gave us an entertaining speech about a wedding video which had some lovely twists and turns.
Then came the evaluation part of the evening. First up we had Aishi evaluating Amanda’s speech in his cool and humorous way. Phoebus evaluated Justin with an excellent evaluation, especially as it was his first evaluation. Penny evaluated Peter and Anjana stepped in at the last minute to evaluate Charlie. These were all very good evaluations. Evaluations are at the heart of the learning curve at Toastmasters and we all learned from these great evaluations.
After the break we had the table topics session performed by David Goodman. The theme of the topic was defend the indefensible. We certainly had some interesting topics here, and David did manage to get everybody speaking, which was great. Rohan started the session talking about Donald Trump. Justin spoke about the salary of footballers. Katy shared her hatred of wheels. Elizabeth let us know that free speech is so important that we should pay for it. Dennis spoke about the flat earth. Varun told us that Amazon Google should be exempt from tax as they provide such a good service. Clare spoke about compulsory naturism on Sundays. Julia spoke about wearing black socks with sandals for men as she says most men’s feet are not nice to look at. And Costa nearly broke out into a rendition of ‘I want to break free’ as he shared with us that he is the woman of the home. It was a fun and entertaining session and many laughs were had.
David Lane then evaluated the topics session with his usual laid-back style which was also informative and Clare Crowther (from Hull Speakers) performed the role of general evaluator to finish of the evening. Clare has become an accredited speaker through Toastmasters and wanted to share this information with you. She has done very well to have achieved this award and here is the link if you require any more information about it.
The winners of the contests were as follows. The best topic was won by Costa. The best evaluator was won by Anjana. The best speech was won by Justin. It is really good to see so many relatively new members winning awards. This also happened at the speech and topics contest. The area contest is being held on this Thursday 5th October at Surbiton Speakers club. Our winners going through are Paul D, Charlie, Phoebus and Costa. If you are free that evening please come along and support our members. I am sure they will deeply appreciate it. I am sure it will be another great evening. Please remember not to turn up in the new Epsom Speakers dress code of hat, black socks and sandals and that it. You may raise a few eyebrows. Lol.
Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday 16th October with Phoebus stepping out for the first time as Toastmaster. I am sure it will be another fun packed evening of learning and laughing. Let’s keep the energy up, and all improve our skills of speaking, leadership and organisation. Thank you all for being so supportive and enthusiastic. I always believe the more you put in, the more you get out, and you are all certainly putting in good work. Let’s keep it up.
Have a great couple of weeks.
Kind regards,
Peter. 🙂