Despite the fact that it’s August and we have the siren calls of exotic holidays, we had 16 members and 5 guests at our club meeting last night. As always, the evening was filled with speeches, Table Topics and lots of fun.

Deborah helped us all to “get grounded” with advice about using a vision board, a future diary and repeated affirmations. Mark shared his “daddy rules”, which seem to have worked for the past 7 years, but suspects he may need to change for the teenage years. Then Nina answered the all-important question – “where does the money go?”. We discovered that our membership fees are mainly used to pay Toastmasters International and for room here. They were all excellent speeches, although I was saddened when Nina said that the club dues aren’t actually being used to fund my exotic holidays. Nina managed to make the potentially dull topic of club finances so interesting that she took home the Best Speaker award.

I gave a talk with my “area director” hat on, and John took on the task of introducing the meeting so well that I’m considering early retirement. Kevin led the Table Topics session, with questions that invited us to choose between two options. He had been inspired by a visit that he and John made to 104 London Debaters. Much fun was had by all, and our best Table Topics award went to one of our visitors – Cristina. It obviously made an impression as we can look forward to welcoming Cristina as a new member soon.

We had helpful evaluations from Arnold, Stuart, Liz and Aris. – with Aris winning the Best Evaluator award. Donia did double duty as both Ah-Counter and Grammarian. Njoud Mahmoud, a visiting Toastmaster, was our Timekeeper. At the end of the meeting, Jane gave her General Evaluation. It was great to see her back at the club.

John rounded out the meeting by inviting everyone to volunteer for roles online (click the link below…) and reminded us all of our speech contests on 19th September. Please support the club by volunteering for roles at the meetings and in the contests. John also plans to contact each member about personal Toastmasters goals in the coming weeks. Finally, John spoke about the idea of planning a debate night at a future meeting, which sounds like a lot of fun to me. I personally like the idea of us having themed nights from time-to-time, so for our next meeting I’d like to propose the theme of “holidays”. If you are giving a speech or performing a role, please try and incorporate the holiday theme in some way. It’s always good to try something new 🙂

We achieved a lot in just a couple of hours (and of course the opportunity to socialise afterwards). I’m definitely looking forward to to the next one.

Steve