"TURNING 90 and CHUNKING!"

I think you know when the Toastmaster is going to be someone of the experience of Graeme , that you’re going to be in for a treat for our meeting on Thursday 22nd September.

And Graeme certainly did not disappoint, with a meeting that ran as smooth as clockwork.

Our first speaker was Jen, who spoke about turning 90. It was a wonderful lead-in for her speech, as we all knew it wasn’t her age (or should know!). Jen then informed us of her successful weight loss programme, the importance of having a mentor and avoiding sugars at breakfast time. With plenty of humour that Jen has become synonymous for, she also won the award for best speech.

Helen introduced Jen and did an excellent job. One thing I particularly liked was her repeating the objectives, by saying “what we’ll be looking for…”

Anna presented a speech about learning “how to chunk”, which essentially means breaking a reading into “chunks” of phrases. I thought some of Anna’s phrases were brilliant; especially “lift the words off the page”. By reading a passage to us from Lord of the Rings we were able to hear its effectiveness in action. An extremely useful speech for any of us wanting to do a bard at some stage.

Noel did a great job of introducing her, using lovely phrases like “real treasure” and “welcome her presence”, making Anna feel really valued.

Darryl ran our table topics session, with the theme of tattoos, certainly an interesting concept and not surprising from someone with his devilish sense of humour.

Linda was asked if she had to choose a Chinese character what it would be, to which the answer was Lucky Linda! A wonderful topic by Linda, showing great use of pause.

One of our newer members, Sandy, was next. She did a fantastic job talking about latitude and longitude coordinates and how they relate to her journey so far. We found that besides Germany, she’s also been to Spain and the US.

Our final table topic was presented by Stephanie. She spoke about which cartoon character she would choose. We found out she is a Roadrunner fan and that she is also good at table topics, winning the best table topic award.

Helen’s and Noel’s evaluations were both top class. I thought both of them provided a thorough analysis of their respective speeches and their use of gestures was something we could all learn from.

Patrick was our table topics evaluator and he was enthusiastic in his appraisal of our three speakers. He presented some good perspectives on their speeches, in one case speaking longer than the table topic itself! As we know, feedback when first starting is so important.

That left Mike to present his extremely vigilant timekeepers report, with not a second out of place.

I kept my General Evaluators report brief, so that Graeme was quite relieved when we actually finished before the clock was reading 1pm.