Our meeting on 9th of August was a bit on the fly! Or at least Freddie Daniells convinced us to that truth in his energetic introduction! He also helped us imagine the agendas that were stuck in the traffic with our President Katja van Koten, and therefore, slightly late.
Then, our SaA Brian Skelton explained the logistics and introduced the guests: Andrew, Dmitri and Branko.
Branko was visiting us for the second time, and this night he volunteered to help us by being a Timekeeper. And what a great job he did providing us with detailed, yet concise, reports of the timings.
The next part of the meeting was Table Topics run by Monika Swiderska. The theme was inspired by her not-so-lucky adventure, when her backpack was stolen a couple of days earlier. The first speaker was David West who was asked what would he do if his bag was stolen. However, David has an incident of his own as he fell on the slippery steps just before the meeting and he told us about that. Marcin Tolysz evaluated David and suggested that he could focus more on the story. Then we had Carol West telling us about one object she can’t live without. She explained us how she needs to monitor her insulin levels and that her medical monitoring device helps her with that. Carol was evaluated by Brian Skelton. Our third speaker was Lynne Cantor, who tried to convince the audience (a board of managers) that the missing laptop and missing data is not a big issue as everything was backed up in the cloud. Bob Fergusson commented that he loved how Lynne lead this table topic with dialogue. The next speaker was Tadija Popovic telling us that if he had had something stolen, he would probably drink vodka. Evaluation for Tadija came from our VPE Hannah Van Der Deijl. The fifth speaker was Cat Kipling who was asked about the form of punishment for the thief. Cat explained that he or she should rebuild the stolen laptop. She was evaluated by Ian Brown. The final table topics speaker was our guest Dmitri. Dmitri told us that we should not put all eggs in one basket if we want to avoid having all belongings stolen. The evaluation came from Chinkata Opara, who commended Dmitri on doing a table topic during his very first Toastmasters meeting.
The first speech was delivered by Ian Brown. It was a mesmerising story about Julius Caesar entitled “Roman Candle”. We learned a lot about Cesar’s life and re-lived the history. Ian brilliantly brought this story to life and completed project 5 from Storytelling manual.
Then, we took part in a workshop by Brian Skelton, who taught us how to make our party special by making fantastic and unusual fruit decorations. Master Chef Brian invited our President Katja to try making the decorations herself, which turned out to be less easy than we all thought!
The evaluation of the first speech was given by Bob Fergusson. Bob commended Ian for his changes of pace that helped to deliver a story, but suggested he should start with more action. After a very lively and powerful evaluation deliver by Bob, we listened to Chinkata Opara who commented on Brian’s speech. Chinkata said that the room was enthralled by this very interesting and unusual speech. Chinkata recommended that Brain could lifted the food up, so everyone could see it and perhaps explain more why certain things are so difficult to do.
Next, we had a fantastic and very insightful Open Feedback session led by our VPE Hannah Van Der Deijl. She not only facilitated it smoothly, but also provided a lot of observant and helpful comments herself.
The role of General Evaluator was filled by our Area Director Cat Kipling. She mentioned that it was her third Toastmasters meeting on the day, but she also highlighted that all the meetings were really good. Then, she evaluated all the roles of the evening.
Lastly, Hannah gave us a bit of an update on VPE housekeeping with the hint that she would like to explain her plans for this year in a speech.
Finally, it was handed over to Katja, who called Lynne to the stage to hand in the best table topic speaker award. And after that, we went to the pub
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