Wednesday 15th April 2009
by Robert Yuen
Spring sprung at ‘the best club in the world’ when Club President Gray Standen opened the meeting and gave a sunny welcome to three new members: Errol Williamson, Richard Holland, and Sharath Jeevan.
Like chocolate Easter eggs, Gray gave the audience a piece of advice –watch “The Speaker” on BBC television. Why? Because the programme contains many features of Toastmasters such as improving body language and learning to speak persuasively. Fascinating fact: the senior adviser on ‘The Speaker’ is a London-based Toastmaster member.
The egg-emplary John Craddock, Toastmaster for the evening, cracked open his section with the words of a certain Ralph C. Smedley (founder of Toastmasters International) “The unprepared speaker is allowed to be afraid”, and pointed out the importance of the club’s mission. He then spent a very valuable few moments running through the format of the evening’s programme for the benefit of guests and regular members.
Timekeeper for the evening was the judicious Brendan Bensley.
Grammarian was Andrew Klimaytys who proposed Explicit (or was that egg-plicit) as the word of the evening.
The first bud-ding speaker was new member Sharath Jeevan with his Icebreaker speech entitled “Keeping Windows Open”. He delivered a personal and poignant talk on his life living in India, Saudi Arabia and UK, and the charity work that he was involved in.
The second speaker was the already-in-bloom Errol Williamson delivering his first speech at Riverside Communicators with the title of “Peeping Tom”. He enchanted the audience with a lively and passionate speech on his love of cars, interior design and food.
Like a sunflower in high summer, advanced speaker Dorothea Stuart performed a magnificent monodrama by the poet Robert Browning entitled “My Last Duchess” that lasted for 7 minutes without any reference to notes. She was poised, elegant and in-character throughout her piece.
Evaluators for the speakers respectively were Zahid Bashir, Bek Singh and the glamorous Sonia Aste.
Topics Master for the evening was the engaging Sue Kennedy and she used Easter and ‘new beginnings’ as the core theme for her questions. In total, nine people (four of which were the guests) delivered their one minute responses with humour and warmth.
Jenny Betts tackled the tough job of Topics Evaluation terrifically, and Riverside’s Geetha Mazarelo rounded off the evening with a detailed and insightful general evaluation.
Awards went to: Andrew Klimaytys – Best Evaluator; Tom Biswas – Best Table Topics ; Best Speaker – Errol Williamson.
