Wednesday 17th June 2009

by Sharath Jeevan

A balmy June 17th evening provided the backdrop for an evening of transition – both for the two speakers concerned and the club’s broader Leadership team.

Gray Standen, donning a captain’s cap, acted as President for the final time, ending her reign gracefully. Franco Vaccaro acted as Toastmaster with some wonderful injections of deadpan humour, including some gentle teasing of those weren’t able to make the evening. Sunaina Shori also acted capably as timekeeper for the very first time.

We were treated to two wonderful speeches by Maria Hemming and Pamela Smith, both around inspiring your audience and both signifying their full status as Competent Communicators. Maria spoke movingly about ‘Dolce Far Niente’, on the benefits of staying still and not doing anything, with some lovely use of pauses for dramatic effect. Pamela’s speech, entitled ‘We live and learn’, included a notable reference to the dwindling value of sex – both frequency and enjoyment – over time.

Franco then visually demonstrated the transition of the leadership team by lining up old and new players of each role, in both a fun and efficient way. The ceremony even inspired one member, Tom Biswas, to join the leadership team on the spot. Indeed, Tom ran the table topics session around the theme of ‘change’, where he skilfully varied the difficulty of the topics based on the experience of the speakers concerned.

The quality of evaluation throughout the evening was very high, with Paul Carroll and Dorothea Stuart evaluating the first two speeches, and Richard Holland playing evaluator for the first time for table topics. Highly regarded Kerry-Ann Smith from London Trojans was general evaluator and provided a thorough and fair analysis of the evening.

The evening rounded off on an emotional note with some flowers for Gray for her leadership – a nice end to a very special evening.