Wednesday 3rd June 2009

by Tom Biswas

So we have had an excellent few days of weather and it was clear that summer was here to stay; but not on the way to this Riverside Wednesday, as this blogger forgot his coat! Even so it was a terrific warm evening in the confines of York House with excellent speeches and considerate evaluations and storming applause.

We started with an urging from our president to get more people into evaluating – Gray pointed out that a lot of the most popular TV programmes are those where the evaluation takes centre stage. Time for Riversiders to do the same! Then Sue Kennedy spoke about the Riverside Garden Party which will take place in Jenny Betts’ garden on 12th July – sounds like great fun.

Richard Holland introduced his timekeeping role, and this was his first instance of speaking at Riverside and it was very well done, in a role that has technical aspects as well speaking to tight time schedules.

For the main speeches, Mark Brown’s icebreaker took us through what it really means to him to be home in Britain and why Australia isn’t quite so cool. Errol Williamson’s #8 reminded us with a dryly ironic speech that even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat, and made his points very effectively indeed. Dorothea Stuart’s advanced poetry reading was a unique and complicated speech combining poetry and prose – will I ever look at eating my porridge in the same way again? And Franco Vaccaro did an educational speech that separated the peas from the pods. We learnt that in competitions we should realise that judges placed 50% of the criteria in the pea (the content), 30% is the pod (the delivery) and 20% is its pop pea- like enough (the language).

After the break when we got to speak to some of the many guests, the Topics Master for the evening was Geetha Mazarelo with a range of thought provoking topics based on talent. All who took part, myself included, enjoyed this thoroughly.

Robert Yuen did a magnificent role as Grammarian that I will try to emulate in a few weeks, introducing himself and clearly setting down criteria in the beginning of the session and then beautifully summarising many different strands including good phrases, sentence fragments and his excellent word of the day (sizzling).

True leadership comes from handling the difficult situations well. And in toastmasters, this is no different – when it was found that we lacked a table topics evaluator, Gray Standen delivered an impromptu evaluation without notes that looked like it must have been scripted! Brava!

Our General Evaluator was from Chris Boden of Holborn Speakers (and also St Paul’s) and excellently covered all aspects of what had been an enjoyable and varied Riverside meeting. We also learned of the single-sheet-shake, a scientific problem with holding a single sheet of paper steady – it’s impossible, so we should use cards or something hard behind.

We also received a little extra information at the end with the timetable for the meeting with news of a special workshop on 16 June for better choosing speech topics (see thelondonspeaker.com) and about a tall tales competition at Marlow Orators, an Advanced speaking club.

Awards went to Franco for best speaker putting his best pod forward, Heidi won best table topic for putting herself first and Jenny won best evaluator for Mark Brown’s icebreaker. This ended the 3rd of June at the Riverside, and it was as usual an excellent and thoroughly enjoyable meeting.