The 12th of July meeting really was a brilliant one.  The energy in the room was at the highest we’d seen it for a while; laughter filled the room and everyone really enjoyed themselves.

Our toastmaster for the night was our former president, Anthony Boboe, who capably guided us through the agenda.  Aparna, the table topics master, threw us a curve-ball by completely changing the format for this part of the evening.  She held a debate on whether our increased reliance on IT was a good thing.  Well done to Anthony Brennan for winning best table topics speaker.

We had two excellent icebreaker speeches from two of our newest members – Ryan and Werner.  Next was Ajeet, who used his 5th speech from the competent communicator manual to tell us how we should listen more effectively.  Our final speech was delivered by Jill on how to live long and prosper, like a Vulcan.  It was speech number 6 for Jill and earned her the Best Speaker Award for the night.

The second part of the evening consists of the evaluations and this meeting we heard Corinne, Jack, Judy and Paul Goodman give their commends and recommends to our speakers.  All were superb at offering useful advice, but it was Paul who received the Best Evaluator prize on this occasion.

This meeting was also the first in the new toastmasters year, under the charge of new President Anthony Brennan and the new committee:

Jack Rick (Treasurer), Judy Mallinson & Paul Goodman (co-VP of Education), Jill Faiella (VP of Public Relations), Ajeet Maurya (VP of Membership), Aparna Pesala (Secretary), Andrew Louis (Sergeant at Arms).

Next meeting: 26th July, 2017.