Despite many any of our regular members being away on their summer holidays, last Wednesday’s club meeting, at The Noke in St Albans, had such a buzz to it – with 2 icebreaker speeches – that you’d have thought we were all there.

‘Being British’ was the theme of the club night on Wednesday 26th July, introduced by our toastmaster of the evening Jill.

We welcomed our Area Director, Steve Campion to the meeting as the only guest of the evening.  He took on one of the evaluator roles and provided an inspiring evaluation of our first speaker Andrew, who’s experiences at a Jazz festival in Rotterdam had led him to question the adequacy in the provision of public toilets!  Steve also won Best Table Topics Speaker for his impromptu speech on his history with toastmasters.

Chris delivered his icebreaker speech – the first speech in the Competent Communicator Manual given to all new toastmaster members.  He overcame his nerves and delivered an excellent speech, that was superbly evaluated by Corinne.

Then we had yet another icebreaker speech – this time for Saulius, our newest member.  Saulius’ personal story about how he didn’t become a pilot earned him the ‘Best Speaker’ Award for the night, while his evaluator Judy was crowned ‘Best Evaluator’.

The word of the day, selected by Grammarian Matt, was ‘umbrage’ but attendees might have mistook it for ‘flannelling’ after table topics master Paul M threw some challenging questions at our more experienced club members Anthony Brennan and Judy, around the subject of how to improve toastmasters.  They handled themselves expertly, as did our other impromptu speakers Chris and Ajeet, who both made us laugh with their own personal anecdotes.

Our ‘ah-counter’ was Ryan was superb – he put a unique and amusing slant on his report back to the group about which of us had used those killer filler words: ah, ummm, like, so… etc

Just when we thought we were going to finish ahead of time, our general evaluator (and resident comedy genius Paul G) decided to ignore the red light signal of timekeeper Barrie (which tells our speakers when their time is up) and treat us to a very candid, yet very humorous review of the night.

Club President, Anthony Brennan, then handed out the awards and brought the meeting to a close.

Thank you everyone who attended, it really was another great night.