This last meeting of Toastmaster year was a truly special one! It was an evening consecrated entirely to speeches and evaluations. Congratulations to Andrew Luis who finished his last 10th speech! Richard Beagle surprised us with his unusual format of speech entitled ,, What a year this was”  where he mentioned the most memorable speakers of the year- obviously with such a great speech he had no chances but to win the title of the best speaker of the evening! And of course, Diana’s speech about Moldova made the evening truly special given the distinctive wine and chocolates she brought for all!

The theme of the evening was ‘leaders’, which was fitting as it was the last evening we were to be led by our president Anthony Brennan, as we almost reach the end of the Toastmasters year.  Anthony’s been an excellent president over the past 12 months, but now passes the mantle to Zsuzsanna, following a unanimous vote on Wednesday night.

Zsuzsanna will officially take on the role in July and be joined by Ajeet and Aparna, who’ll share the Vice President (VP) Education role, Ryan in the role of VP Membership, Diana will take on VP Public Relations, Andrew the role of Treasurer, Chun as Sergeant at Arms and Emily as our Club Secretary.  Massive thanks to all of them for putting themselves forward for the roles, and also to those that have been carrying them out so well for the past year – Judy, Jack, Jill who are standing down as officers and Aparna, Ajeet and Andrew who are taking on the new roles.

Now onto the reason we all come to West Herts Speakers, the speaking element.  Our Table Topics session – the section of the evening in which we practice our impromptu speaking skills – was brilliantly led by Ged.  He had identified the various types of leader that exist and he asked members of the audience at random at talk about one of them.  Our winner was Diane, who joined us for the evening from Chiltern Toastmasters.  Well done Diane!

We had three prepared speeches of the evening.  Richard’s speech was delivered by video, as he pursues an advanced Toastmasters programme, Andrew delivered his 9^th speech from the Competent Communicator (CC) manual enlightening us to where the term ‘thinking outside the box’ came from and Jill delivered her 10th speech from the CC manual encouraging us all to follow her simple tips to cut down on plastic consumption.  All excellent speeches, but it was Jill that won the Best Speaker award on this occasion.

As always, each prepared speaker & the table topics master is assigned an evaluator, who delivers their own speech critiquing the speaker.  Ajeet, Aparana, Aga and Ryan all delivered brilliant evaluations, but it was Ryan that celebrated his first victory in the Best Evaluator category.

Our next club meeting is Wednesday, 27^th June. Expect some exciting twists at this next meeting, as we are having a Speechathon (six speeches, no table topics) to properly mark the end of the Toastmasters year and launch into the new with vigour.  The theme is Feast.  Richard is on course to receive his Advanced Communicator Bronze with his After Dinner speech.

Dress for dinner and join us for a night of fun and fantastic speaking!