It was another fun evening and a full agenda at Bloombury Speakers with four prepared speeches and half a dozen impromptu “table topics”.
Swarajit Das kicked off the prepared speeches with a confident and entertaining icebreaker entitled “Three things you will hate about me” in which he explained that his tricky name, his pseudo-vegetarianism (well, pescatarianism) and his tendency to be pedantic might make it easy for people to dislike him. But this was of course all a humorous conceit and he came across as a very likeable chap.
Next, Adam Horne entertained us all with a speech which set out his one-man campaign against WMDs – which in this case meant “work mobile devices”. He very convincingly put the case that out-of-hours mobile phone usage was eating into our spare time and affecting our quality-of-life. “Watch Me Demonstrate” (another WMD) said Adam as he switched his own phone off at the start.
Next Alex Goldsbrough introduced us to the concept of Snow-Fu – otherwise known as the three vital lessons he learned from a drunken (!) ski instructor about how to teach children to ski. Great fun and useful for anyone who wants to fast track their children’s skills on the slopes.
Finally Raj Jain, completing his number 10 speech, inspired us all to adopt his two golden rules for succeeding in life “without being a geek”. Congratulations to Raj for completing the ten speech programme and officially becoming a Competent Communicator!
Insightful evaluations, were provided by Alex Donald, Femi Asaolu, Jane Liburd and Henry Playfoot.
In a lively table topics session, Kate gave six of us the opportunity to become agony aunts, providing useful and insightful advice to people with problems ranging from a boyfriend reluctant to propose, to a mother jealous of her globetrotting son. Ratan evaluated everyone’s performance in his inimitable style balancing humour and insight like the seasoned Toastmaster he is.
He also did a fine job as acting president in the absence of Bloomsbury president Nazia, and Dave Longley kept the proceedings moving along at a great pace as the evening’s Toastmaster.
After a full evening Ratan announced the results the voting – best speech to Raj, best evaluation to Henry and best table topics to Adam. Congratulations to all!
In wrapping up the meeting Ratan urged all present to sign-up for a morning of high-value workshops followed by the Division B Humorous Speech and Table Topics Contest (in which Bloomsbury member Glen Long will be representing Area 34!) this Saturday 16th October – more information and booking available at http://divisionb.eventbrite.com/.
This should be a great session with much learning and laughing to be done – which, after all, is what Bloomsbury is all about after all!
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