Brighton and Hove Speaker Club meeting on 24th August 2011 saw three excellent speeches including one from our Distiguished toastmaster Dave Sutcliffe on the interpretation or Poetry.
Dave chose to speak about the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”; a book which his mother had given him some 15 years ago. Dave quoted from the writing without notes and enchanted us all with the feeling and expression he put into the words. Describing each bit of the poetry as he recited.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
There’s more about Omar Kayyam on Wikipedia if you’re interested.
I’ve been away on holiday for the last few meetings so I had not seen the new program format. i must say that this is the best speakers club program I has seen to date. A nicely laid out A5 size 4 page pamphlet. inside the front cover are descriptions of all the speech projects included in the toastmasters international Competent Communicator manual, this is a great reminder of what each speaker is trying to get accross and the skills they are trying to master. On the inside back (page 3) is the running order of the meeting with all items listed with exact times against each item. This is really useful when you’re running the meeting as it helps you to know if it’s all going to plan.
One of the main things in any Toastmasters speakers club meetings is getting the timing right. The Competent leader track, in part, is all about time management and this helps enormously. I was Topic Master for the evening so the start times against each item ensured that I knew when to start to wrap up my table topics section. I hit the time bang on, leaving enough time to get off stage and allow the toastmaster to intro the next section for them to start right on time.
We had two other speeches, an “Icebreaker” entitled “Life isn’t all funny Haha” and a “CC4″ entitled “Keep on Learning” both of which were very good indeed. All in all my first meeting for about a month was a really great and maybe the best meeting I’ve been to yet.
