My Toastmasters election special

Posted by on Mar 3, 2010 in Toastmasters | 2 comments Last night I was Table Topics Master at Cambridge Speakers’ Club and I invited  members and courageous guests to imagine they were parliamentary candidates trying to win votes. The role of the TTM is to provide different questions which speakers can respond to totally spontaneously, to make them think on their feet for up to two minutes. I decided to repeat a topic which I did two years...
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The wonders of walking, is it the new rock’n’roll?

Posted by on Dec 20, 2009 in Personal, Toastmasters | 17 comments My last Toastmasters’ speech a couple of weeks ago was about the many wonders of walking; my joy of belonging to The Ramblers’ Association and the Ramblers Group in Cambridge. There were many smiles when I told the audience they could literally walk into love, just like Geoff Jones and Sally in Norfolk did, and other couples that I have met while leaping across a stile. Small surprise then...
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The recession and sprucing up on public speaking

Posted by on Jun 21, 2009 in Toastmasters | 2 comments I was at the 10th anniversary dinner of Cambridge Speakers’ Club a few days ago and asked our area governor Graham Frost whether the recession had seen a decline of membership. I wondered if Toastmaster clubs were closing due to lack of support. On the contrary, he told me, the recession was making them more popular. He told me that Toastmasters International, the world’s largest...
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Preparing my next Toastmasters speech

Posted by on Apr 10, 2009 in Toastmasters | 10 comments You may have noticed that a side panel with my Toastmasters speeches has vanished. That is because I am no longer preparing them in the same way. And they had been there a while anyway and were pretty old. I used to write my speeches in full and learn them almost word for word. But that is not what public speaking is about.  My personal challenge is to present a confident speech by learning it...
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My King’s Cross assignation and Toastmasters

Posted by on Nov 11, 2008 in Toastmasters, updates | 7 comments I am meeting a strange woman at King’s Cross Station, London today – strange in the sense that she is unknown to me – to research another hopefully gripping instalment of a book I am writing. All will be revealed in due course. I’m hoping we can find somewhere quiet and discreet to conduct our interview with my MP3 recorder. Her story is tragic, heartbreaking and totally...
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