Is a Toast Quintessentially Burnt Bread?

Is a toast quintessentially burnt bread, a reason to drink or something completely different?

Notes from the meeting of the 14^th May 2014

After being welcomed by our President Margaret the officers Will, Donal and Blanaid explained their roles. John who was Grammarian for the night introduced the word “Quintessential” for members to try to include in their speeches.  A lively topics session was led by Joe who was performing the role of Topicsmaster for the first time with an excellent selection of topics which included:

• Waste  
• Organ donation
• Star signs
• Decline in church attendance.
• The merits of Galway’s Roundabouts being replaced by traffic lights.
• Whether Toastmasters should be stopped from speaking by red lights.
• Whether toastmasters was correctly named.  Some felt it led to being thought of as a drinking club whilst one member’s daughter thought it was a toast eating club. Great opportunity for some existential angst.

Joe’s selected speakers found these topics very approachable and delivered of themselves a very entertaining session.

There were three prepared speeches all of which were from the Competent Communicator manual

• Aonghus  gave a stage 2 speech entitled “The Moon”  which dealt with the moon and the many way it affects us ranging from cultural, calendar, festivals, tides, effect of the full moon on workload as perceived emergency workers.  Appropriately the 14^th had a full moon.
• Aishling gave a stage 5 speech entitled “Stand up Tall” where she persuaded us of the need to adopt correct posture when dealing with computers to avoid repetitive strain injuries.
• Jenny gave a stage 6 speech entitled “The Armchair Detective” during which she revealed a surprisingly blood thirsty side to her nature. She talked about the works of some of her favourite authors Martina Cole, Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell.

An excellent and constructive set of speaker evaluations were performed by Cathryn, Rita and Majella.

During the Creative Corner Eddie introduced us to the works of the Irish author Donal Ryan and his books “The Spinning Heart “ and “The Thing About December”. He talked about how they showed that persistence pays.

Paul gave a thorough general evaluation of the meeting particularly praising the choice of universal table topics.

Is Toastmasters for you? Attend one of our meetings to find out.

Visit our website at galway.toastmastersclubs.org for dates and times.