It was the last meeting for 2004 on 16th December and we were so pleased to have over 17 members who came along to wind up the year together.

Our Toastmaster for the evening was Fiona Powell and she thoroughly engaged the audience throughout the evening in her own personal style getting us all to introduce ourselves highlighting what we would like to see under the Christmas tree - a very festive start!

Jeff Bartrop introduced the word 'SEASON' and just about everyone made an attempt to fit it into their speeches with very little trouble.

Teresa decided to make the Topics session a 'Grab Bag' event where everyone who took part was able to pick one item from her La Senza carrier bag. This definitely raised a few eyebrows but, unfortunate for some, nothing 'revealing' was pulled from the bag! Our volunteers eagerly took to the floor and elaborated on the many items retrieved from the bag which included: Matches, Malteasers, Money Bags and even a roll of 35mm film. Our runner up for the evening was Mike Watts who talked about our truly over organised topics master and Frances Crane was our winner with her talk on Film - I have no children so we just buy postcards! Brilliant topic.

Our speakers for the evening were Gerry Goodwin, Jon Rowe and Sue Coppens-Brown. All three introduced themselves with their Ice Breaker Speeches to the club in spectacular style. Gerry woke us up with a slap and a cry, Jon humoured us with his I'm not a rock star, and Sue enlightened us with her Universal Ipswich life. Well done to all of you for superb speeches.

This week two of our new members took on the speech evaluation roles. Vivi Coppens-Browne and Andy Pitt both gave superb evaluations of Gerry and Sue's speeches with Mike Watts completed the trio with his evaluation of Jon's speech. All three were encouraging and positive with their improvement points and the speakers went away feeling uplifted with the feedback and ready to give their 2nd speech.

Ian Crane ended the evening with his very valued General Evaluation of the meeting and one of his comments which we will act upon was the layout of the room. We changed the layout to try and see how our members would react with a different setup. It definitely changed the feel of the room and we will continue to try new things to see how people react to different situations.



SEE YOU ALL ON 13TH JANUARY 2005.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!