President elected

THE Association of Speakers Clubs’ national president Eric Baker has congratulated Peter Minshall on being elected the new Loughborough Speakers club president at the start of the new season.

The post of vice president now goes to James Davies, a long standing member of the club and one of our most experienced speakers.

Peter Minshall takes over from Arthur Murray who has worked very hard over the past few years to ensure the club stays in the public eye and Arthur will continue with his role as treasurer and publicity officer.

Eric took the role as chair for the evening and after leading the warm up session introduced the three speakers for the evening.

National contest finalist, David Hopkins gave the first speech entitled “The science of Happiness”.

He began by asking if we remembered Ken Dodd and his Diddymen. “Are you blessed with more than your share of Happiness” he asked. This led us to humming the tune and remembering the old days of Ken Dodd’s humour and we were involved straight away.

Happiness is being taken more seriously these days with studies exploring the things that make people happy.

Of course happy people work and play more efficiently and this can be seen as important to the country as the GDP.

David gave illustrations. It’s not always money or material wealth that makes people happy. Rockefeller for instance had billions of dollars but poor health, which only started to improve when he gave some of his billions away.

Are you a glass half full person or a glass half empty? Certainly food for thought.

Frank Rawson, a newer member to the club gave his third speech entitled “Water”. This was a well researched speech of seven minutes which he performed with little need of his notes. Water is certainly one of the most vital substances to sustain life and industry. Frank examined the various sources of water from the vapour contained in clouds, the seas and rivers to snow capped mountains.

He covered the effect of the hurricanes in the Caribbean and the power of water which was used early on in our history with the water wheel. This led on to the Hydro Electric Dams and high pressure cleaning in Industry and Precision Engineering.

We often take for granted where water comes from but where would we be without it. We drink it; we wash in it, swim and travel on it.

Eighty per cent of our body weight is water and two thirds of the world is covered in it. Frank urged us to consider this especially as it was soon time for the tea break.

James Davies then gave an Impromptu speech from the Advanced Manual.

He was given a choice of three subjects and ten minutes to prepare a speech between five and eight minutes.

From Weather, Time and Entertainment James chose to speak about weather. Well, it is probably the most talked about subject we know. An opener to many conversations wherever you may find yourself. Only in England can you often find four seasons in one day.

James spoke for nearly eight minutes on various aspects of weather around the world with a particularly vivid description of the colourful flowers that appear in the desert after a rare fall of rain and only last for a couple of days.

He concluded that there is no such thing as bad weather only the wrong clothing.

Mark Harrison led us through a topics session based on summer activities.

Everyone had a chance to speak for up to three minutes on such topics as Camping, Festivals, Eclipse and Exams.

These seemed fairly straightforward until Frank was given the topic Bolt. From his seat to the lectern he had time to associate this with Usain Bolt and running but cleverly sidelined this into talking about bolts in engineering, cycling and thunder.

Topics are an excellent format to practice thinking on your feet.

You never know when you might be asked to say a few impromptu words, be it a Vote of Thanks or a Welcome to Visitors.

To practice these skills and have an entertaining evening, join us at John Storer House on the first and fourth Tuesday of the month at 7.30 pm.

For more info visit www. loughboroughspeakers.org. uk.

The ASC where you become a better speaker, a better presenter and a better leader.