Several members were unable to attend, including the President David Heaton who was celebrating his big 50 birthday on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

Frank as acting President opened the meeting before handing over to the chairman for the evening,  Mike, who brought us up to date with the changes to the advertised agenda. The two speakers kept to the theme ‘If I hadn’t seen it�’  Adelaide recounted places she had visited including Egypt and the Berlin Wall.

Reg evaluated her speech and was full of praise for her word pictures and speech construction, all without the use of notes; he passed it as a F10 speech. Mark started his speech by recounting accidents in the home such as failure to see trailing wires from electrical appliances, before moving on to strange sights, which included a seagull with a rabbit in its claws in Allonby!

Frank evaluated his speech, he thought it was cleverly done with good construction and very appropriate gestures. He passed this B4 speech (use of gestures) and now Mark can concentrate on B5 (use of voice). After the interval, the Topics chairman, David Preshaw, after telling us that he would be giving us easy topics then proceeded to give us a procession of difficult ones!

The subjects ranged from Nessie to the Yetti from spoon bending to ‘cow over the moon’ as the members tried to speak for 3 minutes on these diverse subjects; once again, in addition to ensuring that we had to think on our feet, the Topics session produced lots of humour.

Mike, as chairman, decided to dispense with a general evaluator and after a brief discussion on our brand new web site, publicity and the agenda for the next meeting on 7th March he closed the meeting.