From Florian Bay, Area Director 2015/16
As I came home from district officer training ten days ago, several things bubbled in my mind. Relief at having escaped a Martian tripod invading Earth. Empowerment at having reached another level in my Toastmasters journey in so many different ways. Finally, thoughtfulness at the journey taken so far, just over two years on from my icebreaker in Cheltenham Speakers.
It first heard about Toastmasters in early 2007, through some American self-help tapes I had purchased while studying in Bath. A quick search sadly only yielded a club whose meetings finished after the last train back to Bristol and Bath. But always wanting to become a better public speaker, a seed had been firmly planted in my mind. One evening in March 2013 while living in Gloucester, the search made a few times since 2007 was made again. “Oh there’s a club in Cheltenham, I could get the bus there after work on Tuesday!”
I still remember the first meeting I attended. It was the club’s speech and evaluation contest. One of the speech from this evening, ‘Beautiful people’ is still in my mind, especially the speaker’s fantastic vocal variety and use of rhymes. A fortnight later I was doing my first table topic. A fortnight after that, I was a paid-up member. The humble but oh so important role of timekeeper was mine one a month later. June 4th arrived and with it my icebreaker ‘Once upon a Franco-British dream’. A work placement in Scotland meant a pause in the journey, but the bug was there with desires of attending the Glasgow club one hour away by train suppressed with difficulty. In September 2013 the news was confirmed, I was due to be in London from October onwards! Less than a week after arriving, I attended and joined London Olympians, followed by St Paul’s Speakers in November.
In our