Archive for May, 2012

New President and the committee for 2012/13

Sunday, May 27th, 2012

Incoming and outgoing Presidents - Niki takes over from HowardAt the AGM on 24 May 2012 Niki Boersma was elected President for the 2012/13 season. Niki was recently the President of the National Association of Ladies Circles, so is more than a little qualified for the role of Club President!  

Neil Wilson will take over as Treasurer (our fourth in four years – a role that is clearly a bit of a hot potato!)

Howard Herbert will step in as Education Director, taking over from John Holian, who is the new Eastern District President.

Jocelyn Brooks is the new Vice President and will continue as Publicity Officer. Other positions are unchanged.

The new season will kick off on Thursday 13th September at the Days Inn.

This is the full committee:

President  Niki Boersma
Publicity Officer & Vice President Jocelyn Brooks
Education Director & Imm Past President  Howard Herbert
Secretary   Peter Wilson
Treasurer   Neil Wilson
Social Secretary  Mavis Cryer
Webmaster Chris Clissitt
   

Wetherby News report 10 May 2012

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

The meeting was opened by the President, Howard Herbert who introduced Peter Ryans, the Chairman for the evening. 

Sharon Hanson-Cooper, a new member gave her maiden speech entitled The Journey Home in which she spoke about her very interesting career and the many unusual and fascinating places in the world in which she had worked. Although this was her first speech, Sharon spoke with fluency and confidence. The speech was ably evaluated by Peter Wilson who gave Sharon some good tips from his wide experience as a speaker. 

The second speaker was Tim Hunter who spoke for 12 minutes on The Prog New Age in which he demonstrated his skills in speech construction putting forward clear arguments and using a sophisticated vocabulary that evoked effective word pictures. Jocelyn Brooks was the evaluator and she concluded that Tim had passed the assignment with his arresting opening, clear development of the main points and good summary in the conclusion. 

Chris Clissitt gave a resume of the National Conference that had taken place on April 27th-29th in Cardiff before moving on to chair the Topics session. Participants were given a title of a prog rock song and they had to speak around the topic, not explaining the song or the group involved but talking about the feelings and ideas the title evoked.

 The meeting wasclosed by Howard Herbert who reminded everyone that the next meeting would be the Annual General Meeting and that nominations for officers for the new season were required.

Also Ran in Cardiff (twice!)

Tuesday, May 8th, 2012

Chris Clissitt failed to bring home any silverware from the National Contests in Cardiff at the end of April. At the Topics Contest on Friday evening it was all going so well as Chris spoke on “Raising The Bar.” Some kindly observers even said they had him ahead at one stage. But he ignored the extinguishing of the red light at 3 mins 15 secs and continued to speak for 5 more seconds; thus any hopes were in turn extinguished by the obligatory penalty points.

At the Evaluation Contest on Sunday morning he surprisingly completed his evaluation within the allotted 4 minutes, possibly for the first time ever. The evaluation included analysis of the assignment, previous assignments, advice, praise, recommendation – in fact the whole array of ingredients that Chris had previously found impossible to squeeze into 7  or 8 minutes! It was to no avail – once again he was unplaced.

Helen Tate completed a consistent performance by Eastern District by achieving a similar position in the Speech Contest on Saturday afternoon.

It was not all gloom – our District President, Lindsay Dutch of York RISC, was invested as the National Vice President for 2012/13.  We wish him every success in this role, and even more success when he goes on to become National President in 2013/14.