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.