This week’s Boaters hui was themed ‘harvest time’ and we certainly harvested plenty of fun and laughter from the proceedings.

Our Sergeant at Arms, Shaun, did a fabulous job of starting perfectly on time and opening the floor for our toastmaster, and shining star, Louise.

Grammarian Hannah set the standard with the word of the day being ‘Resurgence’ and entertained us with anecdotes of Clarkson’s farm.

A colourful shirt arrived along with Ian to introduce Jacqui’s speech on brands. The purpose of Jacqui’s speech was ‘Managing a difficult audience’, and she certainly did that well with some rude and disruptive audience members! It was very interesting to see how a few planted bad listeners changed the whole vibe of the room and made it more difficult for others to focus on the speaker.

After that, Rachel encouraged us to reset the room and did a lovely introduction of Natalie with some personal anecdotes. Natalie was very entertaining in her speech on music vs dogs and kept us laughing all the way through. Despite her very convincing argument for music dogs are the clear winner for me.

Dan brought some very challenging table topics, where Thomas absolutely excelled describing his life as a tree, his excellent use of tone and body language earned him the Toastie Award for the day.

Member blog, by Tsarina Dellow