Morning music

Weekend mornings in Utrecht are something special.

Woken as usual by the thrumm of wheelie-bags on paved streets, the city rests until it is time for the concert to begin.

Saturday comes and the city is packed with bustling shoppers hunting for a good deal, it’s hectic, frentic and chaotic. Surfing above them on waves of air and sound is the magic of the Dom.

For every Saturday morning some crazy wonderful lunatic wrests control of the bells of the Dom and instead of the usual chimes we get magic – show tunes, songs by the Beatles, Waltzing Matilda, anything and everything that stirs up memories of good times, wonderful places and amazing people.

It’s Martini time…

Amber

Reflections

Blue

It was one of those photo-walks when the macro lens was busy….

Up, up and away….

Number Four

a house number

Learning While Guiding

When I first joined Toastmasters I thought it was all about speaking, people getting up week after week and just speaking, and it is, but there’s more…

Chances to be a leader, opportunities to organise meetings and as you become a better speaker the chance to give feedback as an evaluator. These have all been been very useful skills to learn but the most surprising opportunity that I have been given so far has been mentoring.

I’d been in the club for about 8 months and I still thought of myself as “only new” (I still do) , I didn’t think there was anything that I could give as a mentor, I still had so much to learn. Peter, who had been my mentor, didn’t agree and asked me to mentor him and so began my mentoring journey…

Little did I know that I would become a mentor of a European Speech Champion…

It has been this experience with Peter that has really taught me so much about speech writing and delivery. Normally with Toastmasters we prepare a speech then present the speech. Once the speech has been delivered then we move on to the next project in the manual. A speech is seldom revised, reviewed and redelivered but this is what you do when you move up through a contest. You can give the same speech at club, area, division and district levels.

This means that even though you gave a winning speech at club or area level it might not be good enough to win at division or district level so it has to be improved, enhanced or possibly even rewritten…

And the rewrites! After so many versions we’re left wondering how much of the original speech is left and I think that when Peter has come back from his little “holiday” at the speech contests in America we should put the original and the finished products side by side to compare. There will probably be more similarities than we expect as in each of them the core ideas  still remain.

So if the core ideas remain, what did we change? Pretty much everything else, language was always a candidate for change, the question we always had to ask ourselves was “Does what we’re saying in the speech match the message that we’re trying to convey?” For instance, if we were trying to we were trying to get across a message of keeping your life, your endeavors and your speeches simple, we couldn’t then contradict ourselves by having Peter deliver a complicated confusing speech.

At times one of my main roles was as a human thesaurus, Peter would write up the speech and then together we try to find more beautiful or descriptive words or phrases to add that little extra pzazz to the speech. In fact pzazzz was always something that we were striving to get into speeches to find one image or gesture that would grab the attention and imagination of the audience. What is fascinating is that something as small as a gesture or a pose can have such a profound effect on the audience’s response to a speech.

Connection to the audience is so important. It needs to be be both physical and emotional and it can be something that gets completely forgotten in the swirl of great ideas and beautiful prose but forget this and you’ve lost the contest before you even begin to speak. To get this audience connection we had to always keep in mind the vital question that is is quite often forgotten when people speak – “Will this be of interest to the audience?” and if the answer wasn’t a resounding yes then ask “Can we change it to become interesting for the audience?”

It’s tricky to try and gauge an unknown audience, for the international competition all we know is that it’s a predominantly American audience but a Toastmasters audience. We had to look at the language we used and sometimes even try to guess if the phrase or word was used in American English, we had think about the humour used and we had to think about deliberately misusing English, always tricky for a non-native since the audience may not realise that it’s a deliberate mistake…

One other very useful tool that we made a lot of use of was Google Docs, it allowed 3 or 4 of us to read and evaluate the many iterations of Peter’s speeches, giving opinions and suggestions. It meant that Peter didn’t have to meet us in person to be able to continually improve his speeches.

But we still met up for brainstorming sessions and these were where some of the most dramatic progress was made, where whole paragraphs of text were eliminated from the speech, where characters and even the tone of a speech were drastically altered and where quite a lot of inspirational apple juice was consumed!

It’s certainly been a very interesting journey, I’ve learnt that maybe that winning club and area contests is good but I’m not sure if I’d want to spend six months in contest mode but I’d definitely be willing to coach another contestant through that six month experience…

Screech!!!!

Picture the scene, it’s a beautiful sunny day in an English coastal town and five local teenagers have cycled up to the cliffs overlooking the clear blue sea.

All teenage boys have the need to prove themselves and these five were no different. The dares started off tame enough but soon escalated to the ultimate game of Chicken:

Them against The Cliffs.

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As with all exciting ideas, it was startlingly simple. No-one can remember who thought of it but all agreed that it was brilliant.

Each boy would have a turn, get on his bike and cycle towards the edge of the cliff and brake at the last possible moment. The closer they got to that 100ft drop the better! The adrenalin rush was intense! And it was all over too quickly, each boy couldn’t wait for their next turn! This was going to be a great summer!

But testing their personal safety zone wasn’t enough, they began to compete.

With each new round the braking zone edged closer and closer to the crumbling cliff edge until the inevitable happened, Paul almost flew off the edge of the cliff, his brakes stopping him with millimetres between him and death….

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It had been too close.

The boys were shocked and shaken, that was the end of the game.

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Or at least that’s what we thought but the next day they were up on the cliff again.

This time they weren’t taking any chances.

They brought rope.

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They made it ‘safe’ by tying rope around their waists and attaching it to separate pegs anchored securely in the ground.

Now they could have fun!

But the brilliant ideas didn’t stop there, Jimmy’s brakes had been a problem the day before, the screeches they made had been almost painful. He remembered his father telling him about the best way to solve squeaks around the house – oil.

And it worked. As the end of the cliff rapidly approached he pulled his brakes and they didn’t screech, he briefly congratulated his genius before realising the awful truth – he wasn’t slowing down.

The other four watched as Jimmy and the bike careened over the edge and disappeared from view. They rushed to the edge and peered over.

The rope too had worked. 60 feet below, Jimmy was dangling at the end of the rope. They called out to him but he didn’t answer.

This was serious.

They tried phoning for help but there was no reception, it was up to them.

They decided to haul him up, they went to where the rope was pegged to the ground and dug out the peg. While they were doing this, none of them was keeping the rope taut, when the peg became free, Jimmy’s weight pulled more of it downwards pulling John over with it….

The three remaining boys ran to the edge of the cliff.

They could see John but Jimmy was gone, plunged beneath the waves, drowning, drowned.

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From what they could tell, John was still alive.

A little too late they’d learned their lesson and didn’t try to rescue him, instead they ran to get help. It took a half hour for the Sea King helicopter to arrive but it wasn’t a moment too soon – the knot that tied the rope around the John’s waist had come loose, and he was now hanging on for dear life….

Hanging from the back of the helicopter was a metal cable, it’s used to discharge all the static electricity that the helicopter blades build up during flight.

As the helicopter drew closer, John reached for that cable…

From the helicopter the crew shouted at him not to grab the cable but he couldn’t hear them, he reached again and caught it…

The shock threw him against the cliff and he fell into the sea…

And is why you should always be careful when playing near cliffs.

Cobblers

Dosplayed in the window of the local shoe-repair shop: