London Toastmasters Humorous Contest

Yesterday, a whole day job!

A whole wonderful day at Camden's Irish Center.

Before the Contests, we had a few interesting workshops. The first I attended was about Non Verbal communication. Indeed, I know its importance already, but I did learn new things from Richard Fallon.

He then took someone, a good Improviser too, who helped to show us how much we read, or presume, from different signals someone emits, involuntarily even. Just by thinking of someone hated or loved.

He also taught us strategies to approach 'cat type' not only 'dog type' people... also there is so much it can be told about that!

Dog like was the open, verbal, communicating type - but they also can be of course very misleading, as the ones cat like closed and seemingly listening a lot less.

And all depends, of course, with whom we are and 'how we present the package'.

Next workshop was about memory, interesting, but as we have different kind we do not remember the same way, I cannot remember by number and English rhyme, but images do stick in my memory, also I have to connect them somewhow in a story.

Then we had seven great and very different humorous tales, speaches.

Adolfo Tunon, from Canary Warf's club had the first price, from the time I have listened to his speech in his club, he did improve - also of course, the impact of surprise was lost to me, and it is an important part of it.

By chance, I met before the competition also his wife and mother-in-law as I was attracted like a magnet by that old beautiful and ladylike face. She speaks only italian, and was in London just to visit, but yes, by non-verbal communication, we did understand each other.

Later, we had the Table Topics competition, and I was stunned how well some could tell such a great speech on a subject about they did not expect or known before.

The winner of that one was David Jones, with a great speech, indeed.

But all others gave interesting and very different speaches about the same subject.

Lot of work now still to go through all the formal and informal pictures I have taken yesterday, from 10 to after 4 afternoon, and then, on the street going home. I arrived as the sun was setting down.