On the calm clear evening of Tuesday, November 22nd, with a hint of frost in the air and the background music of the Blackwater cascading over the weir, the members and friends of the Fermoy Toastmasters Club gathered out of the winter dark for their latest fortnightly meeting commencing as always at 8.15 pm and of two hours’ duration. Then the gavel sounds and our President Eilish Ui Bhriain calls the meeting to order with words of cordial welcome and a beaming smile.
A very welcome visitor to our meeting was Liam O’Flynn of Millstreet and Mallow Club who as Area Director had come all that way to see us and evaluate our performance. ‘I love this club and I love this room’, he said with joyful sincerity and charm. Stating that the purpose of our club as shared with the entire Toastmasters movement worldwide is to achieve self-improvement and the promotion of the enjoyment of all leading to more rewarding and fulfilling lives, he then went on to outline some changes in the form of a more integrated approach in our communication and leadership manuals that will be phased in over the next couple of years. Nothing can ever remain static and unchanging and neither can Toastmasters. To meet the needs of our members both present and future requires change and renewal to encourage personal growth and to keep the organisation at all levels vibrant, dynamic and healthy.
Michael Sheehan chaired our meeting with so much warmth, wisdom and ready affability, carefully explaining for the benefit of our guests the role and functions of all participants as the meeting flowed seamlessly from one phase to the next. Every good meeting is driven by a sparkling topics session that gets everyone thinking briskly, sharply, eagerly and above all pleasurably as each topic is given to the first respondent and then quickly taken up by others in lively add-ons, all of which we enjoyed through the style and enthusiasm of Johanna Hegarty. This shows the concept of Toastmasters to best effect like nothing else can: everyone getting involved, using their minds, sharing their thoughts and experiences, with energy, gusto and humour. It makes everyone feel so enlivened and uplifted as creative energy bubbles and fizzes like the best champagne.
The issues of a winter of industrial relations discontent were addressed and the world’s prospects with Donald Trump coming to the White House, with the shared sense that life will go under him as with all his predecessors: and just as with all his predecessors, he too will come and go. There was fond remembrance of the goodness and achievements of past members of our Club now gone to their eternal rest, of whether cats or dogs make the better pets and the financial pressures on parents as Christmas approaches. In that regard one contributor recalled lighting up with great eagerness on a childhood Christmas morning at the sight of ten nicely-wrapped gifts: the first contained a simple juvenile watch, the next one the same, then the same again, until all ten were revealed to contain identical timepieces. It certainly put an end to any inflated expectations when it came to festive gifts so that today the only present now asked for asked for is a simple greeting card and a message of kind good wishes.
We had the listening pleasure of three lovely and most varied speeches that showcased the
creativity and multi-faceted interests of the speakers. Jerry Hennessy brought into our room the dawn chorus with an audio excerpt of Irish birdlife issuing a torrent of glorious sound saluting the new day. With immense research, Jerry told us of how the birds sing chiefly in the spring and early summer months, calling for mates and staking out territory for it is only the males who sing. On the reverse of the programme sheet he provided us with a selection of beautiful colour pictures of some of our best loved feathered friends, swifts and blackbirds, robins and song thrushes, pigeons and wrens, the latter emitting notes on a range far above its meagre size and weight. The world of the hedgerow so rich in birdlife and song was brought so close to us in Jerry’s meticulously well-researched and beautiful celebration of the joys of nature. Jerry entitled his speech ‘A Nice Way To Start The Day’: his evaluator, Saoirse Neilan, termed it so aptly as A Nice Way To End The Night.
Patricia Neilan took us on a journey to the exotic origins of the pastry wrap that is now a staple item on restaurant lunch tables here in Ireland and throughout much of the world, tracing it back to her own sun-blessed native land of Mexico and the tortilla, derived from the Spanish word ‘torta’ meaning cake. Countless generations have made tortillas from corn and flour and cooked them with fire using a formula going way back to the ancient civilisations of the Mayas and the Aztecs. The Spanish conquerors were first unsure of a food that to them seemed alien to their European traditions but they came to adapt the tortilla and export it globally so that something deeply rooted in ancient times is now consumed by millions of people everywhere in our high-tech pressurised era through variants such as the taco, the fajita or enchilada, with illustrations of same passed around to everyone. Patricia recalled her own childhood experience of cooking the tortilla and shared her excellent culinary skills not alone in pictures but in tasty samples of one of Mexico’s greatest contributions to human happiness with one for everyone in the audience that was ever so deeply appreciated and later received a very fine and positive evaluation by Clare Guy.
Finally, Kevin Walsh spoke of the joys of sitting down, the comfort and restfulness embodied in every chair, telling of the mobility issues and the impossibility of prolonged standing arising from his physical disability and the challenges he has faced with the lamentable disappearance of seating from so many retail outlets and public places. Today the provision of supports has brought about some improvement for him but the cry of the weary and less mobile citizen and shopper is left unheard in so many places bereft of seating. In our frenetic time he advocated the rediscovery of the ideal so beautifully described in Patrick Kavanagh’s poem asking for commemoration in a restful seat for the passer by on the banks of the Grand Canal. In Fermoy Toastmasters there is always a welcome seat for everyone. Evaluator John Sherlock enjoyed the speech and expressed the hope that soon we might hear more from Kevin within the parameters of the set programme.
In Toastmasters nothing stands alone. As our General Evaluator John Quirke succinctly put it that the art of evaluation consists not of constructive criticism, but qualified praise, always pointing the way to ever greater improvement and personal growth through the joy of friends and with so much pleasure and fun. All of this and so much more awaits you at our next meeting which will be held on this coming Tuesday, December 6th, in the Fermoy Youth Centre at 8.15 pm. For further information, please contact Eilish Ui Bhriain at 087 1235203 or Kevin Walsh at 058 60100 or log on to our mobile-friendly website toastmastersfermoy.com or find us on Twitter @ FermoyT.