Competition was our theme. Perhaps to warm us up for next week’s contest!

Yet the meeting said booya to the theme. Our three speakers won an equal number of votes for Best Speaker – so it was a tie! A very pleasing outcome and not one the club has seen before.

Our first speaker completed her Competent Communicator manual at the meeting. In so doing, she also completed her “18 for 2018”. This was, she explained, her Happiness Project – a choice of objectives that one can set for oneself within in a limited time slot. She invited us to “create your own happiness project”.

“We all lie,” said our next speaker. There are the little lies we tell about liking unwanted presents. Then there are the giant whoppers told for giant corporate cover-ups and to create political smokescreens.

Our final speaker took us on a ‘Virtual Mini-Tour’ of Salisbury. With well-chosen descriptive language she led us inside the Haunch of Venison pub to see the “preserved mummified hand” of a whist-player of yesteryear and “feel the age of the building”.

Table topics gave a new guest, a new member and a visitor from another club the opportunity to talk about colour. This was a theme on which everyone was able to speak from the heart.

The grammarian moaned about too many uses of “stuff”, “thing” and “y’know”. But she was also pleased with the take-up of her twist on word of the day – a call for more direct speech: “Say it, don’t say they said it!”