Back to Maidenhead
Leaving mostly involves change. Leaving Kuala Lumpur brought change in most of the lumpy things in life: schools, job, accommodation, climate but not Toastmasters. I was going back. Back to Maidenhead. Back to where I started. It took me a while to get my relocated life into a rhythm, this delayed my return to club meetings. When the time came I realised that, like the fashion sense of my wardrobe, the Club I remembered had moved on. A new venue, a shuffled membership and a revolution in one communication medium. No longer was the programme issued as a sheet of paper in a stamped brown envelope through the letterbox. The internet had short circuited the postal service, e mail was up and walking steadily. The structure of Club meetings remained pretty much intact. After a couple of sessions of handshakes and exchanged stories, I was back on the activity roster and doing what I had done before. I was speaking at the Club and entering contests.
Looking back to that time I am grateful for being a part of Toastmasters, it allowed me to scarper overseas for a few years where there was the local availability of a familiar pursuit. Then to return to my starting place and to what has become one of the pillars in my recreation. Applying the word ‘pillar’ seems misplaced to when placed against somewhere I felt so uncomfortable in my early days. In reality somewhere that can still intimidate. Being discomfited can, perversely, become a magnet. Toastmasters’ membership for any length of time is an immersion not a superficial undertaking. You have to expose your whole self to evaluation and shake of the reluctance to be absorbed. Old relationships with the hard core at the Club were renewed. Members new to me, but not the club, soon came into focus. In fact the Club was thriving. Membership was breaching 50 with speaking opportunities becoming a relative scarcity.
Amongst the newer members I easily recall that there was one who refused to cave in to his debilitating nerves. Getting to the front and staying there for seven minutes was agonising. When he was planning to speak we knew, not from the agenda, from a chair placed at the front of the room. He would be seated to deliver his speech. Gestures were limited but determination was not. I can still recall the evening when he didn’t need his chair. He could stand and speak at last. There was a cheer not a chair. That’s the spirit of MSC and probably why I and many others are still attending.
Yes, I was contented to reconnect with MSC but I knew that after my overseas hiatus the global spread of Toastmasters clubs would be a lure if proximity allowed. And it did.
—Ian Rees
Maidenhead Speakers Club 