Winning Speeches - For Contests and Impromptu Table Topics

  Angela Lansbury speaking online on Zoom in TCA contest. Selfie Photo by Angela Lansbury.  You have one job - stay alive? Put your hand up if you are over five years old. That is most of you. How many of you have had a birthday in the last year, the last 12 months. Most of you.  Happy Birthday! (Holds up happy birthday.) Angela Lansbury speaking online on Zoom in TCA contest. Prop, happy birthday (going home gift bag). Photo by Angela Lansbury.  You have already outlived a large number of people who were born the year you were born. When I went to visit my dearly beloved departed uncle in hospital, he was sitting up in bed reading obituaries. I thought that was a bit scary. I asked him why. He said, with a grin, 'I want to see who I have outlived'. Every birthday is an achievement, however old you are. Open your newspaper and every day you will read about people who took unnecessary risks. Women who stayed with violent husbands. Against everybody else's advice. Peop...

 I was invited to be Language Evaluator at Grab Toastmasters Club and thought I was doing them a favour, but they were doing me a favour because I won the vote for best table topics speaker. Table Topics are impromptu speeches. Originally they would have been picked at random from typed subjects on pieces of paper upside down on the table.  At Grab Toastmasters, excellent quotations were provided by Madam Table topics master. I was given two minutes to comment on a quotation by Paulo Coelho: 'When someone leaves, it is because someone else is about to enter.'   I said:  'This often applies when you change jobs. Maybe the boss leaves and a new boss arrives. He dismisses you, so you leave and somebody takes over your job. You take another job and meet a new boss.  (I then thought, some of them might not be employed. They could be retired, or students, or job-hunting. Make it relevant to them.) 'Here in a Toastmasters club, you leave at the end of a meeting, a...