Katina chaired our 1 April 2025 meeting with the April Fool’s theme. She ran a relaxed, fun, friendly meeting and peppered each segment with an info piece on the history of April Fools.

Grammarian Lin’s word of the day was “mischievous”, a perfect word given the day’s theme.

Table Topics Mistress Jacqui asked each speaker to talk about an aspect of April Fool’s Day, with an extra special instruction (she was pranking us all), such as talk very loud, eyeball the camera, pace around too much, or mime your answer. By then we all felt very pranked! But we got her back because she was busy explaining the timing lights when she realised they had changed to a cellphone colour change by timekeeper Mike! Evaluator Angela thought the topics were innovative, informative, and very humorous.

Speaker 1 was Megan practising her Division International speech, and evaluator Jacqui handed out the contest judging sheet for everyone to fill in. Jacqui went through the marking scheme with us so we knew what to do, and collected the forms for handing over to Megan to review.

Speaker 2 was Gary doing a project from the Persuasive Influence Pathway on Laughter. He got everyone involved with a very funny story and Ron’s evaluation pointed out that Gary should just slow down a tad to give us time to keep up.

Speaker 3 was Jocelyn with a very informative speech about whether to go into a retirement home or not, including a story about the dilemma facing her cousin. This speech was from the Engaging Humour Pathway and evaluator Mike acknowledged that Jocelyn’s points made him think, as it did all of us, facing the choice in the future for ourselves or a close family member.

General Evaluator Dale awarded the best speaker to Megan, best table topics to Gary and best evaluator to Jacqui.

Our next chairperson is Jocelyn.

If you are interested in finding out how Toastmasters worked and what we do at meetings, then contact us to organise a visit to our next meeting, we’d love to hear from you. Email us on spinnaker@toastmasters.org.nz for more information.