New Milton Townswomen's Guild

On 19 January, I was booked once again by New Milton TG, a group which I have a great deal of affection for. They were the last audience my late mother ever spoke to just a month before she died and they gave her a lovely write-up in their local paper and even mentioned her in the introduction to my own talk all these years later.

This was a well-attended meeting (60 - their numbers have been maintained as a result of new members joining after a couple of other local groups closed) and I was booked for my Patrick Campbell talk,

The room where they meet at the New Milton Community Centre is very long with windows at the back so the speaker is facing a fairly busy town centre road as well as the audience.

I was about halfway through my presentation when a couple of teenagers, one male, one female, glanced through the windows as they were passing, noticed someone with a microphone speaking to an audience and stood gormlessly grinning and waving! Obviously the ladies with their backs to them couldn't see this and I didn't spend too much time looking at them either. As a speaker, I am constantly looking all around the audience without dwelling on any one area and I treated them rather like the occasional frowner or snoozer that every speaker gets - by concentrating on everyone else. After a very short time, they got bored and walked on, Mr Campbell apparently not appealing to their literary tastes! On the scale of anti-social behaviour in this town it was a very minor incident but if they had started cat-calling then I am sure the TG ladies would have chased them off!

I didn't lose my flow and it was another successful talk for this lovely group.

Public Speaking Tip #282: A distraction does not always need to become an interruption for a speaker,

It is possible for an audience to be distracted without the speaker even realising it. When I spoke at the Somerton Summer Arts Festival (as you may have guessed from the wordplay, it's in Somer-set!) in 2002, I was in a room above a pub in this small, rural town. There was a window behind me and I was told that at one point of my talk, a cart piled high with hay passed by very slowly as I was speaking!

Now, I'm all for speakers making hay while the sun shines but this was at about nine o'clock at night!