Lockley: Another speech at the WI

Apr 24 2011 by Mike Lockley, Sunday Mercury

ANOTHER week, another ‘guest speaker’ engagement.

This one went well. A WI member sidled up afterwards and said my talk was much more humorous than the previous speaker’s.

His subject was ‘embalming’.

He got £25. I got two bottles of wine. Suppose no-one wants a sozzled embalmer.

There was the odd heckler – there always is.

One old dear at the back shouted: “I can’t hear you.”

Someone at the front shouted back: “Can we swap places?”

But I’m now polished enough to ignore the barbed comments and plough on with my speech.

Last week I ploughed on for 90 minutes. At the end, the president gushed: “I thoroughly enjoyed that speech – even if it did mean missing my grandchildren growing up.”

I used to find the prospect of talking to a large crowd daunting. It is, apparently, the average person’s greatest fear. Number two is death.

That means most people at a funeral would rather be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy, which is amazing.

Now I’m almost blasé about these engagements and work to a strict format. Open with a joke, half-an-hour about me, bit about my job, another half-an-hour about me and, if I’ve run short, more about me.

I opened last week’s talk with a gem: “If all people who slept through after-dinner speeches were laid end-to-end, they’d be far more comfortable.”

The silence was broken by the sound of tumbleweed rolling across the village hall’s polished floor.

I was warned five minutes before taking the podium to steer clear of material that’s risqué and non-PC. I tried, but my big joke doesn’t work if the one-legged gay monk is referred to simply as ‘a person’.

My wife once gave me a tip for subduing the butterflies that fluttered in my stomach.

“Don’t look on it as addressing a hall full of people. Imagine you’re in your own living room talking to your own family.”

I did.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced grandly, “are you sitting on the TV remote?”