Unaccustomed As I Am ….

…. To Public Speaking.
I have spoken in public before at my fathers funeral, to an audience made up of friends, and to service colleagues but not to a literate, knowledgeable and expectant audience.
I had prepared a Power Point presentation of slides but the file appeared to be corrupted so I stood or fell on words alone.
Originally I had planned to speak on my role as a volunteer for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission but was denied permission, they have their own PR people so I spoke instead on the War Dead in Cornwall, who they are, how they came to be here and how they are remembered.
Dry of throat I finished and suggested to the host that I thought I’d have spoken for longer than ten minutes only to be told that I’d spoken for a little over thirty minutes and that it had been enjoyable and interesting.
Well chuffed.

RBL meeting in the evening where the subject of Armed Forces Day in Falmouth came up. The problems arise when, along with others trying to put the day into perspective, you come up against people who have no experience or concept of how the military works. At one point the event, which is expected to attract as many as 100,000 visitors over the weekend, was compared by one to the Torpoint Military On The Green Day of a few years ago which had an attendance of a couple of hundred.