Birthday greetings or obituary?
On 3rd March, sixteen days before my birthday on the 19th, Brian Jenner (founder of the UK Speechwriters Guild & the European Speechwriters Network) chaired a Zoom meeting with the title of this blogpost.
With his usual ingenuity, Brian managed to get a remarkable group of people together who said such complimentary things about my work that I wasn't sure whether to be flattered or depressed by what could be heard as an obituary. This was because I remember being told years ago by someone doing research into obituaries in The Times that the routine starting point was what the deceased would be remembered for (i.e. how they'd ended up). The article was then carefully structured to explain how he or she got there.
A lot of people who didn't see the meeting have asked to see a video copy of it. Much of it can be seen at the start of my website at www.speaking.co.uk but you can see the whole thing here:
https://youtu.be/6x7Oi7wrWnI?t=1
If you rewind the clip to a few minutes after it starts, you can watch the whole session, except for a few clips (from Clark Judge, Senator Barrasso, Professor John Heritage and Belgian presentation trainer Carsten Wendt), for which see www.speaking.co.uk